"Are fewer and fewer people being attracted to traditional music ?"
Not in Ireland they're not. On Thursday (St Patrick's Day) there will be over 60 local youngster, mostly still at school, playing traditional music in the local parade in this one-street town on the west coast, most to a good standard and some to an exeptionally high one.
We won't be here - we're on our way to the Inishowen Singing Festival, where we expect to hear a number of the excellent young Sean Nós style singers who have fairly recently appeard on the scene. We will break our journey for a couple of nights at Carrick on Shannon in Roscommon, where we have just learned there is to be a three-day traditional music event planned to celebrate St Pat's.
All this has been made possible by the hard work of people who were sensible enough (twenty odd year ago) to realise that if you took your eye off the ball, the music would disappear with our generation. They also realised that, whatever you did with the music and however you played it, if you lost sight of it's roots and its significance, you would be contibuting to its disapperence. Not saying that you have to play it the way it's always been played, just that you recognise it for what it really is so that future generations are given the same choices we were to take it in any direction they wished, and to return back to base when and if they wish to do so.
"The surest way to kill of traditional music is to stick it in a museum."
And the surest way to make sure that it will die with us is not to preserve it and not to allow future generations to listen to Jeannie Robertson and Seamus Ennis and Joe Heaney and Sam Larner and Texas Gladden... an all those wonderful old singers and musicians who have contributed to our pleasure and knowledge.
Ireland's present success was established on the foundations of having two world-class 'museums' - the Irish Traditional Music Archive and that of the Folklore Society of Ireland at UCD - both still persuading Irish youth how enjoyable and how important Irish traditional music is (interesting to see how many fine young musicians have volunteered to help out at ITMA - in their holidays and full time.
Won't be here for much more of this discussion - will be tucked in a bar somewhere up north enjoying a Guinness and listening to beautiful singing and music, probably in the company of youngsters to young to be on the premises!
Jim Carroll