A wavering, falsetto drunk in a garish shirt with a fat Shamrock brand cigar -complete with a large shamrock emblazoned across it - accosted me: "Bob Dylan is a goddamn Jewish Irish Prophet! Have a nice day, welcome to America!". As he spoke, an old man and woman in shamrock-printed plastic parkas huddled in the rain at the vast Miller stage waiting for Hal Roach: "Write it down" read their sodden placard, the instruction Roach gives his audience on delivery of yet another one-liner. One table of revellers sang Roddy McCorley and The Foggy Dew, the odd Sinn Fein T-shirt was to be seen, but it seemed enough and important for the Milwaukee Irish Fest of Irish music and culture to be a gathering of people of Irish identity; politics (or politicians?) were left at home. This Festival was like a church mission that satisfied many and varied needs. All hotel accommodation for 50 miles around was booked out, but Ed Ward modestly maintains that scale is not what Irish Fest is after: "We just want to be the best". Milwaukee hosts 10 major ethnic festivals annually but, of them all, its 17-year-old Irish Fest is most curious, for the city leans more to the Germanic and has only a small number of first generation Irish. With attorney Ed Ward as prime mover since 1981, Irish Fest is run on community spirit, a $1.25 million budget, some 2,000 volunteers, a board of 18 elected by 80 "co-ordinators" and a full-time director, Jane Anderson. Attendance at this year's event just last week was 108,000. Most of them had an Irish background and almost half were drawn from outside Wisconsin state. Irish Fest has something for everyone - ballads, comics, theatre, traditional music, sets and ceili dancing, Irish language and crafts merchandise shopping. Music is performed on 11 stages, there is a huge dance tent, a large theatre space and six-venue "cultural village". Over the Saturday and Sunday there were over 80 concerts daily, nine plays and 15 kids' events. From the launching "Gathering" on the Thursday evening, Irish Fest is a massive, well-ordered Irish entertainment machine, fuelled by variety, venue-hopping, sociability and constant eating and drinking. Since 1987 it has been augmented by a Summer school, "where the real culture gets passed on," says Curriculum director John Gleeson. This year there was a mini-Oireachtas with seannos song and dance and Irish language immersion courses. Altogether 600 students of all ages attended 55 different classes, two thirds of which dealt with music, song and dance.

"With quality musicians here from Ireland to play for the weekend, we make use of their skills to teach and inspire," says Gleeson. "Irish Fest becomes an important site for meeting - in drama as well as music - many mutually beneficial links are made."

Symbolic and iconic Irishness are in Irish Fest of course too, but not excessively so - one detected in the "leprechaun" festival logo, the "Paddy Bingo" and the like, a kind of self-mockery rather than idealism. Irish music authority Mick Moloney sees the event, bluntly, as "one of America's most prestigious events in the Irish music calendar, and a great celebration and sharing of cultural heritage". Flute-player Joanie Madden observes in it that "the Mid West is now taking over as the centre in traditional music."

This "Carnival of Irishness" indeed had everything this year. Taking the $2 chairlift ride the length of the grounds, one could be a bird's eye witness to a spectacular simultaneity of aspects of our own lives. A pipe band passing in emerald green kilts playing Scotland the Brave, flag bearers in white pants and green shirts carrying Irish provincial and county emblems, Tommy Makem signing his new book, the city's all-black cleaning crews disturbingly obvious yet almost invisible. A waterfall roar of conversation sparkled with laughter, animated conversation, eating, drinking, dancing on the spot to spill-over music, Hal Roach looking tired in a tuxedo, the 45-foot roped-down Macnas Gulliver sleeping to the music of the Templehouse ceili band, Aoife Clancy apologising for singing Don't get married girls, The Irish Rovers boiling an audience of 5,000 with The Unicorn, Cherish The Ladies fuelling Donny Golden's spectacular dragonfly green, silver, maroon and blue hard-shoe dancers. On the rock stage, blasting away into the lake, are Ronan Browne and James McNally playing tortured pipe-wails and scatty low-whistle riffs to a backing track of drum machine and electronics. All set in surreal relief by a moon framed in the gigantic, soaring, overhanging six lanes of silenced, concrete highway. In the cultural tent you could organise an "Irish Pride Visa Card" or Celtic filofax, do your family tree by computer and help restore a vandalised church. The bookstalls sold a bewildering array of genealogy and Celtophilia titles.

Top-class traditional acts included bands like Solas, Nomos, Trian, Moving Cloud and performers like Paddy O'Brien (accordion) John Carty (fiddle) and Larry Nugent (flute), Martin and Christine Dowling (fiddle and flute), Joe Derrane (accordion) and John Whelan (accordion). And at all the concerts, unremarked because they are always there, the obsessive, flitting progress of smitten, self-teaching, tiny three-to-six-year-old girls, dancing up and down in the aisles. Mark Howard's Trinity Irish Dancers fresh from Broadway were the spectacular reminder, too, that Riverdance didn't come from nowhere. Working to live fiddle, flute, pipes and bones music and real tunes, here was a breath-taking display by 100 mostly female dancers to 3,000 gathered in the Sunday's pouring rain. Tots in embroidered black with beige Stetsons in a Country Ceili routine, Three Sea Captains in fabulous costumes of purple, emerald and blue velvet, a music-less Celtic Thunder, wave after wave danced it out to Rakish Paddy and The High Reel. Spontaneous applause, squeals, cheers and whistles, tears of emotion: mesmerising, beguiling and compulsive, this was serious business brilliantly put across.

Top of the financial league, having reputedly secured a very large fee, however, was Dublin's Black family. In their first show they opened strongly with Mary acapella on Little Skillet Pot, sister Frances and brothers Shay, Michael and Martin added harmonies, Mary's band musicians - keyboard and piano accordion player Pat Crowley and guitar player Bill Stanley - developed music backing. This was a performance that mixed oil and water: the brothers' essential tough ballad delivery, Frances's high tremolo and pop-lyric preference, Mary's solid and wonderful vocals, laborious fiddle, guitar and mandolin on the music sets.

But essentially little audience feedback was generated. Not even a terrific A Woman's Heart rallied, and there was no response to an inserted snatch of No Woman No Cry, which underlined the packed crowd's age-group: these would have been more in the market for a hardy old perennials like Rose of Allendale.