The Pecker

The Pecker

At the Munster Final in Thurles town the Pecker stood out at the gate. And people were dropping their coppers down, as they would on a chapel plate; And there he was giving them all the auld tunes and lashing through Sullivan’s John— Bad weather had broken the back of June but the Pecker Dunne played on.

Many a child stood staring at the rings on the bearded man And many an old man mouthing the words of the songs he sang. The tinker, the travelling showman, the best that ever had come, Padraig, the Pecker, from Wexford town, son of the Fiddler Dunne.

But it’s not just Wexford, can claim him, nor his birthplace in Mayo For the “Pecker of Clare” was of the road, and manys the road he’d go With his music and his bearded smile, and his stocky, well-known girth, Padraig the Pecker of Ireland, the joy and the salt of the Earth.

— © Frank Callery
(Meself and Frances travelled up to the City Hall in Dublin a couple of years back for the fundraiser organised by Mannix Flynn et al, when the Pecker was sick, it was a fitting tribute to one of our great travelling people, whose likes we may never see again. The gate in Thurles and elsewhere often saw many men and boys pass him, and drop a few coins in his case for the songs he blessed them with; and although they may not have realised it, they were the richer for it.)