A traditional Irish song in which Peader arrives home to find a grown man in bed with his wife. She explains that the man is his son, whom he has not seen since he left twenty years before. He asks for food, but there is none in the house. He tells her to fetch the cake in his pack. She does so and marvels when she finds it full of gold.

The song element of this performance, Peigín agus Peadar, is clearly related to the narrative ballad Seven Drunken Nights (Roud 114; Child 274), in which the husband comes home drunk one night to find a stranger in his wife’s bed, only to be informed that the strange man is ‘a baby boy my mother sent to me’ — whereupon the husband remarks that he’s travelled far and wide, but never before has he seen whiskers on a baby.

Seven Drunken Nights has been widely collected in English throughout Ireland; Séamas Ennis collected it from several people in the Carna district when he was working for the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1940s. The story element, scéal na dtrí chomhairle (‘the three good advices’; AT 910B) is also widely-known. The linking of these two elements into an organic chantefable appears, however, to be uniquely Irish, and demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Irish imagination.

joeheaney.org

In the long ago, when people were fortunate enough to get a job — now, I’m talking about the time… houses were very few and far between, and there was no roads. And this man had just been married a week, when he stepped out of the house he had — one room, the bedroom, the kitchen everything was in the one room. Peigín was the name of the wife, and his own name was Peadar, and he said to Peigín, “I don’t see any prospects around here, so I’ll put my bag on my back and go looking for work”. So he kissed Peigín goodbye, and off he goes.

Well, the rule was, if you hired to work for somebody, you’d have to waste [Joe probably meant to say ‘wait’] seven years. If you left half an hour before the seven years was up, you got no wages. That was the law. So after travelling three or four days, he hired with a certain farmer to do the job, and he was doing it so good that after seven years, the farmer said to him, “Well, now”, he said. “How would you like to spend another seven years with me? We like you!” To make a long story short, he stayed twenty-one years. And then he thought it was time to go home and see how the wife was getting on.