Irish skipping song:

Fo, fo, fo for devalera,
In comes Mary at the door-aye-oh (first person in queue runs in)
Mary is the one who will have a bit of fun,
And we don't want Anne any more-aye-oh (original player runs out to the end
of the queue and first player moves up, while still skipping)

(ed: I added the rest of the contribution because of the interesting comments passed on)

The skipping rhyme that I remembered is from Dublin in the 1980s and is for the standard long skipping rope with a person on each end. The rest of the players form a line beside one of them, so that they 'run in' on a diagonal - the trick being to do it while the rope is moving, without falling over or tripping on it. It starts with one player skipping and the song goes as above.

Fundamentally it's your basic eternal skipping game, as you keep going until someone trips on the rope or lunch is over. It can have a wide variety in number of players, although seven or eight was usually the minimum (and with more than about fifteen or twenty, the queue starts getting bored waiting for their turn).

The strange thing about it is that my mother remembers playing it in Limerick in the 1940s and that it is actually a version of a political jingle from Eamonn de Valera's election campaign in Clare in 1923! I find it amazing how it has survived for so long, only mildly slurred.

(ed: amazing indeed!)