By Sean Smith
Special to the BIR

It’s not easy to come up with the right metaphor for the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil. The Super Bowl of Irish traditional music? The Mardi Gras? The Cannes Film Festival? All these, and more? Well, sort of.

Unquestionably, the All-Ireland Fleadh is one of the signal events of Irish traditional music, drawing musicians, supporters, and curious tourists each August to a designated host town in Ireland that, for a week, can claim to have the most Irish musicians per capita in the world. Its primary raison d’être is to hold individual competitions in various instrumental categories, as well as for singing and dancing.

But, as Boston-area musicians who have competed can tell you, there’s more to the All-Irelands than seemingly endless processions of fiddlers, accordionists, pipers, flutists and other instrumentalists, dancers, and vocalists holding forth in front of panels of adjudicators. In fact, while the competition might have been their golden ticket to the Fleadh, ultimately it became an after-thought in the totality of the experience: making friends, taking part in numerous sessions, or just reveling in the festive atmosphere. Yet for young or inexperienced musicians, the All-Irelands may serve as an important turning point in their musical development, providing inspiration, revelation or some other valuable component that in retrospect helped broaden their view of the world, and of themselves.

“Going to the Fleadh gave me a more direct connection to Ireland than I’d ever had,” says fiddler Tina Lech, who competed from 1991-93 as a high schooler. “Just going to Ireland helps make you an Irish musician—you smell the air, you eat the biscuits, you drink the water, or the beer, the same as everyone else there. You can feel where the music comes from. And the All-Ireland Fleadh magnifies all that, it condenses everything into one solid week.”
“There’s an incredible focal point to the All-Ireland Fleadh you just don’t find anywhere else, not even at other great events like Willie Week [as the Willie Clancy Summer School is known] or the Irish Arts Week in the Catskills,” says fiddler George Keith, who first competed at age 21 in 1994 and returned five years later. “The sheer mass of humanity, the blend of skills, personalities, ages, backgrounds—nothing compares.”

This year’s edition, which takes place in Cavan (Aug. 13-22), marks the 60th anniversary of the Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann (“Festival of Music in Ireland”), one of the first creations of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, the world-wide Irish music and cultural organization that is also observing its 60th birthday. The goal of the All-Ireland Fleadh—as with the numerous Comhaltas-sponsored county, provincial or regional fleadhanna throughout Ireland and other parts of the world—has been to “establish standards in Irish traditional music through competition.” But the Fleadh also includes concerts, pageants, parades, and its highly popular “summer school,” the Scoil Éigse, which precedes the competition.

Steeped in tradition though it may be, the Fleadh hasn’t ignored contemporary innovations and other cultural developments. It has its own website, of course [fleadh2011cavan.ie], which allows users to get competition results and have a peek at some festival happenings, and has a presence on Facebook and Twitter. This year, the Fleadh will even feature its own version of a “flash mob” Irish dance performance—albeit a pre-scheduled and publicized one—in Cavan’s Market Square several times during the week.
What has remained largely unchanged over decades, however, is the sheer spectacle of it all. The Fleadh host town often takes on the air of a bustling metropolis, especially when the competition is underway: The streets and sidewalks seem fairly full of people en route from one venue to another—nervous competitors (and sometimes equally nervous parents), assorted well-wishers and acquaintances, foreign visitors on a musical pilgrimage. School gymnasiums, theaters, lecture halls, municipal auditoriums, and any other suitably sized places are transferred into the staging areas for the competitions, hushed anticipation alternating with bursts of instrument or voice. And sessions—some pre-arranged, many others impromptu—spring up just about anywhere there’s space.

If you want some idea of the scale of the Fleadh and its impact on the host community, in 1964 the town of Clones sought help from then-Minister for Transport and Power Erskine Childers in obtaining supplies for accommodation as it braced for some 50,000 visitors—about a fifth of modern-day totals. According to local historical records, the town was promised the following: “77 sets of bedboards and trestles, 400 blankets, 97 pillow cases, 77 mattresses, 104 pillows.” Today, that might be enough to put up several ceili bands—barely.

Undoubtedly, for some Americans, the chance to compete in the All-Irelands is the culmination of years of practice, blood, sweat, even tears. But more than a few seldom, if ever, give competition a thought prior to trying for the All-Irelands, which entails finishing in the top three at a US regional fleadh (Boston musicians typically compete in the Mid-Atlantic Fleadh, which usually takes place in the New York City area).

Keith, who was in Chicago at the time he decided to compete, had been playing for about a year — he describes himself in that period as “a classical violinist in a Martin Hayes phase” — and recalls “everyone always talking about the All-Irelands. The more I heard about it, the more I thought trying to qualify would be a worthwhile goal to work toward.”

Lech certainly never had any interest in competing. But Comhaltas’ Boston-based Hanafin-Cooley branch, of which she was part, “had other ideas,” she says—especially its co-founder, chairman, and guiding spirit, Larry Reynolds, who according to Lech always sought to spotlight her at Hanafin-Cooley ceilis or other events.

“Larry can be very encouraging,” says Lech with a laugh.

Taking part in competitions, Lech discovered, means being more deliberate and discerning about tune selections. “I never thought twice about playing, say, a Cape Breton tune at a session or ceili; I figured you just pick up the fiddle and play. But a Cape Breton tune at a fleadh? No.”

As much as she looked forward to the All-Irelands, Lech says, she was “really shy” and wondered how she would fare being in such a different environment. As it turned out, she did just fine.

“I had a ball,” she says. “I went to the Scoil Éigse and had a great time. I made so many friends, who I still have today. I even had an Irish boyfriend. It was the first time I could be independent and out on my own.”

As a 15-year-old in 2004, Heather Cole-Mullen had spent more of her life as a classical violinist than an Irish fiddler. “At that point, I was really beginner-level. I could play the instrument, but I didn’t have the style or the repertoire.” Still, Cole-Mullen had enough ability to land a spot in the All-Irelands, not only that year but also over the next three. She doesn’t recall anything special or noteworthy about her competition the first year (in slow airs), other than she felt really nervous going in—but afterwards, although she didn’t attain any honors, she knew she had done as well as she could.

“By the end of the week, I got a sense of how much more I needed to learn,” says Cole-Mullen, now living in Chicago. “There was one session I went to that week, in a really big spot for musicians. I just remember hearing all these tunes and thinking how much there was to this music. Then when I got home, I threw myself into it.”

Cole-Mullen also was struck by how many other musicians she encountered at the Fleadh who were around her age. “Up until then, most of the people I’d met playing Irish music were older than me. But here were all these kids as old as I was, or younger. That definitely made an impression.”

With her subsequent visits to the Fleadh, Cole-Mullen says, she felt less “out of my league—at a much closer level to most people I saw.” She also found she had acquired a greater discernment about the music: “Early on, I would try to play just about every tune I heard. But then I got pickier about which ones I wanted to learn, and I think the Fleadh was a major factor in this.”

Elizabeth Sullivan, a Boston native who lived in Albany, NY, for most of her teens and is now back in the area as a student at Northeastern, began playing fiddle at age 4 but didn’t compete until she was 15, in 2006. (Her memory of the competition? “The most nerve-wracking 10 minutes I’d ever had.”) Over time, she had accumulated a number of musician friends in Ireland (to go along with relatives living there) who played different styles than the traditional Clare style she had learned through Laurel Martin and Seamus Connolly. She saw the All-Irelands as a means to broaden and enrich her sense of the music: “To me, it was more like just playing with friends.”

Having those friendships in place — which made it all the easier to forge new ones — can be important for young Americans who go to play at the All-Irelands, Sullivan says, “because you worry about feeling isolated or being intimidated.” Fortunately, she adds, the atmosphere is very welcoming, and she did not sense any overriding resentment or antipathy toward her because of her being American: “I think most everyone there respects that Americans are trying to help keep Irish tradition alive. That’s certainly the standpoint of the judges. And Americans have been taking part in the Fleadh for so long I don’t think it’s much of an issue.”

In fact, adds Sullivan, who returned to the All-Irelands the following year, “one of the biggest things for me was seeing how music crosses any border you have: cultural, language, generational. I saw people from so many different places, not just Ireland, during the course of the week. It was a real community there.”