'We still have last year's photographs.' 'Aye, so do the guards'

FESTIVAL DIARY:People of every race and age were wandering around with instruments strapped to their backs when Michael Hardingdropped in to the Joe Mooney Summer School, in Co Leitrim

PADDY McMANUS, a founding father of the Joe Mooney Summer School, sat in his armchair in the kitchen on Saturday evening, as contented as a large cat, while his wife, Betty, fried me a pan of boxty. Outside the streets were quiet and the pubs were open and swept and sparkling. The world was holding its breath for the start of Drumshanbo’s annual music festival.

“Tom Mulligan was a fiddle player who came from Mohill,” Paddy told me, “and he said that the Willie Clancy school was a great success, and that we should do something similar. That was over 20 years ago.”

This year 49 tutors are giving classes in 12 instruments to hundreds of musicians from across the globe, and at night the pubs will hum with a single language.

I thanked Betty for the boxty and headed down High Street for the first session of the music festival that she and Paddy helped establish.

The high street in Drumshanbo has an elevated promenade that links the public houses, and by 11pm humans of every gender, race and age were wandering around with instruments strapped to their backs. “We still have the photographs of you from last year,” one tall German man joked with a local. “Aye,” said the local, “so do the guards!”

A Hungarian man explained to me that the Tuatha Dé Danann came to Ireland in a flying ship but could not land, as the Fomorians had set up an energy field that they could not penetrate. So they had to circle nine times before finding a breach in the energy field, and eventually they landed on

Sliabh An Iarainn, just above Drumshanbo.

“That is the source of the music tradition in Leitrim,” he declared.

He was deadly serious, but I suppose you get all types at the Mooney school.

Berry's Tavern was packed with fiddles, flutes and a bouzouki. The style was furious. Musicians with red faces sweated over their instruments like men at the hay. I recognised one tune as The Battering Ram. Then I recognised an American woman I had met before.

I said: “Let’s go down the street to Monica’s pub; it might be quieter.” It wasn’t. Beneath a low ceiling two uilleann pipes, one accordion, two concertinas and four fiddles were clustered in harmony, flailing away at the polkas, and it struck me that when uilleann pipers dominate a session the music tends to sound less furious and more medieval. They open out a delicate baroque structure at the core of each tune.

The piping in Monica’s was like a soundtrack to a European banquet somewhere in the 16th century. But the American was a thoroughly modern lady. She told me that she was recently in a nightclub in Basle that had bowls of condoms and earplugs on the counters. I said: “It’s an education just listening to a well-travelled American.”

“I’m Irish-American,” she pointed out.

“Fair enough,” I said, “and no doubt you feel like an exile and you long to find home.”

“I guess that’s what’s called being Irish-American,” she said. “We’re always looking for home.”

“But maybe that’s what’s called being human,” I suggested. “All the musicians here are looking for home. They down tools every year and walk away from their desks and tune up their banjos and arrive like old fish at the top of the Shannon, because music offers them a kind of home; a refuge from Facebook, and earplugs and condoms.

“Musicians are just ordinary people – teachers, painters, plumbers – and sometimes they come from tattered lives where they no longer feel at home. But in this place they can shelter for seven days and seven nights, and immerse themselves in the t’ai chi of jig and reel, as their collective psyche shifts into a different zone, where they become more human and feel more at home.”

“But I’m not a musician,” she said.

“Neither am I,” I replied, “but I’m an evangelist for jigs and reels; they have a familiar rhythm as hypnotic and calming as the chanting of Tibetan monks. And music is the real language of all Ireland. Remember that in the big houses of ancient days Irish may have been spoken in the kitchen and English in the parlour, but everyone danced to the same tunes.”

I ordered us another drink. The only thing on the counter was a bowl of peanuts.

“Go to a beginner’s workshop,” I suggested. “You can’t imagine the pleasure of spending an entire morning learning a single tune and then playing it all afternoon like a contented child.”

“I used to play the tin whistle,” she said. “Do you think I could get the loan of one?”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. “I know a woman down the street who has an entire handbag of them.”