Thinking back to yesterday’s EAS 2025 social event, I think the song that attracted the greatest degree of audience participation was this one. It’s very well-known and the chorus is great for a singalong. Anyone who has any Irish relatives – especially an uncle with a fondness for the drink – will certainly have heard this!
P.S. It wasn’t sung by the Luke Kelly and the Dubliners last night.
Taking a short break from examination duties I thought I would post this version of the song Finnegan’s Wake. It was first published in America in the mid-19th century, it is a ballad about the wake of a hod-carrier by the name of Tim Finnegan who is too fond of whiskey. One day, with a hangover, he falls off a ladder and dies. His wake gets a bit rowdy and eventually a bottle of whiskey is thrown over his body, which brings him miraculously back to life.
It’s been in my mind since I got talking at lunch with some colleagues a while ago about James Joyce‘s famous novel Finnegan’s Wake largely because of the connection with particle physics via the word “quark” and thence to the Arthurian legends; for more of that see here. Anyway, one of the people there knew the song on which Joyce based his book and proceeded to sing a few verses of it, much to the surprise of the people sitting around us.
The interesting thing about the title is that Joyce dropped the apostrophe so it is not really about the wake of Tim Finnegan but lots of Finnegans waking up. The implication is that, in a way, we’re all Tim Finnegan. That’s exactly the sort of play on words – or in this case play on punctuation – that Joyce revelled in and with which Finnegans Wake is peppered.
Another reason for posting this is for a chance to see the iconic beards of the Dubliners, especially lead singer Ronnie Drew. Enjoy!
In the Dark 