I dunno. This thread has been quite illuminating, I suppose, but in a rather depressing way. I suppose a country or a culture gets the folk heritage it deserves. I would love to know more about how Comhaltas has 'vandalized' Irish music. If the damage has been that severe I can hardly imagine what sort of state the music would be in by now had it not been subjected to such appalling treatment by musicians, singers, dancers, parents, volunteers and other sundry undesirables. Perhaps it might even have been almost as healthy as English folk music and dance.

Let's face facts, shall we? People don't get involved in English folk dancing because they don't want to. It's as simple as that. Why don't they want to?

Birdseye, if you want to sponsor something useful the next Comhaltas All-Britain Fleadh will be at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston on the 31st June and the 1st of July. If we haven't vandalized the place before then.

I suspect that 'Guest' is hostile to Comhaltas because in his view, it doesn't promote Irish music in a way that is to his taste. Either that, or he feels the sort of Irish people who run it are not his sort of Irish people, or at least they don't conform to his preconception of what Irish people are supposed to be like, how they are supposed to behave, or what sort of attitudes they are supposed to espouse. There's a word for that sort of attitude. It's called racism.