Bob Davenport is a man with an enormous chip on his shoulder, but about what I do not know. He is also extremely arrogant in attempting to dictate to people what they should and should not use traditional music for.

Yes, I love listening to traditional music and traditional songs, and on a world wide basis. It's bloody good stuff.

However, as someone who left school with no qualifications whatsoever, and just a garbled establishment version of history, the music and songs of these isles in particular were a revelation to me. They taught me who I was, and who my forebears were. In fact they taught me that the lower orders had a place in hsitory which was no less significant than all the careers of mad politicians and even madder generals that the world ever produced.

It is a rich seam of intellectual enquiry which I have relentlessly pursued ever since and it is one which has brought me immense satisfaction.

So I will willingly stick two fingers up to Bob Davenport, and all the anti-intellectuals of this world. I'll continue to derive enormous pleasure from listening to Michael Coleman and Joe Heaney and George Maynard and countless other traditional musicians and singers. And I'll continue to seek out every nugget of information about the sounds which they were good enough to share with us.