Cap'n, we disagree basically on the role of CCE - Its job is no more to hold a Fleadh than EFDSS's is to oraganise a weekly dance at C# House.
As a resident in Ireland you will be aware that it is virtually impossible to throw a stone without hitting a festival, singing weekend, music school, seminar - whatever throughout the year - virtually all held without the aid of Comhaltas, and many either opposed or ignored by them, as they tend to reject anything they can't control. The most successful of these by far, and the most influential, The Willie Clancy Summer School, was originally organised by residents of this town, who then invited CCE to participate - they refused unless competitions were organised. Thankfully the locals declined, leaving the School to flourish for over thirty years.
I assume from your tone that you are about to reveal a list of songs that MacColl refused because they didn't meet with his politics - if so, I await with bated breath. As far as I am aware MacColl followed the practice of all conciencious collectors and recorded whatever he was given, but if you know otherwise I would be extremely interested to find out what he turned down (and from whom). In thirty odd years of recording I can only recall being offered a couple of "right wing patriotic jingoistic" songs, we certainly never turned any down and we did much more collecting that Ewan.
Dictionary definition: Cabaret - live entertainment in a restaurant or nightclub with performances by singers, comediens, dancers and the like. Never saw Ewan and Peggy do one of them!
I don't know how many times you actually saw them perform but to the best of my recollection, unless they had been asked to perform say, at an event to raise money for the miners, or an Anti-Apartheid concert, their programmes were very deliberately worked out to present a careful balance of traditionalal and non-traditional items, a few of them political, but very much a minority. If there was any recurring tendency it was probably for the ballads. I could go over to the shelf and check the three or four dozen live performances we have, but I'll wait and see what you come up with.
MacColl went to join the choir invisibule in 1989. As he is no longer able to speak for himself, the least you can do is get some of the facts right. Without the efforts of him, Bert, Lomax, Dominic Behan, Joe Heaney, Seamus Ennis, Fitzroy Coleman (ay, and even Peter Kennedy) and all those others who gave traditional music a push-start we really wouldn't be having this conversation (and I would have missed out on forty years of sheer pleasure).
Jim Carroll