michealt
Tue, 11/08/2015 - 20:58
"Sod" is one of those words which have several different meanings. There is a group of 12 meanings which relate to ground or soil or turf, of which the one here is (according to the OED)
"The surface of the ground, esp. when turfy or grass-covered; the sward. Freq. poet. or rhet. Also N. Amer., more generally, soil which is grass-covered; sward which has never been cultivated; the surface of a lawn." (That counts as 1 meaning, not as 4.)
The word in that sense and the other 11 senses in the group are all commonly used in Britain and Ireland.
Other meanings as a noun include "rock dove (Columba Livia)" and "boiled meat" (obsolete since early modern English days).
Then there is another group of 9 meanings which are related etymologically to each other and are definitely slang. I imagine one of those was the one you thought it meant (a term of abuse, or sodomite, or nuisance). And "I don't give a sod" is a good translation of "j'en ai rien à foutre" (that should give an idea of one of the other meanings in this group of nine).
Myhrel 
A song by the novelist and song-writer Brendan Graham, written for the heroine of a trilogy of his novels. The children's burial ground in the story came about because in the 1840s so many people were dying (as a result of the famine caused by the potato blight) that mass burials were the order of the day, but people didn't want mass burials for their children. I don't know whether it was originally written in English or in Irish, but the Irish feels Irish rather than feeling like a translation from English (for example it doesn't use verbs unless they are needed, but in English you have to).