You couldn't say that joining the Hall of Fame has gone to the head of Tony MacMahon. 'Upset and angry', he's determined to stick to more important issues, he tells Siobhán Long.

'There's no bog hole too deep for all the accordions in Ireland," he declares with the passion of the tortured soul that he is. Tony MacMahon has rubbed more people up the wrong way, both musicians and fans, than there are verbal slings and arrows in the arsenal of Michael O'Leary, the Ryanair boss. When he won this year's TG4 Hall Of Fame award, MacMahon declared that his "reaction to this reward was one of upset and a certain degree of anger" and said that awards "pander to the cult of personality".

And yet MacMahon is riven by contradiction, wracked by a guilt not so much Catholic as distinctly Irish. For years he was a broadcaster with RTÉ, hosting the seminal television series The Pure Drop for seven seasons and, more briefly, the radio series The Long Note, for which he lured the best traditional musicians, from all corners of the country, towards a microphone that many of them would have feared or loathed.

Those experiences, combined with the numerous curve balls he has hurled at the establishment, have served him both ill and well, because MacMahon's reputation is that of the articulate and conscientious objector, and he still produces some of the most sublime, soulful music in the tradition.

"Traditional music is certainly more widely heard now than it ever was," he says, "but it worries me that it can be widely heard in, for example, Japan, but traditional Japanese music is not widely heard here. Is there a colonisation involved? Is there a wiping out of indigenous culture?

"I spent a month touring Japan two years ago, and I discovered great welcome and passionate listening among Japanese audiences, but when I tried to talk to them about the status of their own traditional music, and why I wasn't hearing it, I came up against a silence, as if their traditional music had gone out of fashion."

He says: "It's the American monoculture which is driving this. When you see Japanese people playing baseball, and beautiful Japanese people grossly overweight from eating American junk food, you can't ignore it. After the war, as happened in Germany, Japanese traditional music went into retreat.

"America has become an empire of culturally poisonous proportions, and I have seen the tentacles of monoculture in Thailand, in Ireland and in virtually every country in which I've travelled."

Having played in a triumphant concert alongside the Kronos Quartet last September, in which MacMahon revelled in the sublime cross-fertilisation of slow airs such as An Buachaillín Bán and Port Na bPúcaí, scaffolded by the arch and jagged arrangements of the San Franciscan quartet, he's proven once again that he's not in the business of fixing traditional music in aspic.

Neither, though, is he happy with the health of the music. Just as Patrick Kavanagh noted that "through a chink too wide / there comes in no wonder", MacMahon says the explosion of live and recorded traditional music doesn't necessarily mean that all of what we hear is worthy of our attention.

"I don't believe that the essence of the music is generally intact and being transmitted successfully," he declares with customary frankness. "I find the world of traditional Irish music of today boring. There are several wonderful players who I love to hear, but in general terms I find it bland and lacking in passion. It's too much to do with individuals and reputations and matters of popularity."

This is, he says, a symptom of a wider problem. "There's a blandness that's entered modern life. I have to go to Connemara to hear the sean-nós to get myself excited about music these days. I'm not a snob, but it's simply my experience of music that I've seen us lose so much.

"Players of the calibre of Seamus Ennis, Tommy Potts, Joe Cooley and John Kelly - their passing literally amputated parts of my musical soul. The joy I had in the life of their music has been greatly diminished. I was never the same after they died, and yet of course I know that that's life and that's the way it has to be. So I'm very nihilistic about music."

Despite MacMahon's cult-like status, he dismisses any suggestion that he might have taken the place of some of his heroes in the next generation's eyes.

"I find it very hard to accept my own music," he says. "In Ennis it was referred to as tinkers' music. I was always aware that there was a distance between the merchant classes and the likes of me, whose people came from the country. I suppose I never got out from the shame of having an instrument in my hand as I walked the streets of Ennis."

This classic guilt complex, so beloved of our national psyche, doesn't become MacMahon. His keen intellect should surely overwhelm such primal instincts, and yet he admits to carrying around so much baggage from his youth that his demeanour is unmistakably that of the walking wounded.

"I was educated by the Taliban," he says, referring to the Christian Brothers, "and fear was driven into my life by the priests. Terror, fear and shame was the language they spoke, and if a young person is taught to be afraid and nervous and guilty, that is a strike against performance and against music. It took me a long time to get out from under that fear, and it's really only recently that I've begun to play with any pleasure."

Ultimately, MacMahon says, if music can be reinvigorated by passion and heart its longevity will be guaranteed. Technical proficiency and skill might abound these days, he acknowledges, but without heart a player might as well be whistling in the wind.

"Who was it that said music is the language of passion?" he smiles. "If music doesn't make that little part of your back crawl or give you that intense thrill of knowing that you're alive in the world for an instant in time, then it's wasted."

Pursuit of a career in music can often be the undoing of the heartiest of musicians, he says. "I think anybody who would set about making a living as a traditional musician would need to be partly out of their mind. When you have to perform three or four nights a week it's inevitable that you'll get bored, and if that happens you cannot do justice to the music.

"You might be able to play the notes well, but there will be no colour, no passion, no edge, no contact with the other human being listening to you, no chance to thrill the listener. That's the price you pay for making a living from music, whether traditional or any other kind. I've seen many players who've become anaesthetised by a career in music."

Tony MacMahon will be presented with his Hall of Fame award at the Gradam Ceoil TG4 Awards, at University Concert Hall, Limerick, on Sunday. Tickets from 061-331549 and www.uch.ie