2I thought I'd made it clear that I am an admirer of much Irish music, "
I didn't suggest you weren't Jim, I'm sure you are; I'm equally sure you have a distorted picture of the music scene here - I don't just rely on what is ahppening in Clare, where the music has always thrived, but our work takes us to Dublin regularly, where we are given a fuller picture from our contact with The Irish Traditional Music Archive
Actually, the music was not in a bad way in the 50s and 60s - you just had to know where to go to find it
Fra from needing to be inspired by The Folk Boom, which came and went as fast here as it did in England, there were enough musicians and singers around to make it possible to draw on them to build up the extremely healthy scene there is now and create a solid foundation, not based on 'names' but on local players and singers - The Willie Clancy School was the first such venture and shortly afterwards Nicholas Carolan worked to set up The Irish Traditional Music Archive
There was always known to be music and singing in Connemara, Donegal, Kerry, Cork and Clare and the BBC project proved conclusively that other counties still had a fair number of tradition performers to draw on - particularly in the six Northern Counties
Im told by friends that Wexford was fairly righ traditionally
Later County Louth turned out to be a'nest of singing birds'
What was missing was a guarantee that young singers would take over where the older ones left off - sorted beyond doubt now
It's hard to know what you mean by 'poor state' - Ireland didn't have a 'revival' in the same way as Britain had, so there were no clubs to judge by
Irish music, singing and storytelling was strictly a fireside activity, apart from the crossroads dances that were destroyed by the priests - that continued to happen till beyond the mid 20th century
What it boils down to is that the Irish scene is now guaranteed to last while the British one is blowing for tugs - there are several lessons to be learned there
Jim