"financially to reward it" may be what you should have said.

It isn't about funding.

"Professionalism" means doing something to get paid. It is the antonym of "amateur" which means doing something without being paid.

As (until venality set it) the olympics recognised, doing something for the love of it without expectation of reward is more meritorious than doing the sane thing in hope of reward.

The path you seek to tread leads to doing what is rewarding, not what is meritorious.

You do not merely feel free to criticise what is not well done. You seek to criticise anything that is not done in a straitjacket of "presentation", the god of the management consultant. We've all seen it in country, and country and western, music: the heartwarming aside, cough, sniff or tear that comes in exactly the same place in thousands of renditions. Whan you can fake sincerity you've got it made. That's what you are making.

Oh, and of course a series of snouts in an Arts council funded gravytrain, getting fed because they can fill the right forms.

It isn't about "Good enough for folk" - which was never a credo but rather a very English piece of self-deprecation. Every amateur I know tries incessantly to improve, to get it "right" (by which I mean of course to present what they intended to present rather than to deliver something in the exact mould of a predetermined form - and indeed I understand that one criticism of Comhaltas is that its predeterministic approach to competitions results in ossification).

I am not sufficiently self important to sit in judgment on them all. Better they should try and fail than be shut out by petty Hitlers.

Why don't you apply your analysis to ethnic social behaviour and see how acceptable it is? You conspire with sneerers like Parris, to the detriment of the English folk traditions, and you even seem to accept that he should not be permitted to speak as he did about Welsh, Irish, or Scottish folk arts, while they too have amateurs.

You reserve your arrogant assumption for the English folk arts. You are not part of the solution. You are part of the problem.