Indian Meal

Well, up in the mountains and down in the glens The boilers are splashing with Indian meal From out of the skelps and the hovels and dens They follow the sound of the bells as they peel Indian meal Indian meal Indian meal Fighting their way over necks of old women And half-starving children, with elbows and fists Stuffing hodgepodge into can, into nogging Then coughing and spluttering back over the ditch With bony old fingers on bony old pegs They come with their tickets each day for the dregs Gathering the yellow in tins and in pans That's measured and meted in ounces and pounds Indian meal Indian meal Indian meal Sir Walter, they say, with some controversy He brung the potato from over the way Well, now very few of the holy remain And Indian meal is the dish of the day Our lovely prátaí, oh, where have you gone? You've left us with nothing to bite or sup on The fishermen's nets are all locked in the pawn And all that we catch is our death in the morn Oh, the milk and the butter and knobbly old lumpers Were all that was needed to cure the pangs Now every flutter's a dose of the scutters If you don't cook it right, it'll give you the Indian meal Indian meal Indian meal In Dublin, so fair, to cure hunger and warts The Quakers sells soup for a penny a quart Penny and ha'pence will get you bread too For to dunk in the yellow meal, Indian stew There's ship's leaving full of pigs, heifers and lambs Some transporting convicts to Van Diemen's Land We're hemorrhaging barrels of butter and grain And all that comes back in and all that remains is Indian meal Indian meal Indian meal They're paving the streets of Americay With gold at your feet for a dollar a day While here on the works we make bótharín buí For the yellow or barely a shillin' apiece