Analysis: The skipping ropes, rhymes and stories which were the social media of Ireland's playgrounds are disappearing, but not without a fight
In 1994, every child in our Dublin housing estate had a skipping rope. Alongside chants of 'Vote, vote, vote for De Valera!' (yes, 20 years after his death), the thwack of rope on tarmac soundtracked our lunchtimes and afternoons on the road. We jumped, clapped and counted in sing-song voices, not to become singers, but for the fun of it. Little did we know, but our generation of Irish millennials would be the last to experience analogue musical playground culture before the internet rewired childhood.
Before 2000, singing games were our original social media. Need reminding? Think A Sailor Went to Sea-Sea-Sea or In and Out Go the Dusty Bluebells. Or was it "dusky bluebells"? That’s the nature of children’s singing games: they existed in every parish, each insisting theirs was "the right version!" At least until summer, when a visiting Yankee cousin introduced a new take on Three-Six-Nine that swept the playground.
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From RTÉ DocArchive's One Potato, Two Potato, Three, Pat Ingoldsby records Dublin children playing street games and singing songs (first broadcast 1977)
So why was De Valera still being canvassed by playground non-voters two decades after his death? It had little to do with Dev himself, and the song pre-dates his campaign. The melody was first recorded in London in 1916, from children singing about Mr. Billy Martin. Sixty years later, little ones in Liverpool were backing the mysterious Mister Thingy. In 1976, schoolchildren in Virginia, US, turned the same melody into the chant "bump, bump, bumpin' in the doorway". Variation, creativity, and boldness are the hallmarks of these resilient songs.
The real question is not "why Dev?", but why anyone at all? The answer gets to the heart of singing games and playground culture in general. Elusive and sophisticated, children’s songs are miniature musical worlds where children invent, connect, and try on roles of power at an age when they usually have very little. Often paired with movements and props, they are part song and part social code, passed from child to child and often misunderstood by adults. In a 1978 essay on playlore, Australian political activist Ian Turner cited a boy who said that childhood is surrounded by walls "twenty feet high" and adults only have ten-foot ladders.
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From RTÉ Archives, children demonstrate how to play a game of Jump Sticks in a 1982 episode of Breakaway "a television programme that wants you to stop watching television"
Singing games have long been part of Irish culture, especially among girls. Yet few collections exist that centre the voices of children themselves, free of adult motives or commercial filters. A notable exception is the Dusty Bluebells Collection, songs gathered by Hugh Shields and published online by Lisa Shields and the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Comprising nearly 200 songs, 74 were recorded directly from children.
Despite its importance, the collection pales next to efforts made to document adult folklore. For comparison, Aloys Fleischmann's catalogue spans over 6,000 Irish folk tunes across two volumes. Proinsias Ó Ceallaigh acknowledged this imbalance, noting how collectors deemed children's songs "beneath notice".
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ryan Tubridy Show in 2019, interview with Díóg O'Connell about his book Under the Moon, Over the Stars: Irish Urban Street Games
Those familiar with the Schools Collection will know it as a remarkable archive of oral history: Irish children in the 1950s were tasked with recording local folklore. But the original questionnaire explicitly instructed them to collect material from adults and to name their informants so professional folklorists could return later to record the material "properly".
Some "unsuitable" children's stories were later removed from drafts of the collection. While many entries detail singing games, they are reduced to lyrics alone with no game or tune details. It leaves us wondering: How seriously do we take children as culture-makers when we trust them to record the world around them, but not their own?
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland in 2019, interview with Irish Traditional Music Archive's Grace Toland about the Dusty Bluebells digital exhibition of songs and rhymes from the 1960s and 1970s
Our inconsistent national efforts don’t align with international scholarship. Researchers like Kathryn Marsh in Australia have shown that these games are widespread and remarkably consistent across global cultures. Far from trivial, her work and that of her peers like Patricia Shehan Campbell shows how such games are vital for creative and social development. Despite our reputation for musical excellence, we may have quite a way to go when it comes to valuing its childhood equivalent.
Flash forward to 2025: the streets of the Dublin housing estate are… quiet. It's the silence of cultural decline, drowned out by seismic socio-political shifts. Despite the resilience of children's singing games, sweeping technological changes put these cultural artefacts at risk of vanishing entirely. Ideologies too: some playground rhymes have come under scrutiny for political correctness.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, why we turned a Dublin street into a playground
Children no longer enjoy the same swaths of unsupervised time outdoors, but there is no digital equivalent to analogue play. Musical play is a training ground. You cannot watch or "swipe" your way into the kind of spontaneous creativity that happens when a child, mid-skip, improvises a rhyme and waits to see if others join in. Creativity, collaboration and the confidence to be silly and seen are not things you consume your way into and they must be lived.
In a world facing growing uncertainty, creativity will be essential. So, what can we do? Start simply. Give the little ones in your life a skipping rope (you'll find one at any decent hardware shop). You don’t need to be musical. No YouTube tutorials. Just a rope, a patch of ground and a song you recall. Can’t remember? Ask around. And email me. I’m building a catalogue of Irish singing games and would love to hear yours.
Singing games are spaces where expression, connection, vulnerability, creativity, rebellion, fun and silliness are rolled into one
Children’s culture is Ireland’s culture, and our children must continue inheriting and sharing folklore of their own. Because singing games are more than just singing games. They’re spaces where fun and silliness are the point, spaces where expression, connection, vulnerability, creativity and rebellion are rolled into one. Show me an online equivalent. I’ll wait.
The author can be contacted with stories, audio or video recordings of singing games you remember at holly.woods4@mail.dcu.ie
The inaugural Festival of Voice takes place at the National Concert Hall, Dublin next weekend.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
