You friends to truth and justice around green Erins's isle
I humbly crave attention and ask you for a while
With Christian zeal and fervency to join my mournful wail
For the loss of Michael Hegarty who died in Lifford Jail.
For the shooting of Lord Leitrim one sunny April morn
From house and home, from kith and kin, her ruthlessy was torn
On one's(?) suspicion of the crime of which it was confessed
He was as guiltless as the new born babe upon its mother's breast.
His conscience ne'er annoyed him, for crime he never knew,
No doubt he would be acquitted if justice got its due;
Perhaps it is better as it is, the laurels on his brow,
The biting blast of tyranny can never reach him now.
He died of typhus fever arising froma(?)cold,
Such was the doctor's statement, as in the press we're told,
But you my friends may well conclude, and on firm convictions rest
That his treatment in the prison cell was nothing of the best!
Oh, what a glorious sight it was upon his funeral day
To see ten thousand marching forth, all robed in grabd(?) array,
Of tall and sturdy brave young men who all green ribbon wore,
I'm sure you'd not their equal find around the shamrock shore.
Ten hundred of our Irish girls this grand process joined,
For noble acts our Irish girls were never left behind,
The part they played on Limerick's walls four hundred years ago,
They would repeat tomorrow, if necessity forced them so.