The Fleadh matters to Cavan – and to accordion player Martin Donohue in particular, writes Michael Harding
I MET A big hairy man in Cavan on Saturday in the Farnham Arms Hotel, while I was eating my dinner. He was bald on top, but the back and sides of his cranium sprouted long brown locks that mixed with his big furry whiskers to make him look like nothing else on earth.
There’s only one Martin Donohue; accordion player, raconteur, and chair of the events committee of the Fleadh Cheoil 2010. He gazed at me through tiny spectacles and declared that the Fleadh this week “will be the biggest traditional music festival in the world. We’re expecting over 200,000 throughout the week; 70,000 next Saturday alone. There’s park and ride areas established at all entrances to the town. The equestrian centre has 1,700 tents. And everyone will be fed and watered.”
The Fleadh matters to Cavan, because Brian Galligan, a local doctor, was a founding member of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, and he brought the All-Ireland Fleadh to Cavan in 1954.
I remember Galligan playing at concerts, with his son Bernard; the two playing wild jigs that I envied, because I grew up in the suburbs, a melancholic place of jaded manners and little spontaneity.
I was too young to remember the great Fleadh of ‘54, when people cycled from all over the county and dumped their bicycles in high heaps on the outskirts of the town, and then queued at the Town Hall to witness the Kilfenora Céilí Band outplay the rest of the world.
To say Martin Donohue is helping to organise a Fleadh would be putting it mildly. Five years ago he walked up to the county manager and issued a simple ultimatum. “We’re going to bring the All-Ireland Fleadh back to Cavan,” he declared. The pair hadn’t been formally introduced, but the manager instantly knew what he was dealing with.
Martin Donohue’s parents came from the country, and they made a home on the Fair Green, a beautiful hill overlooking the town, also known as the Half-Acre; a name that people in suburbia once whispered, because of its connotations of poverty. “But I love the place,” said Donohue, “and I’m proud of it.” On Saturday afternoon the phones were buzzing in the Courthouse, and 22 separate committees were finalising the last details, and Cavan seemed to be on the brink of a revolution.
There were sculptures everywhere – giants outside the Kilmore Hotel, a huge fiddle rising out of the ground at a roundabout, and canopies of steel and translucent fibreglass over Main Street, to protect the buskers and street musicians from the weather. “People are hungry for something like this,” Donohue said. “It’s a community celebration. We’re all in the recession together. Even Seán Quinn gave us €100,000, and him on his knees! And the army base is accommodating set dancers. And Paul Brady is coming. And I got eight pianos, in tune, and put them in hotels, because people love a piano at night.”
The real Cavan was always exuberant but it was just hard to find, when I was young; it was always masked by caricatures invented by comedians on television, or pushed out of sight by the local middle-classes, who thought traditional music was a tin whistle player in a straw hat, roaming the back alleys on rainy nights after closing time.
As a child I got faint intimations of Cavan’s real musical heritage, like when Seamus Fay lilted reels and jigs as he was driving the bus into town. And I was seduced early, by the voices of old townies whose talk always seemed to be driven by cadences that were as tight as the notes in a hornpipe. The Church, too, kept a tight lid on music.
And poets that roved the streets with excessive exuberance were sneered at from behind closed curtains and the Half-Acre was a zone to be feared.
But this week changes all that. The passion and music and wit of ordinary folk has blossomed yet again, in an Ireland that is at last forming into something akin to a republic. And artists like Martin Donohue are the new revolutionaries. He has torn up the old image of Cavan, and he’s determined that this week the town is going to surprise the nation with one collective song of the soul.
On the final night of the Fleadh every Cavan musician will gather for one last session, in that old Town Hall, which has been a haven of music and other artistic endeavour in Cavan for almost a century.
“And you can expect a surge in the population,” Donohue joked. “In ‘54 a lot of boys and girls were carrying on, on the bonnets of cars! That was a scandal! But I suppose we can expect a lot of Fleadh babies again next spring!”
