This week, I chose number 27 on the top 100 Irish poems list for my poem choice—the tragic tale of the greatest poem ever composed in the Irish oral tradition. Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire is a lament composed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, the aunt of the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, which outlines the life and murder of the great love of her life, Art O’Laoghaire, an Irish Catholic who fought with the Hungarian Hussars and returned home to stand up to the Protestant Penal Laws in Ireland. 
As this poem is very long, and I am sure most of you reading this will not be fluent in Irish, I have put a short guide to it below. The poem is quite grim, so brace yourselves. And Eibhlin was one of 22 children!
Mo ghrá go daingean tu!
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill composed this keen after her husband, Art Ó Laoghaire, was shot dead on 4 May 1773. Art had served as a captain with the Hungarian Hussars in the Austrian army and came home to the Macroom area of Co. Cork, where he fell foul of Abraham Morris, the High Sheriff of Cork, in the years of the Penal Laws.
The lament moves between tender memories of their courtship and married life, raw grief on the day his horse came home without him, and fury at the men who killed him. It is a very personal poem, spoken straight to the dead man, and it keeps returning to the same cry of lasting love.
The poem survived in the oral tradition before it was written down, and it is now seen as one of the greatest poems in the Irish language. The English version I shared extracts from was by Thomas Kinsella, and it is still in copyright, so I have left it out.
You will find the Irish text with Thomas Kinsella’s English translation in An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed, edited by Seán Ó Tuama (Dolmen Press, 1981).