No matter which circles you move in in Dublin's Smithfield these days, there's a lot of heated topics of conversation: the scandalously run-down streets, the latest judgment in the Children's Court, judicial resignations, the construction business, and now, - thanks to a brave new development in the old market square - traditional Irish music.
Property developer Terry Devey's new Chief O Neill's hotel is named after the Irish turn-of-the-century Chicago cop and music collector (most famous for his 1001 Dance Tunes of Ireland). Developed ahead of the projected new 365m Civic Square and tourist village in Smithfield, Devey's hotel is a stab at the quality end of the market, with the place radically themed around the craft and anarchy of Irish traditional music.
Within the hotel, Devey has also bankrolled a state-of-the-art £35 million interpretative centre of Irish traditional music, called Ceol. Designed by the UK-based Event company (who produced the 1798 Centre in Enniscorthy) with software produced in Dublin, it's a space-age, labyrinthine display which, for all its technology, maintains an exciting "warts and all" authenticity.
Don't expect to hare through Ceol in 20 minutes. It's an exhaustive crash course in traditional music: its history, instrumentation, regional styles and cultural context; with a mix of material from RTE archives and new recordings, in digital audio-video, of many of the music's chief exponents.
The initial impact is theatrical: the life-size bronze-coated epoxy resin sculptures of musicians; the video projections and plexi-glass photo gallery; the interactive touch-screen consoles in chrome booths; the children's room with its floor-panel sensors (you can walk out a tune on sampled uilleann pipe or accordion) and robotic hands demonstrating a wooden flute.
There is an odd little story-telling house; and a very weird song room, which holds a circle of futuristic metal figures with televisions for heads, each hosting the face of a singer or listener in a sean nos house gathering.
There's a set dance room, and beside it an area where you can trigger a ceili tune, like the High Caul Cap, and match your steps in the mirror against a video wall of shuffling experts. Further on, there's an encomium to collectors from Bunting to the late Breandan Breathnach; and a debating wall with, again, disembodied video heads, theorising back-and-forth between traditionalists such as Sean Potts and more progressive forces such as Donal Lunny, Micheal O Suilleabhain and Bill Whelan.
But the centrepiece is the 180-degree, wide-screen cinema/auditorium. Using a unique Norwegian system of five cameras, it shows a wraparound panoramic video which cuts from dizzying aerial sweeps of the landscape, to the Tulla Ceili band belting away in the tiny Pepper's Bar in Feakle, a Dervish session in Shoot the Crows in Sligo, or Pat Kilduff's gob-music in the snug in Westmeath.
After which you are disgorged, blinking, into the craft-shop where, presumably, you shop simply to reorient yourself. And whatever about the woolly jumpers and caps, there's a seriously hardcore rack of traditional CDs here. If you're a guest, you can borrow them from the CD library at reception, and play them on the midi system in your room. There's even a CD sampler to welcome you while you unpack, with music from Altan, Ceoltoiri Chualann, sean nos singer Sean 'ac Dhonncha and Solas.
For a tourist, I imagine it might be difficult to escape the hotel at all, what with the lunchtime/evening sessions in the huge bar and restaurant area, and the evening concerts in the 150-seater Ceol auditorium and the smaller White Room downstairs.
The idea came to Devey two years ago, after strolling through the high-diddle Paddy-whackery of Temple Bar. He immediately assembled a formidable team of elders from the tradition: former Chieftain and Piobairi Uileann Chairman, Sean Potts; Nicholas Carolan of the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA); music historian and Comhaltas man, Mick O'Connor; Terry Moylan of Brooke's Academy; Dublin singer Aintine O Farrachain; and RTE producer (for 17 years) of The Long Note, Harry Bradshaw.
With Bradshaw now installed as A&R manager, the place has been alive with gigs, with plenty more high-profile ones to come. The acoustically-perfect auditorium has already seen banjo-players John Carty and Gerry O'Connor, Donegal fiddlers like Altan's Mairead ni Mhaonaigh, Martin McGinley and Peter Campbell, and a high-calibre Irish-American gig organised by the Milwaukee Irish Fest people, with Liz Carroll, Mick Moloney, John Williams and Jerry O'Sullivan.
There will be no formal gigs tonight, but the main bar, which has been pulsing with music since the hotel opened nine days ago, will have a session hosted by Kerry singer and multi-instrumentalist Sean Garvey - a man more often associated with the Cobblestone pub at the top of the square. The Dublin Folk Club has taken over the White Room downstairs for Saturday nights. Last week they kicked off with piper Gay McKeown, the mourn-some dogyodel of the Rough Deal string band, and Mick Hanly, while tomorrow night they have the honour of hosting both Triona and Maighread ni Dhomhnaill. Also in the bar tomorrow night and Sunday lunchtime and afternoon are the incendiary Irish dancers Lisa Clarke and Patrick McHugh, in front of a young session band, Dun Dyra, which includes Teresa O Grady on banjo and her brother Ciaran O Grady on concertina (both from Luton), Freda Hatton on harp, Fergal O'Neill on flute and traditional song from Edel Vaughan.
Meanwhile, between now and September, the White Room also hosts an exhibition from Carolan's ITMA, The Northern Fiddler, a sympathetic ethnographic project on many longgone Donegal/Tyrone fiddlers, carried out in the mid 1970s by Eamonn O'Doherty and Allen Feldman. Opening the show last Sunday, Arts Council officer, Dermot McLaughlin brought the room to life with a fine version of the Low Highland he learnt from the late Con Cassidy.
For all the vexed issue of cultural tourism, this goes way beyond tokenism. The hotel is infra-structurally kitted out as a recording studio, with a satellite connection for broadcasting or ISDN link-ups. There are plans for a record label, educational CD-ROMs and, down the line, a big open-air trad festival in the Civic Square, which goes onsite in May.
Devey is an unusually down-to-earth character who passionately believes it is possible to be "commercial without being crass". He is confident of hauling back his investment through room occupancy, the bar and the "traditional Irish food".
The hotel is just one part of Devey's development of 2.4 acres of the old Distillery site into a pedestrianised area with 224 apartments (already snapped up and occupied), a new retail area, an Irish bar/Thai restaurant, and even the whiskey museum, which Devey built and sold back to Jamesons.
It will take time to settle. Chief O Neill's is an extraordinary addition to the landscape of Irish traditional music, and it will have a radical effect on the old markets area, with its quality session pubs like the Cobblestone, or Noone's of nearby Stoneybatter. With its technological potential, and its international links, it fetches up a dizzying prospect of the music, caught like a rabbit in the headlamps of the next century.
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