Donegal

You got decent fish grub in Nancy’s in Ardara (pronounced “Ard-ra”, if you’re visiting):

Before they banked and repaired the road, it was a hairy enough trip in an under-braked and over-loaded 1970s Renault.  Of course, all these “bad” roads were great roads for other purposes dear to my heart:

Ballinamallard’s late Bertie Fisher on the charge in Donegal in 1978:

Looking back, I was an observer at some cultural plate tectonics.  Donegal was a last redoubt of an un-curated peasant culture, both traditional music and the Irish language.  Donegal generally was ignored by the rest of the South; politically, it largely still is.  (That’s why, even today, you see young Donegal folk with Donegal number plates on yellow NI-type number plates.)  Irish traditional music was on the way out though.  The old guys bowing it higher, for love not money, in isolated cottages were fading fast, the dying embers of a defeated culture.

That culture was rescued though, by outside intervention.  My late cousin from Canada, Dr. K[ ], a founder member of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in the 1950s, was instrumental in that endeavour.  He and his wife stayed with us every year, while he and my Uncle went on a major drinking and music session to the annual All Ireland Fleadh.  Although by that stage, Dr. K. had stopped the booze completely, after the “waking up naked in a morgue with a John Doe number on his toe” incident, but I digress : )   Dr. K. and I wrote to each other throughout his life.  He was an extraordinary, Hemingway type character (music, boxing, car rallying, literature, drinking, revolutionary politics).  I thought the world of him, and he was a major influence on me as a child.

CCÉ provided a platform and a new PR focus for trad music.  Obviously, the Irish middle classes openly detested it.  The sniggering references to “diddle-aye” music from the corporate lawyers I worked with in Dublin was a cultural eye-opener; I had never encountered any comparable cultural hostility in England.  Now alerted to its existence, traditional music was revived by counter-cultural young people, people of the kind we met in Donegal in the 1970s.  I remember my parents, dressed conservatively like Richard and Hyacinth out of the Keeping Up Appearances TV series, chatting to a young German bloke with a tin whistle.  Hair down to his arse, anti-nuclear badges, presumably drugs in his back pocket, yet he and my parents bonding away happily over a shared interest in traditional fiddle music.  “That music … goes to my heart“, he proclaimed, solemnly, to my parents’ surprise.  And, as we all knew, the best traditional fiddle music was in Donegal.  Donegal fiddling has a fierce, driving energy, fast paced and with precise slurs and that characteristic use of the bass string to simulate the Scottish bagpipes. Check out this tune from Vincie Campbell – it may sound like a ridiculous comparison, but it in some ways it’s an acoustic version of hard rock – it has that same head-banging intensity, and refusal to compromise for untutored easy-listeners:

That generation of rooted traditional musicians, men who played that way because they knew no other way, included people such as:

• John Doherty
• Simon Doherty
• Neilly Boyle
• Francie Dearg Byrne
• Mickey Bán Byrne
• Con Cassidy etc

My late Dad was a superb traditional fiddle player, and much of his social life in his later years was mediated through music.  A violin was a social passport.  We would drive to a stranger musician’s house, knock, and my Dad would introduce himself as a fiddle player from Tyrone.  If it was nowadays, you’d be chased; but I remember all of us being invited in to Francie and Mickey Byrne’s house, and a great music session ensuing.  Mickey was un-married, but Francie’s son and grandchildren were there.  One year, their US cousins were there as well, and more chairs had to be borrowed from the village community hall.  Everyone had to do their party piece.  We stayed until the small hours and were fed twice, and my parents and the Byrne family became lifelong friends, and we visited them every year.  I well remember Francie and Mickey sizing up my Dad on that initial gate-crash visit – was this Tyrone man any good, or was he just a tourist?  Of course, once Dad broke out the Fritz Kreisler and Scott Skinner Highland compositions, and the German hornpipes in flat keys, broad grins of approval broke out, and then Francie and Mickey cut loose themselves.  They wouldn’t bother playing anything too complex until they (ever so tactfully) had sussed you out and were sure that you had sufficient musicial understanding.

In later years, Dad, by then a very old man himself, was attending the annual <Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí> concert in West Donegal, and it was humbling to see a room full of younger Donegal fiddle players getting to their feet and applauding as he came in.  Enthusiasts of the tradition, they had that instinctive respect for someone who, by then, was a living embodiment of that tradition.

I admire and enjoy the scenery in the North of Donegal – it too is stunning.  Yet for all the reasons noted above, a corner of my heart will always be in South West Donegal, in places like Teelin and Sliabh Liag

among people like me, who just happened to be blessed with better scenery and ready access to beaches : )