AUL' MILL STREET, ENNIS
AUL' MILL STREET, ENNIS*
(Tommy Mahony's song)
The jetsam with the flotsam off the land,
Uprooted, displaced people, we make do
The best we can: "No stake in the country, you!"
Settled tinkers! Day labour at command
To anyone with money in his hand;
Drovers and scollop-cutting brawlers who
Half-starve — "Tis Ireland will be free, not you!"
We wear in this farmer's town the weasel's brand.
Unlettered gaums we are, to pluck and fleece
Or export on the hoof, alongside cattle,
To factory and battlefield — wild geese
Who fledge then flee to Salford and Seattle.
And still I feel behind my fugitive feet
The anger roaring down through Aul' Mill Street!
----
Old Mill Street, and beyond it Cloughleigh,
was one of a number of long streets of
one-story working class houses stretching
to the west of the town of Ennis. The others
were The Turnpike and Drumbiggle. The Great
Grandfather of Mohammed Ali, Abe Grady,
migrated from Drumbiggle in the 1860s.
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