The Fields of Athenry

Written in 1979

St John said he had heard a story of a young man from the Athenry area caught stealing grain during the Famine years and deported to Australia. A claim surfaced in 1996 that a broadsheet ballad of the 1880s had similar words, but the folklorist John Moulden found nothing to support it, and St John stated plainly that he wrote both the words and the tune.

Danny Doyle recorded it first in 1979 and reached the Irish top ten; Barleycorn took it to number seven in 1982; and Paddy Reilly's version of the same year, though it peaked only at four, stayed in the Irish charts for 72 weeks. The Cox Crew reached five with it in 1999 and Dance to Tipperary six in 2001.

From the hurling terraces to Parkhead

Galway hurling supporters sang it regularly in the late 1980s, and the Republic of Ireland's football supporters adopted it at the 1990 World Cup. Celtic's followers in Glasgow, many of Irish descent, took it up in the early 1990s; when the club's Irish goalkeeper Pat Bonner had his testimonial in 1991 he invited St John, who thanked Glasgow for taking in 100,000 Famine emigrants and then sang the song with thousands of fans, a night he called one of the most memorable of his life. Loyalist bands and Rangers supporters sing their own version.

Recorded by everyone

Foster and Allen, Mary Duff, Daniel O'Donnell, Frank Patterson, Ronan Tynan, James Galway, The Dubliners, Charlie Haden with his daughter Petra, the Dropkick Murphys, The High Kings, the Irish Tenors, No Use for a Name, the Durutti Column, Serbian bands Orthodox Celts and Tir na n'Og, a reggae version by the Century Steel Band and a psycho-ceilidh single by the London-Irish band Neck: the list runs on. It is sung in the films Veronica Guerin, Priest and The Matchmaker, and, out of time, in Dead Poets Society, set in 1959.