Ruth Archer, yes, you're quite right that many people have found their way to Irish music through other routes besides the Comhaltas route - and that's fine. But think about what those other routes have been: records, folk clubs and festivals, sessions and so on. Now that's all well and good, but what Comhaltas does, with varying degrees of success, is to locate Irish music within the Irish community.

Folk club performances and pub sessions comprised of folk musicians who have come to Irish music later in life don't seek to fulfil that function.   For many Irish people, therefore, those versions of 'Irish' music are as irrelevant as you say that Comhaltas is for many musicians.

Since the formation Comhaltas in the 50s and for most of the time since, that community, at least in England (and we're talking about the state of folk music and dance in England so I think there's some relevance) has been homogeneous and cohesive enough to support clubs and Irish centres across the country where traditional music and dance have been supported. Perhaps that's the real challenge in promoting English music and dance: there isn't the same degree of common understanding, particularly among thoughtful, educated people who grew up during the 60s and 70s and who now represent the 'Folk Establishment' (for want of a better word), about what 'Englishness' itself means.

I think many of the criticisms of Comhaltas you refer to are very valid, though I think you need to consider them in context: many Comhaltas breanches still have members and committees who have been involved since they first came over from Ireland decades ago. To some extent, part of what they are doing (whether consciously or not) is to preserve a community and a sense of Irishness that itself stems from the Ireland they left.

I think this is something that many emigrant organisations tend to do. The US Senator and former UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a couple of very perceptive essays about this tendency of the Irish community to get itself organised soon after its arrival in a new country but then to settle into a very conservative pattern, reproducing the society it came from as well as acting as a group upon the new, host community. Edwin O'Connor's novel, 'The Last Hurrah' about city politics in Boston, also gives a strong sense of how Irish people tended to organise themselves socially and politically in the new setting. It's not just Comhaltas. And I don't doubt that many of the Irish people you knew had their own criticisms of Comhaltas. Plenty of Irish people in Liverpool do, including me.

What bothers me (and I've encountered this many times) is when English folk musicians profess to be attracted to Irish music on an aesthetic level but are clearly uncomfortable being around Irish people whose lifestyles or attitudes are not congruent with their own. Or when people profess to want to promote Irish music and culture but make a point of avoiding or excluding organisations like Comhaltas because it's comprised of the 'wrong' sort of Irish people. By the way, when I mentioned Racism earlier on, it wasn't Birdseye I was referring to. Just wanted to make that clear.