Ten things we learned from the Belfast Fleadh?

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann came to Belfast for the first time and left on Sunday. Here is what the eight days told us, as opposed to what everybody would like them to have told us.

1. Belfast can host something on this scale. Projections put the crowd well north of 1.6m  across the week. The previous high water mark was Sligo in 2015 at around 450,000. If the final figures hold, this was the biggest Fleadh ever held, in a city with no track record of hosting one.

2. The Fleadh does not normally do cities. It has been a small town institution. Mullingar, Ennis, Sligo, Drogheda, Wexford. Cork and Limerick have never had it. Dublin had it once, in 1972, and only because the 1971 Fleadh was postponed after internment. Belfast is the largest host by population in over fifty years.

3. The absence of gatekeepers did most of the work. No ticket, no venue, no door, no invitation. The music that defined the week was not on the timetable. It broke out on pavements, in doorways, on corners and in back rooms of pubs that had made no plans. You did not decide to attend. You could arrive by accident.

4. That matters more here than elsewhere. Belfast has spent decades building cultural provision that people sort themselves by, mostly without being asked to, through the ordinary private calculation of whether a thing is for you. Last week that calculation had nothing to work with. No door means no decision, and no decision means no sorting.

5. Music is not automatically benign in this place. A tune has been a boundary here and a drum has been seen as a claim. Anybody who has stood on a road in July knows it. What happened last week was not music naturally breaking through. It was programmed that way by people paying close attention, and the distinction is the whole point.

6. Ulster Scots got a hearing it has almost never had. Bands and players appeared on the same public stages as the trad ensembles, in front of an audience drawn from across the island. At home that music is usually read through the marching season and filed accordingly. Presented simply as music, to people with no prior position on what it is meant to signify, it was listened to rather than interpreted. That is close to unprecedented and it is the most underrated thing that happened.

7. A DUP deputy First Minister opened it, and used Irish to do so. Emma Little-Pengelly told the opening that culture need not divide us, invited visitors to listen, to learn and to discover, and referred to her own constituency in several languages including Irish and Ulster Scots. Respecting another’s culture, she said, never diminishes our own. She said it standing alongside a President of Ireland.

8. The competitions are the engine, not the sideshow. Behind every player on a street corner sits a qualifying system, adjudicators and an exacting standard, and in many cases a teenager with ten years of practice behind them. When you’re told so and so is an All Ireland fiddle champion it is at the Fleadh. The informality on the streets is what happens when competitors stop competing, and the rigour is why the standard was worth stopping for.

9. Our own cultural bodies have a question to answer. Lee Reynolds put it bluntly. Why were Comhaltas able to achieve better representation of, and a better relationship with, the Ulster Scots and Ulster British identities in such a short time than our institutions and funding bodies have managed over many years? That is a statutory commissioner praising an all-island Irish music organisation at the expense of local bodies. It deserves an answer rather than a shrug.

10. So was it a watershed? A week in which nobody had to declare themselves is not the same as a week in which anybody changed what they would declare. Nothing structural moved. No policy changed. Warm words at an opening ceremony are the easiest commodity in Northern Irish politics, and festivals are permissive environments by design. We have called good weeks turning points before and been wrong.

So call it a proof of concept rather than a watershed. Watersheds get identified afterwards. Proofs of concept can be repeated, be it in music or politics. Though a key reason for its success may be the fact that Comhaltas gave a hard no to those politicians who wanted to bend it to their own narrow purposes.

Last word to Sarah Morrison, who notes… “The Fleadh worked because nobody made a show of the inclusion. It just happened.”

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty