"Your OPINION,and nothing else, "
Don't be silly Dick - I have nothing to do with the making of policy in any Irish Singing club, festival or Singing Circle - that's what they have decided, not me.
It is not our place as "BLOW INS" to tell Irish people how they should do things.
It is "Your OPINION,and nothing else," that accompaniment is an essential part in the development of Irish song and that it can't develop without it - go and convince them, not me.
Ireland went through the commercial-driven, accompanied 'Ballad Boom" way back, it ran its course when the music industry decided when there was more money to be had elsewhere and Irish singers returned to their source material to pick up the baton - that did not include instrumentation or electrification or harmony singing to any great extent.
What is slowly developing now is a rising interest in solo-voice, unaccompanied singing based on what the likes of Elizabeth Cronin, Tom Lenihan, Joe Heaney, Eddie Butcher...... and all those other wonderful old singers were doing.
It would be sheer destructive arrogance fo us to interfere with that by demanding something from a British revival that appears to have run its course (judging from the "not knowing their folk arse from their elbow and not caring very much" arguments here.
The Voice Squad had their day an ran their course - their style of singing never caught on to any great degree, unlike the wannabe Waterson, mini-choirs that infested Britain for so long.
I like accompanied singing, I used to sing with accompaniment back in Britain.
When I moved to Ireland and lost my accompanist I found that I could sing virtually all my songs unaccompanied and get the same satisfaction that I always did.
Accompaniment was never a feature of British or Irish traditional singing and it thrived and developed for centuries without it - it was the advance of technology, particularly radio and television, that killed of our oral traditions, not the lack of accompaniment.
I have no intention of continuing this with you - you usually manage to turn arguments between us into unpleasant slanging matches - I'm not alone in this - your reputation goes before you.
If you have any reasoned arguments, put them - dogmatic pronouncements on what the Irish singing scene needs will get us nowhere.
Jim Carroll