As the Fleadh Cheoil wraps up in Wexford, there will be plenty of time to reflect on the popularity of traditional music in Ireland. The previous weekend in Waterford, the 11-piece all-female trad group, Biird, drew a huge crowd at the All Together Now festival, and were later seen playing an impromptu session with Ed Sheeran during the Fleadh.
Music festivals across the country now prominently feature traditional music being performed next to contemporary genres. Line-ups, support and main act combinations, and even the sounds within groups themselves are often in collision between the traditional and the new.
These revolutions are both radical and referential, but none of this would be happening without the countless players, families and places that have held and passed on tunes over centuries.
At the core of this heritage is the traditional music session. Over the past 20 years, a quarter of Ireland’s pubs have closed, with rural areas the most adversely impacted. Like an out-of-tune fiddle, there is discordance at play with regards to the hunger for traditional music among younger generations, and the disappearance of places where it can be played, honed, shared and learned in unamplified sessions.
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This brings us to Co Clare, probably the most important site of traditional music in the country. Kilfenora is a village with a storied musical history, especially with regards to the Kilfenora Céilí Band, making the place the home of céilí music. And yet if you are a musician in the village, and you want to drop in on a regular session in a pub, you’ll have to drive to Doolin, Ennis or Miltown Malbay.
Crucially, Kilfenora has its own sound. This subset of our intangible but vital heritage comes from the people, the land and the place. It is a sound that generated and infused tunes across the centuries through families, house dances and sessions. But where to play and pass on these tunes today?
A group of people has come together with a plan to purchase and reopen Linnane’s Pub in Kilfenora as a community space and social enterprise, with a focus on safeguarding the musical tradition of the area and promoting local culture. They are currently crowdfunding the project, asking for the public’s help, and they need €350,000 to buy the pub and €150,000 to bring it back into use.
The pub was the headquarters of the great Kitty Linnane, where many legendary musicians played. The plan for the project, entitled Kilfenora Corner, includes reopening the pub as a hub for unamplified sessions, with potential for a community garden, market space and creche. The project has also been approached by someone looking for a space in which to make flutes. These are the kinds of spaces that Ireland’s rural villages and towns need more of. It’s an idea with integrity, and imbued with a collective spirit and love of heritage and culture.
Aoife Kelly is one of the people behind the project. A concertina player from a family of fiddle players, she comes from a long line of musicians, which now includes her siblings’ children. Her family are all from Clare - her mother from Kilfenora and her father’s side from the west of the county - and she divides her time between Kilfenora and Dublin. Her paternal grandfather was John Kelly, a member of Ceoltóirí Chualann, alongside Seán Ó Riada and founding members of The Chieftains.
Her maternal grandfather is Jimmy O’Donoghue, aged 96 and from the townland of Clogher. When Kelly found rare photographs of house dances from the area in his home, “Jimmy could tell me everybody in the photo, where it was, when it was, how there was an American wake for a woman in one of the photos - his memory is amazing.” She also discovered old tapes of local musicians, which formed the basis of her Sounds of Kilfenora project.
“You have Doolin, which has a lot of mic’d sessions. But we say ‘unamplified’, because that’s what we do. You want to go into a pub, get a gang together, and play. There are house sessions, and that’s all well and good, but they’re for our friends – you’re not playing with new people and meeting other people. It sounds strange, but when musicians find a place to play, it’s quite special.” Linnane’s could be that place once more.
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Across Ireland, there is a growing number of people exploring community ownership of pubs and other third spaces. Accessing and administering finances for this are difficult, because our system around loans, mortgages and ownership is geared towards the individual and the corporate. But if the public got behind Kilfenora Corner, and the project was successful, it wouldn’t just be a space for a community with a great spirit, a place to showcase Kilfenora’s heritage, and a new hub for traditional music to be played, shared and passed on. It could demonstrate a people-powered model to save, preserve and invigorate villages and towns with a sense of potential and joy, not to mention to create jobs and attract tourism.
“People are on screens, they’re at home, they’re lonely,” Kelly says, “If you can have something like this to bring people together, then wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to do?”
