I repeat..........John, I am sure you are a fine man with too much time on his hands. I accept your point..........but to ponder it to this length begs the question. What is it about the Irish that bothers you so badly that you would devote this much time to bitching about something like songs that they have appropriated? As if every culture hasn't done the same. If I felt like devoting the time to this inane subject, I would come up with about 200 examples of this. Ours is a culture which places its music, poets, artists et al, on a pedestal unlike almost any other culture in the world.

And Hasio, you either have the same problem, or you are an elitist. In either case, your post was an arrogant piece of work. I wonder if you go into Irish pubs in England and complain about plastic English paddy crap, or in Amsterdam the Dutch Plastic Paddy crap, or in Germany, the German plastic paddy crap. I have been in pubs in each of these countries and heard the same pub songs I have heard in the states. I have also been in pubs in Boston, and plenty of them, were some marvelous trad is being played. Come to one of our shows and you will certainly hear the standards. But you will also hear jigs, slip jigs, reels, some sean nos, and other "trad" stuff. It really bothers me when I hear the generalizations about yanks. To be sure there are plenty of the green beer drinking, pointed ear wearing Americans who don't know much about real trad Irish music. But the states also produces more than its share of world class step dancers, musicians of every stripe, pipers and some of the finest pipe builders in the world (Quinn Koehler come directly to mind). Groups like Altan play to sold out houses of "plastic American paddy's" everyplace they perform.

Purpose of the rant...................Lay off the stupid generalizations. They are not true, and they demonstrate that you are a shallow person.

Mick