Will changes in licensing laws, the smoking ban and drink-driving awarenessforce traditional music sessions out of the pub and into the kitchen, asksRosita Boland.

The traditional music session and the pub. The two have become intertwined over the years: that indefinable energy that pulses between musicians playing live in the informal setting of a bar and their audience. Anyone who has ever heard a wonderful, spontaneous bout of music making will have recognised something special, something, when at its best, that also reminds us culturally who we are.

Last week traditional music and the pub were in the news for rather different reasons. Sharon Shannon, the accordion player, Frankie Lane, the singer-songwriter, and Leo Healy, a friend, had been in the Crane Bar, a pub well known for its trad sessions, on Sea Road in Galway on September 26th, 2001. At 6.30 a.m. the following day their car crashed. Last week Judge Mary Fahy accused Shannon of telling "blatant lies" in court: after her arrest she denied having been the driver of the car, having said she was the driver at the scene of the accident. She was found guilty of drunken driving, fined 800 and banned from driving for two years.

It was also reported in court that Lane, who had been a back-seat passenger, got out of the car on that September morning and went to sleep in a nearby garden before going into town and collapsing in a café while eating breakfast. He was then taken to hospital by ambulance. It was not the finest day for the professions they represent.

Shannon's case will, for some people, have compounded the murky image of the traditional musician who drinks too much. It also focuses attention on the pub as the place where sessions take place, however, and how the place of the pub in traditional music is still changing.

Brendan Begley is an accordion player and singer who plays nationally and internationally with Beginish and the Boys of the Lough. He lives in Brandon Creek, on the Dingle peninsula. Like many traditional musicians he is very unhappy with the change in the licensing laws that bans under-18s from pubs after 9 p.m.

"I watched my father, my uncle and my neighbours playing music and dancing sets at 10, 11 at night in pubs when I was growing up. I learned from them. I was looking at an old RTÉ tape recently, of Noel Hill at 14 in a pub, playing concertina brilliantly. If it was now he'd be thrown out after 9 p.m.; he wouldn't have had the chance to hear people like Miko Russell playing.

"Brandon Creek is a rural area. People, including the musicians, come to the pub with their kids. You can't send kids home on their own, so that means they don't hear the music, and sometimes the musicians leave too. This blanket law, and now the smoking ban, is killing the spontaneity of the pub session. What I think will happen is that sessions will go back to the way they used to be in Ireland; go back to the house. It's like that in America now with all the smoking and drinking restrictions: musicians just ring round and organise a session in someone's house."

On the ad-hoc custom of the bar sending down drinks to musicians playing sessions, Begley says: "It varies. Most of the time, if you're getting paid to play in a pub, they don't. To be honest I generally prefer to look after myself, the nights I am drinking - and not driving, can I stress that? Otherwise you'd have a barman sending down a pint and they'd think they'd own you, and the next thing is they're asking for Danny Boy."

Mary McPartlan is a traditional singer living in Galway whose new recording is The Holland Handkerchief. "The pub is historically an extension of where traditional music began - the house - and the session is the heart and soul of traditional music. A session is always important to a musician, no matter where they are in their careers. It's not about lashing in the pints. The session is a place where musicians can try out tunes, play without the pressure of being in more formal, paid-in gigs and where they are with friends. The session has a sacrosanct, glorious place in traditional-music culture."

She too is concerned about the 9 p.m. ban on under-18s. "At festival time music is centred round places where drink is sold, because that's where the people are. Young players meet each other there, in the company of their parents. This is how excitement in music is generated. I feel that the people on those legislative committees making those decisions about licensing laws have a fair modicum of ignorance about the way they measure what is good or bad for people."

Kevin Glacken is a Dublin fiddle player who also runs the Irish Music Agency, a supplier of traditional musicians for corporate work. Although the session has been part of pub life in the west of Ireland for decades - the west is where most traditional musicians were based - "it's only in the mid 1970s that sessions started to be allowed in Dublin pubs. Now they can't enough of it."

How pubs pay and treat their musicians is up to each publican. In central Dublin it's common to pay two or three musicians to anchor a session; those two or three then attract other players, who might or might not get drinks sent down from the bar. "The image of traditional musicians and drinking too much goes back to some ballad groups of the 1960s," Glacken says. "But in fairness, personally, some of the best music I've heard in my life was in a pub - people like Seamus Ennis and Tommy Potts."

Miltown Malbay's internationally famous Willie Clancy Summer School, in July, showcases the best of traditional music and offers up to 120 workshops and classes for music students of all ages. This year will be the first to be held under the new licensing laws.

Muiris Ó Rócháin, who runs the school, is unsure what effect it will have, but he's not happy. Very many Willie Clancy students are schoolchildren; many of the musicians there for the week are teaching by day and therefore playing in pubs by night. "We have a lot of families coming along for the week, and children would be in the pubs as part of a family unit," says Ó Rócháin. "So what happens to the families now after 9 p.m.? Someone will have to go home - or maybe they'll all go home. Will there be an Irish solution to an Irish problem?"

Those who love and appreciate traditional music can only hope there will be. Perhaps some enlightened politician who believes people can be relied on to behave responsibly in a pub, both before and after 9 p.m., will push for special dispensation for children in the licensing laws during Ireland's traditional music festivals.