Top Ten Best and Worst Irish ballads

The Best

1. 'She moved through the fair', an exquisite love song, with words by Padraic Colum to an old Irish air.

2 'Galway Girl' by Steve Earle. This is one of the very few recent songs which touched an Irish vein.

3. 'I’ll tell me Ma', a catchy Belfast children’s song, rescued by David Hammond which has re-entered the mainstream.

4. 'The Croppy Boy' - the old version, not the maudlin nineteenth-century one. A piercingly haunting emotionally taut song about 1798.

5. 'Raglan Road', a poignant Dublin poem of love lost and won by Patrick Kavanagh. Luke Kelly’s singing of it is the finest ever recorded version of an Irish song.

6. 'Lisdoonvarna' by Christy Moore. A catchy, witty, verbally dextrous modern ballad securely anchored within the Irish tradition of songs of place.

7. 'Whiskey in the jar'- the rollicking ballad that has been mangled in a million bars, but still a rambunctious rollicking rafter-rousing song. Check out the version by Thin Lizzy.

8. 'Song for Ireland' by Scottish folk singer Phil Colclough. Mary Black’s version: written in 1982, this is a modern classic. A little po-faced, but still a worthy effort.

9. 'Only Her Rivers Run Free', written by Mickie McConnell in 1965, the song catches the alienation of the northern Catholics just on the eve of the troubles. Christy Moore does the iconic version.

10. 'Bonny Lighthorseman'. If you want to see where the tradition derived from, listen to this Napoleonic song in the brilliant version by Dolores Keane.

The Worst

1. 'Fields of Athenry'. Enough already.

2. 'Ireland’s call'. Ditto.

3. 'Danny Boy'.

4. 'Irish Lullaby'. Bing Crosby’s Crime against Humanity.

5. 'The Rose Of Tralee'.

6. 'The Rose of Mooncoin': set in Kilkenny- no more needs to be said.

7. 'Delaney’s Donkey'. Let’s hope it’s extinct.

8. 'Paddy McGinty’s goat'. Ditto.

9. 'The wild rover'. Over-exposed.

10. Anything by the Wolfe Tones.