Something for the weekend: The Foggy Dew, written by Canon Charles O’Neill, a parish priest, in 1919 and set to the tune of a popular love song.  We are just a bit over two months before the centennial commemoration of the Easter Rising in Ireland on April 24, 1916. A militarily hopeless venture, it was easily crushed by the British. Yet, astonishingly, this doomed quixotic episode began the events that within five years would bring to an end in most of Ireland of almost a thousand years of English rule. History is usually so much more dramatic, and unlikely, than fiction.
The Walsh name is perhaps associated with that nasty business between Diarmait Mac Murchada King of Leinster, and Henry II whereby the English took over Ireland in the Twelfth Century. If so, we beg your pardon. But then it got us to Ireland where we were most prolific. Walsh is the fourth most common Irish name after all. What of the name McClarey pray tell?
It means “son of a clerk” and is not very common.