Re Frank Hamilton's bizarre assertions about the influence of Irish music: look at Alois Fleischmann's "Sources of Irish Traditional Music" and you can see immediately that *far* more tunes in the Irish repertoire originated in Britain than the other way around. This is particularly clear for Scottish tunes, where thousands of tunes were in print (often ascribable to known composers) decades or even centuries before anyone found the same tunes in Irish tradition.

The oldest Irish fiddle music rarely emulates either pipes or flute. The uillean pipes were an expensive instrument mainly found among the elite, and only arrived from northern England around 1800 - the oldest Irish dance tunes predate that. Flutes were also very much more expensive than fiddles until the British Army becasme a regular source of used ones late in the 19th century. (I suspect my great-grandfather was fairly typical; a peasant from the West of Ireland who joined the Britiush Army at 14 and learned to play the flute and melodeon when serving in Afghanistan. Nobody of his class and generation could have learned those skills at home, the instruments weren't there).

Clogging is from northern England, nothing "Celtic" about it.

There is zero evidence for *any* musical link between Galicia and the British Isles before the "Celtic music" bandwagon of the 1980s.

There are several not very closely related idioms called "step dancing". The folkdance industry in Scotland likes to promote a myth that it was a creation of the common people in the Highlands, taken to Cape Breton and from whence it has just been recovered: there seems a basic prerequisite missing for this story to make sense. Peasants in either Ireland or the Scottish Highlands very rarely got to tread on a wooden floor, and didn't wear shoes either. You can't do Cape Breton or modern Irish stepdance barefoot in a black house floored with earth and straw, you will not so much tap as plop. They simply *can't* be some timeless heritage of the Old Country.

Azizi, where were the earliest known venues for proto-minstrel Black American dance? It must have come from somewhere before it became showbiz. Where were "plantation dances" done?