Back to Les's original question - there is a vast anthology of random clippings related to bagpipes in the National Library of Scotland which points to a specific inventor of the modern uilleann pipe (with regulators). He was a pipemaker in Newcastle in the late 18th century, and made enough of them to get a reliable product. And presumably made enough impact with them to get his idea taken up by makers in Ireland.

The NLS stuff only documents the production and sale of the instruments - looking in archives around Newcastle it might be possible to find some reference to what players did with them.

At any rate, this locates the development of the instrument right in the heartland of the Industrial Revolution, as Les guessed. (Isolated achievements of ancient precision engineering are irrelevant - they were custom jobs for such prestigious applications that there might be only one to an empire; bagpipes are a product). You need the infrastructure of good lathes, precision measuring instruments, reliable stockholders of seasoned exotic timber, people like clockmakers who can make custom parts of steel and brass. Dublin and Belfast weren't quite in the same league, but close enough to adopt the new technology.