Alan, it appears that thee and me are out on our own in trying to think of practical ways of making the place more popular and pleasant. Maybe that's just not what some people want.

Websites and song books are great, as are on-line sales, but they aren't necessarily going to get people into the building. And as regards the urinating lady at the tube station, I've seen plenty of large and none too clean women - and men - inside the building in my time. Stones and glass houses?

Some responses to the comparison with Comhaltas. Comhaltas is far from perfect but it does function at a grass-roots, local level outside of London in a way that EFDSS seems not to do. Maybe I'm missing something. And as far as kids being put off music by being taken along to lessons by their parents: well, maybe, in some cases. But a lot of kids get music lessons that they don't particularly want at the time but they are often grateful for it later on in life. One of our teachers in Liverpool was brought along as a kid and drifted away from it as she grew up. Now she has kids of her own and she wants them to have to same contact with their roots that her own parents made sure she had. So now, she's got seven or eight kids gathered round her (other peoples as well as her own) learning the whistle every Monday night.

Maybe Comhaltas is an old-fashioned, conservative organisation (how very unlike the EFDSS!) but for a long time, until Irish music became 'trendy', it was almost alone in keeping it alive, especially in England, and it will still be there when all the folkies who only came to Irish music after they heard the Bothy Band, Van Morrison and the Chieftains or the Waterboys have drifted off in search of the latest craze in 'Roots' music.

I should emphasise, however, that Comhaltas is mainly concerned with music rather than dance - which is what this was supposed to be about.