Historical reflections on Irish dancing
By John Egan
As a kid growing up in Limerick City in the ’40s and ’50s my exposure to Irish dancing was very limited.
In a family of 11 kids (seven brothers and four sisters) surviving on dad’s dole money, augmented by rearing the odd pig in the backyard, things were a wee bit tough and I felt deprived in many ways.
However, in spite of the fact that food, shelter and clothing were the priorities in the household budget (sob, sniff) we were never conscious of any feeling of deprivation simply because my mum’s purse couldn’t stretch to weekly fees for Irish dance lessons. After all, there was no peer pressure. Those who lived in our Limerick City lane didn’t clamour to the ‘dance masters’.
In his excellent memoir on life in the Limerick lanes of yesteryear Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes described how his poverty-stricken parents managed to find the weekly sixpence to provide him with Irish dance lessons, but instead of aspiring to becoming an early-day Flatley he squandered the ‘master’s fee’ on ice cream or a night at the pictures, and had no more to show to his parents in the way of dancing skills than I have to this day.
His youngest brother, Alfie, my schoolmate at the Christian Brothers school for about 10 years, and an accomplished scrum-half, clearly found rugby lessons more accessible and agreeable.
With the onset of dreaded puberty my interest in Irish dancing was rekindled by the Saturday night céilí dance in St. Patrick’s Church Hall, where we lads went to chat up the girls of our dreams, even though the evening’s dancing was heavily supervised by the man who had to hear our confessions on the following Saturday.
My deprived childhood however, was to conspire against me meeting any girl who expected less from me than a slick performance in the ‘Walls of Limerick’ or the ‘Stack of Barley’.
Who knows, perhaps this ineptness in the social graces of everyday boy/girl interaction in provincial Ireland contributed in no small part to my decision to ‘layve the ould country’ in order to chat up the birds at the Locarno or the Palais that my older brothers had written to me about from Birmingham and London.
In the late 1950s during my brief sojourn in Birmingham, the city of my family’s adoption, I felt ill-equipped to be a full member of the local Irish community, particularly in the Digbeth area where we lived. For God’s sake, was I the only Irish emigrant who couldn’t do the ‘Stack of Barley’, performed upstairs every Sunday lunchtime in the Olde Crown? I hasten to add these were impromptu performances by guys who, unlike myself, were able to shake a mean leg.
After Birmingham my next contact with Irish dancing was years later in 1963 when I found myself in the Far East (for reasons which are terribly dull) in Labuan, at that time an island territory of British North Borneo.
On my first visit to the local recreation club I was greeted by its chairman, a Dutch gentleman named Patrick Sarsfield, who worked for the Shell oil company. I never did find out if he was related to the other Patrick Sarsfield or descended from the ‘Wild Geese’.
On our way up to the members’ recreation hall my curiosity was aroused by several pairs of ladies shoes arranged step by step on the staircase. To my pleasant surprise I soon learned the shoes belonged to a group of Chinese girls from a local school that I found in mid-performance of an Irish 16-hand reel.
Even now, 40 years later, I can still remember my emotional pride on seeing a group of girls, so geographically and ethnically removed from Ireland, performing my own cultural dances, the very ones I couldn’t learn myself in Limerick about 9,000 miles away. To me this was shame, but without blame.
It was not until 1980 that I again came into contact with Irish dancing when I ‘covered’ a feis for this newspaper. Seeing these second and third-generation Irish kids weaving their magic on a town hall stage somewhere in south London was for me an extremely emotional experience.
On seeing the local mayor presenting trophies and medals to the young dancers, I found it difficult to fight back tears of pride knowing that this manifestly distinctive part of our culture was alive and kicking outside of its birthplace. And what a nice touch it was when the mayor plucked a medal from the medals basket to cheer up a five-year old who was tearful because she had not achieved a medals placing.
From that moment I felt it was important to learn more about Irish dancing. At the age of 40 and with two left feet it was too late for me to learn how to ‘shake a leg’, but I wanted to develop at least an appreciation of its history, and of its current organisation and teaching which clearly had enabled it to travel so well outside of the ould country.
In spite of spending 10 years at a school with a totally Irish Gaelic speaking environment, little did I know of the history of the Gaelic League’s involvement in Irish dancing. The objectives of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) founded in Dublin in 1893 were stated as ‘(1) the preservation of Irish as the National spoken language of Ireland and the extension of its use as the spoken tongue and (2) the study of and publication of existing Gaelic Literature and cultivation of modern literature in Irish’.
Although primarily set up to promote nationalism through a native language and its literature, it also promoted music, song, dance, sports and even Irish dress. The League went on to set up in 1930 a body that had long been in gestation called An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha (The Commission for Irish Dancing), generally known as ‘the Commission’, to legislate for Irish dancing worldwide.
With a head office in Dublin, it does its work through regional councils in Ireland and in other countries. In Britain for example, there are six councils covering Scotland, Wales, England south, midlands, north-east and north-west. Readers should be aware however, that there are other more recently established organisations in existence with what I would describe as a different ethos for the legislation and organisation of Irish dancing among their numerically lesser memberships. These bodies are based in Ireland and Britain, but in some cases with affiliations overseas.
With no firsthand knowledge I found it difficult to source definitive literature on the subject from an historical viewpoint. There seemed to be little or no primary references and my earlier enthusiasm for the subject became dormant until ‘Riverdance’ burst onto the world stage in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin.
No-one denies the significant but immeasurable impact of that first televised Flatley and Butler performance on the perception of Irish dancing worldwide and on the exponential growth in numbers of dancers who have since taken it up as their favourite activity or even as a way of life.
Subsequently I decided once again to seek out literature on the topic. Library searches were disappointingly unfruitful, but the first most significant signpost for me came in the form of an introductory article in the programme for the Great Britain Championships in the late ’90s, compiled by Seán Hennigan, chairman of the Southern Regional Council (England), outlining the history of Irish dancing in the London area from the late 19th century to the present time.
This pointed me in the direction of the various published works of Corkman, Dr John Cullinane, Irish dance historian and vice chairman of the Commission.
Yes, Flatley and Butler may have provided the biggest impact in modern times on the popularity of Irish dancing, but it is arguable that the most profound influences on its nurture and direction derives from two events that took place about one hundred years earlier, namely, (a) the establishment of the Gaelic League in Dublin in 1893 and (b) the very first céilí held — not in Ireland — but in London’s Bloomsbury Hall, organised by the Gaelic League’s London branch in 1897.
The events that flowed from this first ever céilí were to have profound implications in Ireland itself for the collection and categorisation of what were to be regarded by the Gaelic League as ‘real’ Irish dances as opposed to ‘foreign dances’.
The League was soon to develop a major role of organising, regulating and promoting Irish dancing competitions, and eventually approving those whom they deemed eligible to teach or adjudicate.
The term ‘feis’ and ‘oireachtas’ were introduced to denote local and national events. It is true that the Gaelic League introduced the notion of competition into feiseanna and oireachtaisí over 100 years ago and to this day competition remains the main driving force of Irish dancing.
The Gaelic League gave birth to its offspring, the Commission, after a seven-year gestation period (1924-1930) which took place in a spirit of co-operation between the League and the dance teachers associations. The birth however, was not without its labour pains and also had delayed post-natal complications.
In its early years the Cork dance teachers as a body were not prepared to join a Dublin-based organisation that would regulate competitions in Cork and levy registration fees on the local organisers, as well as introducing what they regarded as restrictive practices, similar to that of the GAA ban on participation in, or attendance at ‘foreign’ games by its members.
They saw the Commission as an unrepresentative body, top heavy with Gaelic Leaguers, with just three dance teacher representatives and these were all from Dublin. The Cork teachers, who had the longest-established association in the country (since 1895) were understandably aggrieved and for a time went their own way.
With compromise and flexibility on both sides however, they joined the Commission’s fold over a period of years after its foundation. A more recent and longer-lasting ‘schism’ between the Commission and a section of Irish dance teachers took place in the 1960s when an amalgamation of various local teacher associations formed its own national body called Comhdháil na Múinteoirí agus Moltóirí Rincí Gaelacha, usually abbreviated to An Comhdháil, and meaning Congress of Irish Dance Teachers and Adjudicators. I have little or no information on the reasons why this split occurred but I suspect there were reasons that might resonate with the former Cork Teachers Association.
Since the late 1967 the Commission changed from being just a national body to becoming an international body when it conducted its first exams and registered its first teachers in England and America. Australia was soon to follow in 1969. Other overseas countries followed and with increased ease of travel the global interest gave rise to the fantastic success story that is the World Irish Dancing Championships.
From about the same time, following some teacher dissatisfaction, there has been an increase in the numbers of teachers from Ireland and from overseas serving on An Coimisiún. This reflects the changing global nature of the teacher composition.
The original imbalance of teacher and Gaelic League members that existed in the 1930s has largely been addressed. In the year 2000, 93 per cent of all members of An Coimisiún were actually qualified teachers.
Over 70 years after its foundation, An Coimisiún still remains under the patronage of the Gaelic League. The World Championships, All Ireland Championships, Regional Championships, examinations and registration system aimed at maintaining high standards, are a monument to the success of the Gaelic League and to its foresight in establishing An Coimisiún. It is also worthy of special note that Tomás Ó Faircheallaigh, current president of An Coimisiún, was one of its founding members in 1930 and is still going strong after more than 70 years unbroken service.
I believe that this is unique in any national organisation in the world. I had the privilege of holding a lengthy conversation in Irish when I had a chance meeting with him in Belfast at the World Championships in 2000.
I hope to meet him again next year when he becomes a centenarian, and I’m sure that he will be as kind to my rusty Irish as he was in Belfast.
I am grateful to Dr John Cullinane for the factual information in his various publications on which I largely drew for the history of An Coimisiún, and also for the use of photographs from the Cullinane Archive Collection. It is important that the reader should be aware that any error in the interpretation of the historical facts are due to myself, the author of this article. I would commend the reader who is interested in any aspect of Irish dancing to refer to the publications of Dr John P Cullinane, who can be contacted directly on Tel/Fax: 00 353 21 431 4094.)
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