When it was danced to, more widely than it is now, it was often customary for dancers to wear footwear that would make a racket when battered against stone flags. Or to dance upon a wooden floor that would make a noise. This Kerry geezer reckoned that you'd get people trying to dance louder than each other.

Now, I don't know if that's true or not. Strikes me as plausible.

In the absence of dancers, I see nothing inappropriate in percussion filling the sonic space that might otherwise be occupied by feet.

I find nothing inappropriate in that either.

However if the hard-shoe-shod dancers get as across, and out of time with, the music as the type of bodhran-thumper we're talking about, there's a whole lot of 'sonic space' which gets filled with hopeless mush - and that is what we're talking about here. Nothing to do with banning instruments or enforcing The Pure Drop or whatever, just trying to take a stand against the tunes getting buried under a relentless tide of badly battered goatskin.