The sign is clear: “The following are not permitted in the hotel lobby, public areas or corridors: Dancing. Running. Make-up application. Hair-styling.”
Every February the Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney, Co Kerry, tries its best to contain the glamorous madness that comes with the prestigious duty of hosting the All-Ireland Irish dancing championships. If you wander down the winding angular corridors on that spring weekend – and breathe in an atmosphere thick with adrenaline, sweat and heavy notes of fake tan – you will seamlessly enter the INEC arena, the major event space. For four intensive days, this place is the apex of the universe for some of the top Irish dancers in the world.
Thum, thum, thum, thum, thum ... everywhere you look, children and teenagers are hammering the hotel floor in last minute rehearsals. The plush carpets are resigned to the battering, with no hope of muffling the sound. These spectacularly complex routines have been practised with such intensity that each next step comes as a primal instinct to the dancer. None are dancing to music, just the drum of their nervous heartbeats.
This is competitive Irish dancing – where the margins between those who make it on to the podium and those who won’t will be ruthlessly razor thin. Irish dancing is too big for almost anything, too big for almost anywhere: the hundreds of dancers spill far beyond the designated practice areas, the stage, the auditorium, their hotel rooms, the restaurant, reception and the bar.
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Black garment bags are decorated with rhinestones and the name of a dancer. They are strewn on the floor next to gear bags with the names of top schools, who collect champion dancers and titles like human trophies.
For days, they’ve been arriving. Daughters and dance moms climb out of taxis, the Kerry taxi drivers casting weary glances at garment bags and personalised luggage they heave in and out of their cars. Family dynamics shift. Children are athletes this weekend – and mothers are managers.
Every time you turn a corner in the hotel, you risk stepping on a shattered dream or intruding on heartbreak. Dancers in full costume sit slumped on the floor like broken porcelain dolls, some openly sobbing, others staring into space in blunt devastation. Very few around them, apart from their own heartsore mothers, try to console those who are crying. Broken hearts are not unusual. Devastation is mundane.
Irish dancing, a unique blend of cultural art form and elite sport, is not only fiercely competitive. It can also be very subjectively judged.
[ The next generation of Irish dancers takes on the WorldsOpens in new window ]
When the level of skill accomplished by competitors is so high and so obvious, earning a podium place often comes down to the personal taste of one judge. Under a system that operated until relatively recently, one judge taking a turn against a specific dancer could also be enough to obliterate their chances entirely.
Those who have finally made it to that All-Ireland stage in Kerry, carry with them hopes of competing and winning on the World Championship stage a couple of months later. The sheer grit and graft that has gone into reaching this competitive level might well be the product of an entire childhood sacrificed to dancing. And when those extremely talented children lose out, often by a hair’s breadth, the disappointment felt by those who championed them can fester into something else: suspicion.
In 2022, I broke what became a worldwide story about a shocking alleged cheating scandal right at the heart of the top tier of competitive Irish dancing.
Until then, outsiders like me had viewed the curious world of Irish dancing as an almost entirely innocuous and twee pursuit. Being reluctantly escorted into a local GAA hall to learn your one-two-threes was as mundane an aspect of an Irish childhood as a household portrait of the Sacred Heart. Irish dancing was ubiquitous as a kind of background noise, especially for the post-Riverdance generation.
It was certainly our most wholesome and arguably most recognisable national cultural export. But while outsiders were stunned to learn that competitive Irish dancing was allegedly rigged, nobody inside that strange little universe was a bit surprised.
The practice that became known as “feis fixing”. What was alleged to have happened was that people would use and abuse the alliances and allegiances with other top teachers and judges in this insular world to effectively do favours for each other.
The most decorated teachers would often also be accredited to adjudicate competitions – those that their own Irish dancers weren’t competing in. If you, as a judge, marked up the dancers of another teacher then they, when it was their turn to adjudicate, would do the same for you. The practice calcified when many started to subscribe to the belief that Irish dancing was inherently unfair, to the point that some almost felt a righteous responsibility to cheat for their dancers.
In the early days of breaking and writing this strange story, feis fixing was compared on more than one occasion to a Mafia-style code which governed Irish dancing’s worst kept secret. Alleged cheating was being described to me as a near endemic issue, one that led many people to adopt a stance of wilful ignorance.
Once the story was revealed, it was picked up around the world. Irish dancing was in a state of convulsion. It was embarrassed, exposed for the first time ever – and facing serious questions about its ability to survive.
More than 40 people would eventually be accused of cheating. For two years, An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG), the governing body, would try and ultimately fail to bring matters to a satisfactory conclusion. Eventually, the eagerly anticipated disciplinary hearings for those accused of cheating collapsed in spectacular fashion.
The scandal seriously threatened CLRG’s ability to host the 2025 World Championship. Cancelling the Worlds, as they are known, would have been like scrapping the Olympics. This would have meant, in effect, that CLRG had lost what had become a referendum on its ability to shepherd dancing out of its most perilous crisis. It was, without question, the biggest thing since Riverdance – and not in a good way.
I was initially incredulous that what was effectively a child’s hobby could really merit the kind of omertà that I encountered from those I interviewed about feis fixing. All privately insisted that they had openly witnessed years if not decades of cheating, but then said it would be too dangerous to speak openly about it.
But the more time I spent delving into this colourful world – and the more I learned about the bold and brash characters that populate it – the more I started to understand that Irish dancing really might be much more ruthless and Machiavellian than imagined.
It turns out people have been fighting about it for as long as they have been doing the steps. Irish dancing has existed formally under CLRG for about a century. The organisation was established by the Gaelic League in an effort to use the popularity of Irish dancing as a vehicle for the political project of the Gaelic revival. This presumably straightforward effort – to have a body to run and regulate dancing – was mired in controversy from its inception, stirring strong and diverse views about what exactly Irish dancing was and how it should be performed.
Earlier still, when dancing was a more organic and native pursuit at the crossroads and in farmhouses, there is evidence that people came to blows at feiseanna over who who should win a “bout” of dancing. The victor would be awarded a boxing-style belt.
The story of how and why the biggest and oldest Irish dancing organisation was brought to the brink of collapse over cheating scandal is complicated.
But the more research I did on the history of dancing, the clearer it became that the affair had been decades in the making. Dancing always invoked a deep passion but, even more than that, ruthless competition.
CLRG has long enjoyed the prestige of effectively being the global custodian of the rich and historic art of Irish dancing. And as the most important curator of its history and heritage, it was largely left to its own devices. Although it has global reach and serious status, it is run in an office in Dublin by a tiny group of volunteers and even fewer paid staff. The failure to professionalise was exposed when it was paralysed and unable to cope with the intensive media scrutiny that the scandal brought to its door.
CLRG receives almost negligible Government funding, so the State has no real mandate to oversee or scrutinise how it operates. For more than 35 years, Irish dancing has been growing – and for that entire time, it has effectively been entirely self-regulated.
The problem is that from the very first World Championship in 1970, Irish dancing started to become like a sport that was entirely consumed by competition. In doing so, it abandoned its responsibility to celebrate and commemorate Ireland’s native dance. Competition, and more specifically, winning competitions, has for decades been the driving force behind the evolution of Irish dancing.
The aesthetics of dancing that we’re all familiar with – the double wigs, the crystal studded gowns, the stage make-up – dominate not because they are faithful to tradition and origins but because they are proven to be the kind of presentation that tends to be rewarded by judges.
Even after Riverdance, when there were hopes that the elegance of Jean Butler’s simpler costume might exile the sparkling stage gowns forever, it only took about one competition cycle for the sport to reject black velvet dresses and revert to having the same glitz and glamour on the most important Irish dancing podiums.
The routines themselves – exponentially more impressive and complex with each passing decade – are entirely divorced from the kind of authentic Irish dancing that should be celebrated and curated. Routines change and advance for one reason only – to improve the dancer’s chances of winning. Older routines are abandoned forever.
CLRG has tried to suppress some of these advances over the years – reining in efforts to change the tempo of traditional Irish music to benefit performance, or clamping down on more athletic and balletic routines that demonstrate skill but certainly don’t showcase authentic Irish dancing. But for every battle it won, it was slowly losing the war.
[ Irish dancing: All cases of alleged competition fixing dropped by governing bodyOpens in new window ]
Irish dancing exists now under a governing body that has effectively devoted itself to hosting and running competitions, rather than protecting and promoting the art of Irish dance. No sport in the world is immune from cheating – there will always be those who want to take nefarious shortcuts to glory.
The question now is how and why the cheating scandal was allowed to fester for so long. It may be the case that one of our most important national art forms suffered irreparable damage because it has celebrated competition far more than a precious culture.
Ellen Coyne’s book Dirty Dancing: The Inside Story of the Irish Dancing Cheating Scandal (€19.99) is published on April 16th by Gill Books.
