Anne “Nancy” Mulligan, who died at a nursing home in Co Wexford last week, is immortalized by her grandson’s song Nancy Mulligan. The Irish folk tune was released in 2017 on his album Divide.
It was one of two songs on the album in which the Grammy Award-winner paid tribute to his Irish roots, the other being Galway Girl.
But while the latter is a made-up tale that borrows its name from the Steve Earle song, Nancy Mulligan tells the real-life love story of Nancy and William Sheeran.
Sheeran was inspired by the Romeo and Juliet-esque relationship his grandparents shared. As William was a Protestant from Northern Ireland and Nancy was a Catholic from the Republic of Ireland, their relationship was unconventional at a time when Ireland was segregated by religion.
With the lyrics taking his grandfather’s point of view, the song shares how William was 24 years old when the pair first met at Guy’s Hospital in London:
I was twenty-four years old/When I met the woman I would call my own
Well, I met her at Guy’s in the Second World War/And she was working on a soldier’s ward
According to an obituary in the hospital college’s newspaper, William trained in and practiced dentistry at the hospital in the 1940s. Nancy worked there as a nurse when they met during the Second World War.
Another part of the song makes a strange reference to William’s occupation: On the summer day when I proposed/I made that wedding ring from dentist gold.
Explaining the line in an interview with Zane Lowe, Sheeran claimed: “He stole all the gold teeth in his dental surgery and melted them down into a wedding ring.”
But as the song goes, Nancy’s Irish Catholic father disapproved of her relationship with a Protestant from Northern Ireland. The couple, who didn’t care about their religious differences, went to Co Wexford and eloped without their families’ blessings.
And I asked her father, but her daddy said, no/You can’t marry my daughter
She and I went on the run/Don’t care about religion
I’m gonna marry the woman I love/Down by the Wexford border
The obituary states the pair married in 1951. Sheeran said they “wore borrowed clothes to get married” and that “no one turned up at their wedding”.
Despite the disapproval of others, the couple’s marriage lasted over 60 years until William’s death in 2013. They had eight children and 23 grandchildren.
Sheeran was inspired to write the song by how his grandparents had “this kind of Romeo and Juliet romance”, which he saw as “the most romantic thing”. As the last verse shows, true love can prevail in any socio-political circumstance.
I never worried about the king and crown/’Cause I found my heart upon the southern ground
There’s no difference, I assure ya