I spent the whole of last week in the town of Ennis; the capital of county Claire. I was really on my way back down to Cork but was given the tip of detouring to Ennis and stumbled upon The Fleadh Nua which is one of the major music festivals on the Irish trad calendar - somehow I had missed seeing anything about it before now. The festival lasted the whole week - during the days there were a series of workshops and concerts, and at night there was music sessions in quite a few of the pubs around town. By the weekend this ended up being music sessions in pretty much every pub in town (in some cases there were 3 or more simultanious sessions in the same pub!) and on every street corner too.
I arrived in Ennis on Tuesday but because there were so many people in town for the festival the only accomodation I could get was a B&B about 3km out of town - with my bike that wasn't too bad when it wasn't raining. The workshops were taught by a fiddler called Brian Prior who is quite well known in Comhaltas, an international organisation which promotes (and in a way regulates) traditional Irish music and dance around the world. The workshops were attended by people from all around the world, quite a few of which were in Ireland specially for the Fleadh.On Saturday I met up with Benjamin, the French fiddler that I had met in Cork a few weeks ago. There were also a lot of other familiar faces around the Fleadh from some of the other towns that I have visted along my trip so far. That night we played in a session in town with a bunch of completely random musicians... one of which was a Uillian piper who entirely co-oincidently, through a completeley different link, exactly 1 week later and about 200km away I end up at a party playing music in his kitchen... but that is another story!
At closing time we started walking back to the B&B and along the way sneaked into an after hours session in another bar... once they decided to close up we then joined in with a street session with some musicians from Leeds and eventually got back to the B&B just as the sun was rising.
We managed to get up for the 9 o'clock breakfast (mainly becaue I wasn't spending that much money on a room and not taking advantage of the free breakfast!) and then went back to bed to try and catch up on some sleep. As part of the Fleadh the cathedral was having a Sunday morning Mass in gaelic which we set our alarms to be up for... with just 5mins to go and a 3 minute drive we thought we would make it, until we got in my van to find it wouldn't start! - because I had been cycling all week the van hadn't been used and the battery was flat... Luckily there was a guy sitting outside who gave us a hand at push starting and we arrived only a few minutes late.On the Sunday afternoon there was a big parade of marching pipe and traditional music bands... including a piping band from Ulster - I got the feeling that their presence in the republic of Ireland was politically quite a big deal. After that we went to a pub to listen to a session - here I was able to have a nice long nap in front of an open fire before driving on down to Cork city.
The Hounds of Ulster
The Parade
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