IT WAS being tipped as a bun fight with Dr Micheal O Suilleabhain at one end of the table and Tony MacMahon on the other.
Dr O Suilleabhain is professor of music at the University of Limerick and the voice of the River of Sound series on traditional music, and MacMahon is a radio producer and River of Sound's vocal opponent.
Crosbhealach an Cheoil/The Crossroads Conference, which ran all weekend at the Temple Bar Music Centre, provided a showcase for the debate about tradition and innovation in Irish music.
Dr O Suilleabhain's measured lecture sounded the keynote, in its insistence that inherited tradition was the result of constant innovation, which did not destroy "the beehive" of the traditional sources.
Taking a practical example in the tune, The Old Grey Goose, he showed how it had been experimented upon but also how certain marker motifs" remained constant in all versions. For some reason, you don't mess with the final four foot taps". He thought we could be seeing the formation of a new genre, "trad pop".
MrMacMahon countered that recent experimentation, such as that championed by Donal Lunny and Dr O Suilleabhain was damaging the traditional source. He described it as open cast mining by musical explorers, undermining cultural habitats.
He played three tracks from the River of Sound album and described one piece as "hiberno jazz, scrubbed clean of roots and balls", and another as the dreary "rattling of bones".
"If there's an iota of Ireland in there, then I'm a spaceman," he said. Traditional music was "a gift of nature, dispensed with the abandon of wild flowers".
When asked how he could justify playing the relatively recently imported instrument, the button accordion, he surprised the large audience by calling the instrument "an abomination" and explaining that he had begun to play it by chance.
Throughout the conference, which was addressed by more than 40 speakers and attracted over 300 delegates, the point that traditional music and dance have always been experimented with was constantly made.
Mr Joe O'Donovan, dance tutor at UCC, showed how set dances incorporated French quadrilles, which were banned by the Gaelic League in the early part of the century when ceili dances such as The Walls of Limerick had been made up to take their place.
Dancing on a wooden board, he demonstrated the old, loose style of dancing which always existed.