Irish tunes themselves are meaningless (in the sense that a collection of notes can never be interpreted linguistically), only their titles carry any meaning.

I'm not sure I fully agree. Having grown up playing Irish traditional music and having played with others and in public for some 45 years, I cannot view ITM as just a collection of notes. The melodies, phrasing and timbre of instruments do, at least to me, frequently communicate feelings, situations and events in a powerful non-linguistic way and are very far from being meaningless. The titles often reflect what the tune has been trying to convey.

I'm sure that many will disagree but that's the way I see it.

RS