Fleadh Cheoil na h\u00c9ireann, first held by a nascent Comhaltas Ceolt\u00f3ir\u00ed \u00c9ireann in Mullingar in 1951, arrived on a wave of social change in the wake of post-war economic stagnation and was \u201cthe most extraordinary thing which happened to traditional music in the 1950s and 1960s on this island\u201d, asserts researcher Dr M\u00e9abh N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in, head of Irish Studies at the University of Galway.<\/p>\n
Though its path was not without twists and turns in the years ahead, the festival\u2019s rise was swift, and in Clare a very different picture of traditional music emerged when the all-Ireland fleadh visited the county for the first time in 1956.<\/p>\n
\u201cTen fiddles, two jew\u2019s harps, a battered concertina, six concert flutes. Three tin whistles, two melodeons and four raucous accordions are thundering out the melody.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Ennis, the session is taking place not in a pub, but in the lingerie department of a shop which \u201cseems to have cast aside its 85 years of dignity and respectability as singers and musicians raise the roof\u201d.<\/p>\n
In Heading to the Fleadh: Festival, Cultural Revival and Irish Traditional Music, 1951\u20131969<\/span>, N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in explores how the festival, which today attracts crowds in excess of 600,000, unleashed a new exuberance for collective music-making after decades of decline.<\/p>\n In what is termed the \u201cfirst comprehensive academic study\u201d of the largest annual festival of Irish traditional music, N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in casts a critical eye over the context for the fleadh\u2019s establishment and the shaping of the festival in its first two decades. Concerts, c\u00e9ilithe, competitions, and sessions formed \u201ca core set of material and symbolic components, creating a distinct fleadh identity embedded in the social and cultural world of Irish traditional music, and becoming a key driver in the revival during this period\u201d.<\/p>\n While she notes that the key aim of the fleadh was to provide opportunities for musical communion and that \u201cgathered from near and far, musicians came to the fleadh with the expressed purpose of playing traditional music with other musicians\u201d, formal competition, as well as the informal session, became synonymous with the fleadh in a \u201csimultaneous coexistence of opposites\u201d.<\/p>\n Indeed, it was through adjudication that the fleadh \u201cdefined acceptable sounds of traditional music in competition, which spilled over into other sites of performance\u201d, she says, and by the 1960s Comhaltas regarded itself as the gatekeeper of Irish traditional music.<\/p>\n Modelled as a \u201ccompetition-festival\u201d, Fleadh Cheoil na h\u00c9ireann in its early days required none of the qualifying county or provincial rounds that now exist and Though some early fleadhanna accepted competition entries on the day, there was nothing casual about the fiddling duel fought between Armagh\u2019s Brendan McGlinchey and S\u00e9amus Connolly of Clare, which in 1961 continued into the early hours of the morning after multiple recalls failed to produce unanimity among three judges on the destination of the senior title. What eventually decided it in Connolly\u2019s favour was his strict adherence to fleadh rules on tune choice.<\/p>\n Whether in matters of musical style and proficiency or repertoire choice, fleadh rules and their interpretation proved challenging in the festival\u2019s early decades and continue to cause debate.<\/p>\n N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in finds no evidence of a specific \u2018Comhaltas style\u2019 of playing developed through competition, \u201cbut there are preferences\u201d, she tells the Irish Examiner. \u201cThere are things which are prioritised in competition, but those are not consistent either. The tides of time change them.\u201d<\/p>\n Many musicians, she notes in Heading to the Fleadh, were \u201csceptical of competition and the very notion of adjudicating performance, even if they competed themselves\u201d.<\/p>\n For Clare musician Michael Tubridy, who made just one foray into adjudication in 1964, \u201cthe lack of consistency and guidelines in adjudication, and, in his view, the impossibility of objectivity, merely confirmed his suspicions about the unsuitability of the competitive frame for Irish traditional music\u201d.<\/p>\n N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in shines a spotlight on the thorny topic of delineating \u201cthe right kind of traditional music\u201d in fleadh terms. What is considered traditional? \u201cIt\u2019s nebulous in 1955 and it\u2019s nebulous now,\u201d she says. However, \u201csymbiotically with adjudicators\u201d, competitors can influence change \u201cwhen new repertoire is introduced and has some success, but also in terms of style\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the fleadh doesn\u2019t exist in a vacuum, as much as one might think that. The fleadh is responding not just to wider cultural and social change but also to this arbitration of what\u2019s really traditional and what isn\u2019t. It\u2019s making those changes itself.\u201d In singing competitions in particular, she \u201crealised that the authenticity marker was actually to do with whether [a song] had been commercially successful or not by a \u2018popular\u2019 artist\u201d, familiarity via radio airwaves sometimes breeding adjudicator contempt.<\/p>\n As those who performed songs popularised by Donegal\u2019s Bridie Gallagher discovered, her association with a particular air \u201cwas enough to make it competition-toxic\u201d at the fleadh.<\/p>\n Fleadh Cheoil na h\u00c9ireann\u2019s own commercial merits are examined by N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in, who contrasts the 1956 festival in Ennis with the following year\u2019s fleadh in Dungarvan, which one newspaper dubbed a \u2018flop ceoil\u2019, despite its success in the eyes of musicians who attended.<\/p>\n Based on the huge numbers that had flocked to Ennis, organisers and businesses in Dungarvan pulled out all the stops, but when only an estimated 5,000 of the anticipated 40,000 arrived in the Waterford town, newspapers devoted many column inches to bemoaning the \u201cthousands of sandwiches, hundreds of pounds of ham and beef, chicken and mutton\u201d that went to waste.<\/p>\n As a moveable festival, Fleadh Cheoil na h\u00c9ireann \u2014 which boosted Wexford\u2019s economy by an estimated \u20ac60m in 2024 \u2014 created commercial expectations in its host towns and a conflict between cultural and commercial concerns became evident.<\/p>\n Accusations that commercial interests had triumphed over cultural authenticity were made when the fleadh returned to Mullingar in 1963 and was blighted by an \u201cunruly group\u201d intent on \u201ccausing real trouble\u201d, with buildings damaged and several people injured.<\/p>\n Its second decade, the permissive Swinging 60s, saw what was referred to as the \u2018Fleadh \u00d3il\u2019 embroiled in conflicts of societal change as its booming popularity, especially among young people, was blamed for the unwelcome attendance of \u201cbeatniks, teddy boys and other bizarre and unwashed individuals\u201d.<\/p>\n There were whispers that the All-Ireland Fleadh should be abandoned until such time as the unruly elements could be rooted out, and suggestions that the festival should be held on an island in order to control access. A national newspaper\u2019s front-page headline proclaimed \u2018Beards at Fleadh Cheoil are criticised\u2019, and disorder by \u2018bowsie elements\u2019 saw the 1965 festival in Thurles dubbed the \u201cfleadh of the shattered glass\u201d.<\/p>\n It took the might of the Irish Countrywomen\u2019s Association to ensure such shenanigans did not occur in Enniscorthy, when its campaign saw plans to bring the 1970 fleadh to the Wexford town abandoned in favour of a move to Listowel. The ICA\u2019s intervention was \u201cextraordinary\u201d, says N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in. \u201cThey said \u2018no \u2013 not coming here\u2019 and they just put a stop to it.\u201d<\/p>\n The middle decades of the 20th century on which N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in focused her research were transformative in Irish life and popular culture, she says. \u201cThe fleadh is an essential part of that, warranting this kind of critical [academic] attention.\u201d<\/p>\n A flute player who studied music at UCC, N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in entered fleadhanna as a child but \u201cdidn\u2019t have the stamina\u201d, later becoming a fleadh adjudicator, which she \u201calso didn\u2019t really have the stomach for\u201d, yet it was Comhaltas and its role in shaping tradition that she chose as the subject of her PhD research.<\/p>\n Expanding on that research and releasing it into the public domain, her book \u201cpositions the fleadh at the top of any taxonomy of traditional music revival and Irish cultural transformation in the 1950s and 60s\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIn those first two decades, I just think the fleadh is a remarkable development and there isn\u2019t really a parallel anywhere else in other revival movements of the mid-20th century in the United States or in Britain. There\u2019s nothing quite like the fleadh that emerges,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n![\"music](\"http:\/\/www.irishexaminer.com\/cms_media\/module_img\/9089\/4544509_2_articleinline_Meabh-1_20IRIS.jpg\" "\\"music")
\u201cmusicians often met casually at the fleadh and decided spontaneously to enter duet and trio competitions together\u201d, says N\u00ed Fhuarth\u00e1in.<\/p>\n![\"music](\"http:\/\/www.irishexaminer.com\/cms_media\/module_img\/9089\/4544515_2_articleinline_Figure_207.2_20Musicians_20at_20Fleadh_20Cheoil_20Dungarvan_201957_20.jpeg\" "\\"music")
![\"music](\"http:\/\/www.irishexaminer.com\/cms_media\/module_img\/9089\/4544518_2_articleinline_Heading_20to_20the_20Fleadh.jpg\" "\\"music")
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