Moses Ritoora-li-ay

DESCRIPTION: A policeman sees a man peddling in the street and hauls him in. A trial ensues in which the court tries to find out if Moses Ri-too-ral-i-ay is Irish. He turns out to be a Jew related to the judge. Moses is released, and the unhappy policeman fired
AUTHOR: attributed to Brian O'Higgins (1882-1963?) but see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: 1952 (recording, Margaret Barry)
KEYWORDS: police Jew humorous trial punishment
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (1 citation):
DT, MOSESRIT*
Roud #5197
RECORDINGS:
Margaret Barry, "Moses Ritoora-li-ay" (on IRMBarry-Fairs)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Vilikens and his Dinah (William and Dinah) [Laws M31A/B]" (tune & meter) and references there
cf. "The Sergeant's Lamentation" (theme)
NOTES [374 words]: In the period around the Easter Rising, it was a crime in Ireland to preach rebellion. Apparently many revolutionaries got around this by preaching in Irish (though this raised the possibility that the listeners couldn't understand them!). The police, who were often English and almost always anglophone, were told to learn Irish to try to figure out what was going on.
This didn't work out all that well. (Gee, where have we heard that story before? The Habsburg Empire? Iraq?) The amused Irish created songs like this to celebrate the problem.
Brian O'Higgin wrote a song about this topic, according to Frank Harte. But Harte believes the song on this topic is "The Limb of the Law," found in Songs of Dublin, second edition, Ossian, 1993, pp. 36-37. Could he have written two such songs?
Kee, p. 28, cites a Sinn Fein speech from 1918 claiming that "there were by then five hundred people in Ireland imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm Regulations on charges ranging from singing a song written seventy years before to presenting their names in Irish when accosted by a policeman." Unfortunately, he does not cite a precise source.
Then there is the mention, in the Clancy version, of "Briscoe." The DT notes mention Briscoe as Mayor of London. Which is true, but.... Boylan, p. 34, gives a capsule biography of Robert Briscoe (1894-1969) -- born in Dublin, but the son of an Orthodox Jew of Lithuanian ancestry. He left Ireland to avoid World War I, but returned in 1916 to support Irish independence. A hard-liner, he opposed the Free State and the Treaty with Britain after the war, and was a founder of Fianna Fáil. He was chosen Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1956 and 1960.
Thus Briscoe cannot have been mentioned in the original version, which doesn't much resemble the Clancy version. The bottom line on the origin appears to be that O'Higgins wrote the original of this song, but it drifted somewhat, then was modified (deliberately? perhaps by the Clancys?) to mention Briscoe. This quite possibly while O'Higgins was still alive (For some reason, although all sources seem to agree that O'Higgins was born in 1882, I've seen three different death dates: 1949, 1963, and 1966. Wikipedia says 1963). One wonders what he thought. - RBW
Bibliography

Boylan: Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, second edition, St. Martin's Press, 1988
Kee III: Robert Kee, Ourselves Alone, being volume III of The Green Flag (covering the brief but intense period from 1916 to the establishment of constitutional government in the 1920s), Penguin, 1972

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