Sir, - Brian Maye (An Irishman's Diary, August 11th) wonders why the patriotic ballads which he learned in the 1960s are now forgotten and no longer taught in primary school. He suggests the growing sophistication of young people as a possible explanation. He is right; but he is also quite, quite wrong.
It is not television, videos or computers which have seduced people away from such music. Technology has not impeded other elements of Irish culture, as the growth in gaelscoileanna in recent years can testify.
No, the sophistication that drew them away was rather an awareness of the limited perspective of "patriotic ballads", a realisation that the body of Irish folksong was not made up almost exclusively of these ballads. This latter view was fairly prevalent in the early 1960s and was tacitly supported by the educational system which successfully concealed from the vast majority of students that the bulk of the Leaving Certificate Irish poetry syllabus was made up of ancient Irish folk songs, none of which really fit Mr Maye's genre of "patriotic ballad".
Students listened to the singers and musicians who were then surfing a wave of popularity. They heard the "patriotic ballads" all right, but they heard a lot more. They heard the likes of Liam Clancy singing some songs and Barney McKenna playing some airs that their teachers would have had them believe did not exist. And they heard even more: they heard songs of love, songs of work, songs of exile; they heard of sportsmen and seamen and scholars and saints. Young people woke up to the fact that the "patriotic ballads" were not what it was about at all, that there was a hugely rich musical heritage out there waiting to be discovered; and discover it they did. They discovered singers such as Frank Harte, Joe Heaney and Paddy Tunney; ensembles such as Sean O'Riada and Ceoltoiri Cualann, The Chieftains, Na Fili, Sweeney's Men, Planxty, De Danann and so many, many more.
As these singers and musicians played and sang young people realised that the music was more about dancing and drinking and the ordinary lives of ordinary people than it was about political propaganda.
Most of the "patriotic ballads", young people discovered, were composed 5 to 100 years after the events they describe, virtually all as a rallying call to the next rebellion. They were thus abused in recent Irish history.
The "Memory of the Dead" we have with us now is not the "warm romantic glow" from "selfless patriots who sacrificed their lives" but the horrific butchery of innocent non-combatants whose ordinary lives were more the stuff of real Irish folksong than the deeds of those who callously used them as the cannon-fodder of their own private revolution. - Yours, etc.,
Eugene Vesey, Honeypark, Sallynoggin, Co Dublin.