"The vast majority are passive and happy to have specialist people do it for them."
Sorry Steve; I find this the most patronisingly destructive sentence I have ever read in the field of folk song; but it does bring this argument down to where it should have been in the first place.
It would appear that the Irish people made their own songs, the Scots made their own songs, the English weren't up to it so they paid somebody to do it for them.
"Are you sure you aren't misquoting 'ascending'"
This is Emrich's piece of mystical (and also patronising) nonsense - remembering that it is an analysis of one of the most beautiful tragic ballads in the English language - the Lake of Coolfinn (Col Fin):

"FROM Lilith, the wild woman of perilous love, and Morgain la Fée, to the mood of a street ballad about one of the many Irish youths who have lost their lives in fresh water, is a long leap. But "The Lakes of Col Fin" takes it. Irish singers understand the lore of the ballad perfectly: Willie was not "drowned"; he was taken away to Tir fa Tonn, "Fairyland-under-wave," by a water woman who had fallen in love with him. Legends of similar content are frequent in Middle Irish literature and have survived into modern popular tradition. We may compare Motherwell's, "The Mermayden," whose "bower is biggit o' the gude ships' keels, and the banes o' the drowned at sea"—a grim picture of the supernatural woman's cruelty in love, which the poet nicely caught—and Leyden's "The Mermaid of Corrievrekan," with a happy ending wrought by a clever hero who inveigles the mermaid into taking him back to bid farewell to his former love, "the maid of Colonsay." Both poems were based on local traditions and legends.
Popular tradition, however, does not mean popular origin. In the case of our ballad, the underlying folklore is Irish de facto, but not de jure: the ballad is of Oriental and literary origin, and has sunk to the level of the "folk" which has the keeping of folklore. To put it in a single phrase, memory not invention, is the function of the folk."

Jim Carroll