It was one of O'Neill's cylinders that prompted the Gaelic scholar Father Richard Henebry to declare, "performance has the life of a reel and the terrible pathos of a "caoine". It represents to me human man climbing the empyrean heights, and when he had almost succeeded, then tumbling, tumbling down to hell, and expressing his sense of eternal failure on the way. The Homeric ballads and the new Brooklyn Bridge are great, but Patsy Touhey's rendering of 'The Shaskeen Reel' is a far bigger achievement.”