There’s a place in fiery Ulster we may christen Macaroon,
Where they won’t believe in Parnell or the Land League very soon;
Where to call a priest “his rev’rence” treads upon their pious corns,
For they think a priest hoof-shodden, and believe the Pope wears horns;
’Tis there that yells and shouting on the twelfth day of July
Make the populace so thirsty they could drink the Shannon dry;
And ’tis there, where papal bulls could never make a sinner quail,
That a Papist cow has trampled on their feelings with her tail.
Pat Duggan, finding Clifford Lloyd too much for him in Clare,
Thought he’d try his fate in Ulster, so he took a holding there,
And of all the spots of Orange North, that most unlucky coon
Had the evil chance to squat in “no surrender” Macaroon.
And in his blissful ignorance, unmitigated ass,
He trudged a half-a-dozen miles each Sunday morn to mass,
Till his very Christian neighbors, his convictions to assail,
Began to whisper fell designs upon his heifer’s tail.
’Twas in the summer season, and the flies that skirmished round
Discovered that that cow’s soft ears were A 1 feeding ground,
And they gathered in their masses and formed animated plugs,
In perpetual convention, in her sorely troubled lugs;
And when, in her congested ears, agrarian troubles rose,
The poorer flies migrated and they colonized her nose,
But that cow knew neither tenant right, fair rent, nor yet free sale,
For she exercised coercion very strongly with her tail.
When round her nose the leading flies had taken plots on tick,
She would liquidate arrears and clear the district with a flick;
And the enterprising settlers that her ears would fain divide,
With the same obstructive weapon she would scatter far and wide.
Her practice made her perfect, and she grew so strong behind
That when her tail would whisk, ’twas like a gust of stormy wind.
Why, even when Pat Duggan split the handle of his flail,
That cow came in and threshed the oats completely with her tail.
Well, still to mass Pat Duggan every Sunday morning went,
And the Orange farmers round him grew insanely discontent,
Till they held a parish meeting, and decided there and then
That the time for speech was past—the knife was mightier than the pen.
They deputed Bill Mulvany, who was handy with the shears,
And Ned Malone, who’d often sang of clipping Croppy ears,
To see that Duggan’s butter would not pay another gale,
But they little knew his cow had such an energetic tail.
When darkness kicked the daylight out, Mulvany and Malone
Had somehow found their way about Pat Duggan’s byre alone.
The wind that whistled through the trees no warning signal gave,
As Ned Mulvany seized a hoof intended for the grave.
Malone was smart and ready with his fingers on the hasp,
But before the pride of victory their eager hands could grasp,
That dirty cow deposited Mulvany in a pail,
And created much confusion with a flourish of her tail.
And she wasn’t quite content with that: she rushed from out the byre,
Her horns curled up in anger, and her mighty tail on fire;
She seized (with cool indifference to very touching groans)
Malone around the waist and smashed his most important bones;
And when the jury gathered round his mangled fragments there,
And his friends had somehow recognized the mush of skin and hair,
That jury placed Pat Duggan’s cow on very heavy bail,
Because in their opinion she had rather too much tail.
And this is how, in Macaroon, it strangely came to pass,
That Pat Duggan, unmolested still, pursued his way to mass;
And that cow was so respected that no bigot would offend her
Bovine susceptibilities with shouts of “no surrender.”
Why, even on the glorious, immortal twelfth July,
The enthusiastic drummers in dread silence pass her by;
They would rather that the glory they commemorate should pale,
Than again tempt Duggan’s awful cow to exercise her tail.