That soundtrack of Irish mid-morning normality that is the Pat Kenny radio show was cut some time last year by Karan Casey's voice. After Kenny had played The Shamrock Shore there was a perceptible silence. Eventually he breathed, "Wasn't that beautiful?" The Wall Street Journal had already called her singing "one of the true glories of Irish music today", but this was the first time that I, and probably the vast majority of Kenny's hundreds of thousands of listeners had heard her. Though Co Waterford-born, she has spent most of the past five years in the US, and only toured in Ireland for the first time last year, when her debut solo album, Songlines, and Sunny Spells And Scattered Showers, the second album of the band she sings with, Solas, were both released on the Shanachie label.Both albums promptly began to rock around the top of Irish Music News's local trad top of the pops, as punters like myself beat a path to the till. But the fact is, the albums do her scant justice. When she sang live in the Temple Bar Music Centre at Christmas, she brought the crowd to its feet, shouting for more. She has not just clarity and technique, she has power too. Now based part of the year in Cork and stepping out with Nomos's accordionist, Niall Vallely, she met me half-way through a dash to the extreme north west of Donegal, where she was recording a programme for TnaG. The first relief is this 28year-old songstress bears no resemblance to the God-help-us swathed on the cover of her solo album in what, to all intents and purposes, look like unwanted Christmas presents. She is petite, brown-eyed and cheerful, and has funky purple streaks in her hair."Irish traditional music's becoming very trendy," she agrees; but having a background in jazz and classical music, she has been able to map out some of the weird cultural schisms in Irish society: "When I was studying music in UCD I was practising Stormy Weather one day, and one of the lecturers came in and said, `That's not music'. I kind of left after that."But down in UCC with Mel Mercier, they have a whole jazz section and you can have jazz as an option. The whole ethnomusicology scene has really opened up."It's not snobbery," she says of the UCD incident. "It's fear. The teachers don't feel equipped to teach other kinds of music and they need to be more open about saying so." She goes on: "People don't think a traditional song is as technical as a classical song, and that's not true. It's a hang-overfrom colonisation, wanting to sound more English and more cultured - and that's classical - and the contempt we have for ourselves."She still does exercises learned while singing in the classical mode to keep her voice limber. But she says she hasn't played classical piano for eight years: "We still haven't come to grips with teaching classical piano in Ireland - apart from maybe in Dublin, in the Academy and the College of Music. You'd do the left hand and then the right hand and then you'd put them together, rather than coming in and hearing the whole thing and it being a musical experience. When I sit down at the piano I tend to get anxious about it."Meanwhile, she was making money by singing jazz in George's Bistro. When the competition opened for Morrisson visas to the US, she saw her chance to learn more. Supporting herself with a bizarre mixture of baby-sitting and inexpert chemical experiments for a science textbook publishing company, she enrolled in a jazz course in Long Island University.She began to study with a double bass player called Kinsuma Kinshasa: "He was very politically aware and very aware of the Irish situation, and that jazz and traditional both come from oppressed cultures and how the music betrays that." How? "In songs like An Buachaillin Ban (an old song of political banishment, recorded on Songlines) there are underlying themes, layered and hidden. In blues songs there are sometimes calls and answers in the songs which maybe only the black community understands."Before she went to the US, she says, she had barely heard of Oscar Brown jnr or Thelonius Monk, "the politicised side of jazz". But although her love for the genre deepened, she eventually pretty much turned her professional back on it: "I began to realise the depth of musicianship there is in it. I hadn't had it in my ear growing up, and I suppose that's partly the reason jazz hasn't really flourished here. How do you put yourself across as Irish in jazz? I was singing in an American accent - ridiculous. But I'd be broadminded now. I'd try to sing jazz classics (she mentions Strange Fruit) in my own accent and put my own `gimp' on them."The political edge of her music keeps showing itself. It would be hard to record an album of folk songs without engaging with social issues, but Songlines piles up the Ballad of Accounting, the feminist tale of Roger the Miller, who loses his woman because he has too much regard for her dowry, Shamrock Shore, Ewan McColl's feisty consciousness-raising ballad, a beautiful elegy for Grattan's parliament, and the aforementioned An Buachaillin Ban. She says she is particularly drawn to political songs, and mentions She Is Like The Swallow, which seems like a simple love song, but is, she says, about an induced miscarriage: "Then out of these roses she made a bed/A scarlet pillow for her head/She laid her down, no word she did speak/and then this maiden's heart it did break". "This went on and has been going on for centuries," Casey says.At the Temple Bar gig she wore a Roisin McAliskey T-shirt and drew a tepid response when she spoke in support of her. I explained my own response - I wanted justice for Roisin McAliskey, but didn't want my support interpreted as support for IRA violence. It was for this reason, we agreed, that Casey felt there was more interest in the case in Irish circles in New York than there was in Ireland."It's farcical how we don't talk about the North. We say `Wasn't it terrible what happened?' and then `What horse is running in Listowel?' I always remember Bernadette Devlin saying that less than learning to agree, we need to learn to disagree. We will never have a closer understanding of the struggle without understanding how people come to violence. I just can't pretend not to understand their position. Maybe if I was brought up in West Belfast . . . It's important to understand that mindset."She adds that if she thought the answer was to be found through IRA activity, she would be a "volunteer". Instead, she says, she would support the position of Kevin and Mary Whelan who do cross-community work, or Bernadette Devlin; she prefers to approach Northern politics through socialist or feminist issues - "It's unbelievable what women have to put up with there". "I've been a reluctant supporter of the peace process, which is not very fashionable," she says. "They haven't been very open as to what they're talking about. Everything is put in such vague terms so that no-one could be offended. They should say it openly and honestly, like the songs. I don't agree with not being optimistic, but I would also be critical, and a lot of times, in republican circles, you can't be seen to be critical. Sinn Fein are so isolated in the talks."The loyalist parties have not been as isolated, she says, because they have had more links with the unionists than Sinn Fein has had links with constitutional Nationalists. But she agrees that Protestants are frightened. A Lambeg drummer who stayed with her in New York explained to her "the fear in loyalist communities that they were losing any power they had".Does she think that British withdrawal is necessary for peace to come?"Yeah. At the end of the day. I think for us to move on in any way we need to sort this out. I think the unionists are also beginning to see that demographically, they're losing out. They must be trying to see what their position will be in 50 years' time."These openly stated opinions may be seen by some as narrowly nationalist; but there can be no argument about the pluralism of Casey's vision of traditional music. She describes an excessive attachment to "purity" as "xenophobic": "I have to have a Ring dialect because I come from Waterford, and I'm not even from Ring. I sing in my school Irish and I sing in English. I can understand why people are defensive about it, but it doesn't justify being a Nazi." She adds, however: "That fear and narrowmindedness come from a time when you couldn't sing an Irish song. It's a defensive position."Karan Casey performs with Robbie Overson tonight at the Roisin Dubh, Galway, tomorrow at Whelan's, Dublin, on Thursday at the Old Vic, Tramore and on Friday at the Lobby, Cork.