The music of what happens

Achill island stands against the full force of the Atlantic Ocean that sketches, erases, and resketches its cliffs and shoreline with every violent storm. It is an island off an island off an island off Europe and has, like its majestic cliffs, its mountains, its lakes, maintained its independence and individuality, as well as many of its oldest and most human traditions. Heinrich Boll, the German novelist and Nobel laureate, came to the island in the 1950s searching for just such a refuge from the unbalanced and unbalancing rushes of post-war Europe; he found a stalwart Catholicism, an engaging landscape, a generous people willing to welcome him and to leave him whatever privacy he wanted. He stayed.

I was brought up on Achill Island and, as a child, was free to explore every cove and cliffface of the island. I found excitement everywhere, in the storms, the wildness of the waves, the power of the cliffs. And I found stability in an ancient Catholic heritage that had grown undisturbed for centuries. God, then, was everywhere, like the thousand varieties of rain; He was in the kindness of the people, He was in their music; He was, too, in the froth the sea created, while the mist came in from the sea like inarticulate angels passing with messages. Sometimes through the darkness, the fabulous light from Clare Island swept like a dancer across the bay. Often and often again the winds came, driving the salt spray like herds of cattle over our fields, crossing from the beginning of time until now. And I understood what those words meant, "to you, O God, ten thousand years are as yesterday, you come sweeping men away like dreams."

Riveted to this glorious landscape of beauty and wildness, and forever bound to the stability of an ancient and Catholic God, are, for me, the pipe bands of Achill Island. The great banner held up on days of parade linked together the traditional image of Saint Patrick, like a Bishop dressed in Green, hoisting his crozier with a simple nationalism; it also carried the words "A Dhia saor Eire", God save Ireland. St Patrick's Day, when the coldest winds seemed to sweep down from the Northern ice-caps, was nothing without the pipe bands. We walked to Mass, bunches of shamrock flaccid in our lapels. There were the great hymns of that day, Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, Dochas Linn Naomh Padraig, and while we prayed to our national saint for the safety of our souls, we pleaded with him, too, to "come to our aid, in our battles take part". These battles were, no doubt, the spiritual ones, "against Satan's wiles and an infidel throng", but behind those meanings was the infidel throng that had for centuries kept our country in subjection. "Faith of our Fathers, we will be true to thee till death", oh yes, we sang it out with gusto and fervour. But the greatest time came in the afternoon when we went back to Keel and gathered on the sandy banks, just inshore from the great sweep of Keel beach. We suffered the winds and rains because this day they had a daffodil edge; there was something sprouting in the spirit that suggested spring, and the wonders of summer not far ahead.

And then we heard, in the distance, coming with pride and colour and ineluctable spirit, the pipe bands of the island! "Let Erin Remember" lifted us into a great joy of excitement, and all the other songs we linked forever to the struggle against the great invader, A Nation Once Again, The Wearing of the Green, The Minstrel Boy. There was a sadness too in those years when my memories of these bands were the strongest, because many of our island exiles had come home from Scotland, from England, from the loneliness and the hardship, to take part in this wonderful occasion and celebrate the great verities, the unchanging beliefs in freedom, St Patrick, and God. And we knew they would have to go away again, almost at once, back into exile. The first Achill band was formed for St Patrick's Day in 1882, three years after the founding of the Land League and when the campaign for Home Rule was in full swing. The band paraded from the village of Dooagh to Mass at Dookinella and the people paraded behind them. And ever since then the custom has continued, and associated forever with the rousing vigour of the music is the stability of a faith and the deepest longings for freedom.

Another event occurred in the early part of this century when, in 1912, "scoil Acla" was established in the hope of keeping spoken Irish alive, and spreading the skills of piping. One year later the first pipers joined the band that marched to Mass on St Patrick's Day. Since then pipe bands have grown and flourished in several parts of the island. Keel. Dooagh. Dookinella. Pollagh. Bunnacurry. During Black and Tan times there was a ban on public assembly. As Saint Patrick's Day approached the bands began to prepare, as usual. Mass in Dookinella was to have been at 11.30 p.m. to allow the bands time to march and lead the faithful with them. But the priest announced the Mass for nine o'clock, hoping to avoid trouble. That spirit of freedom and individuality was not so easily circumvented, however, the bands reacted and the big drum went around the village that morning at 6 a.m. to make sure everybody would be up and ready.

THE band paraded to the church and there was no trouble. This wonderful reveille, too, continues to this very day, drum, reveille, parade and pipes calling to all souls to congregate before the Lord, to remember they are Irish, to celebrate hope, beginnings, and togetherness.

So there we stood, young and impressionable, the winds biting into our flesh, the rains sweeping down across the bay, our saint watching down on us and bestowing his sweet smile, and the bands, kilts and sashes and all the appurtenances, pipes and side drums and the majestic sleight-of-hand of the big base drummer, lifting our souls to Ireland and to God. With all the excitement in the air we were given treats, I had a half a crown in my pocket and I was as rich as a bishop. I bought an orange, I bought a special Patrick's Day medal with a green ribbon attached to it, I bought a bar of Fry's chocolate cream. Heady times, indeed. And yet I was aware that some of the men marching proudly along through the low and shivering grasses of the sandy banks would "go away" in less than a week's time, to work abroad. There was work on the Preston by-pass, on oil refineries, on hydro stations and, of course, on "the buildings". For several years, during the dark decade of the 1950s, the years of struggle and severest emigration, the strengths of the bands declined. A band consisting of only eight or nine members, however, still held on to the inveterate faith of olden times that things would yet come right. The sight of three goose quills, dyed green and gold and fastened with a Tara brooch to the uniform cap, while it suggested no more than colour to me, suggests now a fierce sense of pride and hope. And oh how we carried on the music when the bands came to a stop, left down their drums and pipes, and lounged about with a flask of tea or a glass of lemonade, how we children marched together, miming pipes and drums, playing our drones, our pipes, our chanters, making an ancient - though for the moment imaginary - music that touched the deepest roots of our faith and our Irishness.

The 1950s were the lean years. But today the pipe bands of Achill are thriving. John McNamara, a teacher in Dooagh, in 1966 started a school band, teaching the youngsters the music and the traditions. From this restart, the Keel band now has some 30 members. And then, with the co-operation of the island, the aims of Scoil Acla were revived and are thriving now when, for a fortnight in August every year, the traditional instruments are taught. Come the Feast of the Assumption, August 15th, and one of the most wonderful echoes of those early Patrick's Days can be heard again. There is a large bus station in Dooagh and against its high, white wall, a lorry is drawn up to form a makeshift stage. People gather in the afternoon. On one side there is the pub; on the other is the Atlantic Ocean, and in between the children who have studied during the week, display their talents. It is a sort of dawn chorus in the early afternoon, an occasion filled with hope and joy, music and beginnings. I have stood there often, waiting. This time there is more than a bar of Fry's chocolate cream; I will have a pint in my hand. And we wait. And the excitement mounts. And then we hear it, that wonderfully rousing big bass drum sound carried on the wind to us from the Keem road. Gradually the music of the pipes can be heard, coming like a promise of great times and then the pipe major appears, followed by the band in full costume, building us all into a frenzy of joy and a delightful gladness that we are privileged to be here.

It is this same sense of beginnings, and of renewal, a sense, too, of celebration and arousal, that takes the band out on New Year's Eve. The band in Keel gathers at Keel Hall, the band in Dooagh gathers at Gielty's. On this special night there is no dressing up in uniform but there is always a need to dress warmly. There is a great feeling of waiting, of attending; the sea continues its sway, sometimes lightly visible under a bright moon, more often than not only audible in the darkness. The members of the bands chat quietly, moving about to keep themselves warm. People gather to participate in this, most pure, most pagan, greeting with music of the future. This is Hogmanay, the gifting of another year, the coming of midnight, the darkest hour, before the turn towards dawn. It is the most natural, the most Janus-like, of moments. For all of us it is, too, given the associations we cherish, the most holy of moments.

Watches are carefully examined; breaths are held; no one dares to anticipate, with touch of drum, or slide of chanter, the perfect moment. And then, at last, precisely on the stroke of midnight, there is the wonderful tune of Auld Lang Syne, followed by The Dawning of the Day. This is the closest that the pipes will come to their origins in Scottish music for these are the bagpipes, not the uillinn pipes. Scotland the Brave, I Love a Lassie, Ye're no awa till ye're gone awa. . . And the new year is welcomed in with a heartstopping sound of musical revelry.

I have stood at the side of the street in Dublin and watched the Patrick's Day Parade and wondered. Texan girls go by, all thigh and bodice, suffering the chill and our blunt stares; we watch the painted wagons commercially rolling west and see! we are unkempt no longer, we have learned the score, island sophisticates and scholars, welcoming the new missionaries, their balances, their credit cards. But sometimes I wonder, when that old, dim message of peace and love and prayer and charity, fades under the groans of stalled traffic, if perhaps the perfect revelry is that dignified marching of the Achill bands, or better yet, a wilful stomping in place to the rhythms of the music, or best of all, eyes closed, attending, and standing still.