Thing is, bodhran playing in the normal modern style is not dance-friendly. In a practical dance band in just about any genre, from Chinese lion dancing to Bulgarian horas to rock and roll to Scottish country dance, the drummer is providing the sound the dancers are really listening to, and so the drum accentuates the primary beats of the tune, HARD. If they have to cue in to the melody instruments against a percussion part that doesn't exactly track the tune, they will often get lost. In most dance music genres you could work out what the tune was just by listening to the percussion part. For almost all dance tunes of the British Isles, you will have to batter out recognizable 8-bar phrases to tell the dancers exactly where they are in each successive figure. If the tune repeats, so must the rhythmic pattern you play.

Very, very few bodhran players can play like that. Usually they think only at the level of a single generic bar - beating out a 6/8 or 2/2 metre, with no thought of coordinating it to specific phrases of specific melodies. It's quite common for bodhran players to not even know when the tune stops, and carry on beating after the end. If you don't even know how long the tune is, what do you think you can add to it?

The percussion instrument I went for is the washboard, because I could see straight off how to reproduce the drum patterns of a Scottish country dance band on it - it's the world's most portable drumkit. I taught myself by listening very damn carefully to country dance, ceilidh band and pipe band snare drummers. There are very few tunes I accompany on it that I couldn't also play on a melody instrument - I know exactly how the rhythmic phrasing of each tune goes. But there's no reason why a bodhran couldn't be played in a similarly precise style - Middle Eastern and Basque players manage it all the time on tambourines and frame drums. The problem isn't the bodhran in itself, it's the toxically stupid style that's evolved in the Irish music scene in the last 40 years, which does nothing for Irish music and even less for other idioms it's applied to.