“The sea-chanty. As I told you, chantys come from the word sean-teach which means ‘old house.’ And long ago when the sailors came in from sea… they used to bring a barrel of rum into the sean-teach and start drinking. Of course, the pubs that time wasn’t as modern as they are now, so when you had a barrel of rum, maybe smuggled off somewhere, you drank it in the sean-tigh” - Joe Heaney
His derivation of ‘chanty’ from the Irish sean-teach (‘old house’) is doubtful: chanty surely derives from the French chanter (‘to sing’). The Irish sean-tigh (pronounced shan-tee or shan-tig, and a variant of sean-teach) is, however, the most likely origin of the English word ‘shanty’ — a tumbledown house (also an unlicensed boozer; in Australia especially).