If it approaches Ciaran Carson's "Last Night's Fun", it's worth reading. Is it?

Nowhere near, not even in the same county.

Last Night's Fun is about the emotional and social value of traditional music: the subtleties and the joys of instruments, of sessions, of making music with friends and strangers, and of the way that a good tune, like a happy memory, gets in your head and stays there. Carson is a poet as well as a flute player, and combines the two passions into an evocative and meditative book that bears repeated re-reading and would probably be one of my top 10 favourite books ever.

Irwin's book is a trite skate across the very top of the surface of Irish traditional music, all about namechecking his famous mates and seeing how many cliches he can pack into every sentence. I enjoyed his journalism in fRoots, but the book is far too superficial. (The follow-up about English music, 'In Search Of Albion', was far, far, far worse, or maybe I just know more detail about English music and so was even more acutely aware of the grinning stupidity of his pronouncements.)

In Carson's book the focus is on the music - in Irwin's book the focus is on Irwin. Avoid.