That's particularly interesting about O'Neill's, Sham, because when I started learning tunes from that book, my friends who'd been playing Irish stuff for a while informed me that the tunes were not meant to be played as written. The book logs the tunes in eighth notes, and my friends said they should be played with dotted eighths and sixteenth notes. They said the convention was to transcribe the tune straight, but to swing it when you played it. Is that convention followed in the UK?
Blessings,
Barbara