The craze for céilí music and dancing survived the hostility of the church and now its 'golden era' is captured in a new archive, reports Siobhán Long

Céilí dancing, like it or loathe it, continues to thrive in pockets across the country. A glance at the hundreds of dancers who descend annually on the Willie Clancy Week in Miltown Malbay, or in Killarney for the Gathering Festival, reveals a subculture that thrives well below the radar. Even Cork's City of Culture calendar included a monster céilí with some 8,000 dancers taking to the streets for a knees-up. While much of our social activity depends on the machinations of the public relations industry, céilí dancing thrives on word of mouth.

Brian Lawler is a founder member of the Ardellis Céilí Band and a long-time lover of both céilí dancing and the music that fuels it. Anyone who has had the primal pleasure of céilí dancing in the right location (ie, on springed dancefloor boards, which ebb and flow in concert with the feet of dancers) will understand Lawler's passion for capturing the essence of the céilí in archive form.

Lawler has been working on this archive since 1999, gathering interviews reflecting "the golden era of céilí dance and music" from 1955 to 1970. It's a labour of love, which has come to fruition in the form of a céilí audio archive, housed in the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

"Céilí music has been very good to me," Lawler admits shyly. "So when I retired from my day job in the pharmaceutical industry, I felt that it was time to give credit to this music that never before got the kind of attention and publicity that showband music did. Music is a like a disease in me, and I just can't shake it off."

The politics and passions of the music and the dancing are irresistible, Lawler contends. Purists might question the distinction between céilí and "old-time" dancing, and Conradh Na Gaeilge was active in promoting "fíor céilidhes", which included céilí dance only. The debate continues and is unresolved about the relationship between céilí and set dancing, and about which is indigenously Irish. Lawler's research indicates that set dancing (such as lancers and quadrilles) mainly originated on the continent and was brought here by the British military in the 19th century. Local dancing masters would have adapted continental dances to suit the Irish context, he suggests. The essential difference between céilí and set dancing is that sets remain within their circle whereas céilí dancing involves the "pass through", which is a highly sociable way to meet people.

"Céilí was always promoted well on Radio Éireann," he recalls, "particularly in the 1950s, and it was always seen as an integral part of Irish culture. Of course, [it was] back in the time when there was no television, so this idea of 'céilí dancing on the radio' was very popular. It was as big then as showbands were at their peak."

The Irish Club in Dublin's Parnell Square was a mecca for céilí dancers. At that time, even the most voracious appetites could be sated, with céilidhes seven nights a week and on Sunday afternoons. Bands came from throughout the country and proved a magnet for lonely people from outside Dublin who flocked to hear musicians from their home counties.

Back in the mid-1920s, the form was viewed with some disdain by the Catholic Church. According to Breandán Breathnach in Dancing in Ireland (1983), the Lenten pastorals of 1925 revealed the scandalous nature of modern dances and fashions. A communiqué from the archbishops and bishops declared that "dancehalls, more especially in the general uncontrol of recent years, have deplorably aggravated the ruin of virtue due to ordinary human weakness". Breathnach's book paints a colourful picture of the passions which ran high at the time of the church's opposition to céilídhes.

According to the clergy, there was no end to the base behaviour of céilí dancers. In 1927, the archbishop of Tuam declared, "Instead of Irish dances, we have sensuous contortions of the body timed to a semi-barbaric music. Instead of honest hard work, there is the tendency to do little for big wages." Subsequently, under pressure from the Catholic hierarchy, the Public Dance Halls Act was passed in 1936, requiring all public dances to be licensed by district judges.

All licence applications had to be accompanied by written permission from the local clergy, but even this did little to stem the tide of nightly céilídhes, house dances, recordings and radio broadcasts across the country.

Most of the céilí musicians were committed amateurs, players whose love of the music lured them to the dancehall, often until the small hours, after which they dusted themselves off and retreated into their day jobs. In the mid-1950s, musicians such as Lawler and Rose O'Connor (mother of Gerry "Fiddle" O'Connor and a stalwart of the céilí scene in Co Louth for years) thought little of engaging in marathon music sessions throughout the country. That was unquestionably céilí music's heyday.

"It's natural that everything has its day," Lawler says, "but it would be great if céilí dancing were to be seen as 'cool', so that students who return from their summer sojourns in the Gaeltacht continued to have an interest in it. It's one of the greatest things in life."

• The Céilí Audio Archive is at the Irish Traditional Music Archive, 63 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 (01-6619699; www.itma.ie)