Well that was what point I read into mouldy's post. The 'invasion' of the irish music. But I think mouldy actually did mention 'The Wild Rover'

It's just a little pet hate of mine, the commercial, and dare I say, user-friendly end of the spectrum.
The command "Play Irish Music!" is quite often uttered with the expectation that a song of the above ilk will follow. Such is the general perception of Irish music.
I don't think the average English man/woman would feel comfortable with the 'commercialised' concept of an English folk tradition; the only coverage it gets by the media is of quaintly dressed people waving sticks and white handkerchiefs.

Personally, I grew up, in the '60's and '70's, trying to emulate people like John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Martin Carthy, just as much as I did Donal Lunny, Paul Brady and Barry Moore.
I wished that Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Pentangle; all those groups, along with Bill Leader's efforts to showcase the industrial folk tradition, had have caught on in England.
It did elsewhere.
They did for English Folk music roughly the same job as Emmet Spiceland, Planxty, The Clancy Brothers, and The Dubliners did for Irish music.
It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that the latter was the more susceptible to commercial exploitation. It seems that Irish Folk music has unwittingly set the standard by which other Folk Musics are measured by; and that's not fair either.

It is a problem I think, as far as the English music is concerned, that a very 'modern' taste entered the scene, just as the Folk revival was going through it's heyday. And England had more home-grown 'stars' in those days than Ireland had. At least on the world stage, anyway. In Ireland, the whole essence of pariochialism kept the music in the area. And for good or bad, the music was given more lee-way to develop.
Irish emigration, quite early on in America's modern history, fanned this pariochialism outwards, and the music and dancing, which had been part of their lives in Ireland, became part of it there too.

Our music has always been a part of us, and each county, has it's own styles. Each house of music has it's own style. That 'nearness' of the music was a thing the populations of the rapidly growing cities and those with the need for a faster fix could easily discard, and with England now a multi-ethnic nation, it's 'roots' are getting harder to define.

But yes, I do think that not enough English people are proud of their rustic roots. I think, if you take the Civil War out of it, 17th century England would have been a very pleasant place to live. It's not an image most English people want to portray of themselves, however. Remember 'Finian's Rainbow'?

I don't know if it's too late or not for either of our traditions. England's is in danger of being swamped by a larger sea, and Ireland's of being speeded up and vomited down some toilet bowl, just as the songs would tell us to do. Although having said that, I think the 'purer' form of Ireland's music (and I'm talking here in the 'non-commercialised' sense) will survive longer than England's will, if only because it is ingrained in us and is more a part of us, than England's is.

B.