A Man For Every Sleeper

The railway track from Mallow to Killarney through a green old countryside Where a man for every sleeper in Ireland's famine died A man for every sleeper that's what the old man said And tears of loss and sorrow won't wake the famine dead. In the depths of Ireland's Winter the sun don't often shine And a man for every sleeper died on that railway line Young men from North Cork and East Kerry of the hunger and the cold They are the long forgotten and their stories never told. They did not live to see their children grow or to be old and gray And they never even made it through the Winter for to see the blooms of May And hear the robin singing on the flowering hawthorn tree Near where the old Blackwater goes murmuring towards the sea. It's been said for Ireland's famine that the British are to blame And that Ireland was a better Land before the invaders came And that when the potato crop had failed they took the Country's grain But the wrongs and rights don't matter now though the legacy remain Of Ireland's tragic famine in Ireland's saddest time When people in their thousands died many yet not in their prime And thousands died in 'coffin ships' bound for the U.S.A. The stories of the famine remain with us today. From Mallow to Killarney through a land of song and lore Via Banteer and Millstreet and through East Kerry via Rathmore The railway track stretch onwards through that green old country side Where a man for every sleeper in Ireland's famine died.