With 150,000 visitors, 10,000 performers and 131 competitions, the Fleadh Cheoil is the Olympics of Irish music. This week it returns to Co Donegal for the first time in 25 years, writes Martin McGinley
The descent into the village of Cashel in Glencolmcille presents one of the most beautiful vistas in Ireland, as the patchwork of green fields and mountain heather gives way to beaches and rocks pounded by Atlantic breakers.
At the bottom of the hill, at the crossroads, Biddy's looks as welcoming as ever, although a light drizzle means that the fiddle sessions haven't spilled out of the pub onto the road this Thursday afternoon.
Fiddle Week brings more than a hundred fiddlers, masters and students, to this tiny village of three pubs at the tip of southwest Donegal. Visitors, too, from all arts and parts. It's all about a unique strain of traditional music, a fiddle style and repertoire saved by the very isolation of places like Cashel and the inspirational genius of the Donegal masters.
In we go to the front bar, scene of so many unforgettable sessions down the years. If anywhere is the cradle of Donegal fiddle playing, this is it. Or maybe the Highlands or the Glen Tavern in Glenties. But there's hardly a sound, and not a fiddle to be seen.
Is this it? Has Donegal lost its successors to Neilly Boyle from Dungloe, the man who learnt his wild music from two fairy fiddlers; Frank Cassidy, the shy Teelin genius who famously played with his back to the audience; and the traveller John Doherty, the prince of them all? Turns out there's no need to be worried. This is not a silence, merely a lull, and it marks not the waning of a great tradition but the recent conclusion of a marathon 27-hour session, led by another Donegal master, Danny Meehan, a Mountcharles man living a lifetime in London.
"One of the best ever," is the verdict.
A peek into the lounge confirms that all is well. Vincent Campbell of Meenahalla, Glenties, inheritor of the Doherty legacy, is there, with his brother Jimmy and nephew Peter, their fiddles taking a short break.
Fiddle Week is a paean and a pilgrimage, a meeting place pulling in a remarkable cross-section of people, both musicians and followers of the art.
It isn't too long before some familiar faces start drifting back into Biddy's - among them the former Altan man Paul O'Shaughnessy from Dublin; the well-known scientist, fiddler and wit Professor Dermie Diamond from Dublin City University; and the Irish scholar, fiddler, flute-player, accordionist and piper Maurice Bradley, from Sixtowns in Co Derry.
Soon the music's thumping off the walls. All is well.
OVER IN LETTERKENNY, things aren't quite so relaxed.
"First thing when I get up in the morning I'm thinking of the fleadh. Last thing before I go to sleep I'm thinking of things I have to do. Since the end of June I've been waking up at four or five in the morning, and not able to go back to sleep. That's the fleadh!" Paddy Tunney is the chairman of the committee in Letterkenny organising this year's Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the All-Ireland, on behalf of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. They're assisted by 14 subcommittees, with more than 100 local volunteers. For this is a mammoth task, the Olympics of Irish music.
Around 600 young performers and their families have already arrived for the week-long workshops, Scoil Éigse, aimed at developing the next generation of exceptional players and singers.
After that, the deluge. More than 150,000 people are expected to stream into Letterkenny for the Fleadh weekend, starting on Friday evening. There are 131 different competitions in 22 venues, some 4,000 competitors and maybe 10,000 performers in town altogether, from harpists to tabla players to clowns.
There will be more than 200 volunteers working flat out. Two medical centres going for the three days. Mounted gardai. Red Cross, Order of Malta and Civil Defence personnel to beat the band.
For Paddy and so many of those involved, it's a labour of love, even a family duty. Paddy is a fiddler and singer, the son of one of the greatest traditional singers of them all, the late Paddy Tunney from Mulleek in Co Fermanagh, who was a long-time resident of Letterkenny.
Officially, the centrepiece of the All-Ireland is the competitions, which take place on Saturday and Sunday and draw capacity crowds. For many, though, the public face of the Fleadh is the music sessions which take place in every pub, hotel, cafe, doorway, alleyway and tent throughout the weekend.
The Fleadh is a touchstone, its phenomenal growth seen as a sign that another generation is doing its job. The music lives on. And for the first time in 25 years, it's back in Donegal, back in Ulster.
THE NEWS FROM Glencolmcille is also good. It seems that at one stage during that already-famous 27-hour music session, Danny Meehan went up to the bar in Biddy's and turned to friend and fellow fiddler Jimmy Campbell, from Glenties.
"Jimmy," he said, "did you ever think we would see this day? Young fiddlers as good as any in our generation, and in numbers we could never have hoped for. Our job was to be the wee bridge to allow this to happen." Anxiety about the future of traditional music is nothing new. After all, we're living in an age of short attention spans, video games, texting and the world wide web. How much more difficult to keep a regional fiddle style alive, when iPods bring the music of the world into a small box? Facing into the challenge is Cairdeas na bhFidleiri, the "friends of the fiddlers" in Donegal. They've been holding the Fiddle Week since 1986. They've also hosted a weekend get-together in Glenties since 1983, and organise other events and classes.
Caoimhin MacAoidh, who wrote Between the Jigs and the Reels, a book on Donegal fiddling, has been involved from the beginning.
"It's about giving new generations the chance to meet the likes of James Byrne, Vincent Campbell and Danny Meehan, the chance to shake hands with them, have a laugh with them and learn from them. That's how the genius is passed on." In Glen this year, the signs of success are to be seen all round in players barely out of their teens: Aoife McLaughlin playing two of Con Cassidy's waltzes with such precision and clarity in the Raidió Na Gaeltachta truck at Biddy's gable; Derek McGinley's beautiful slow air, delivered with a maturity beyond his years in a late-night session; another young player, Aidan O'Donnell from Bruckless, following with a couple of fine tunes.
THE DONEGAL MUSIC tradition reaches back a couple of hundred years with ease.
On September 4th, 1835, the scholar John O'Donovan was moved at the sight of Eamon McSweeney, chieftain of a once-great clan, walking across a beach near Downings, with an ass and a few dogs "the only badge of his nobility".
O'Donovan was helping the military with the Ordnance Survey in Donegal. He visited the hut where the McSweeney family were staying.
"My eyes were astonished at the sight of the two able-bodied young men (with thighs as thick as two fat bullocks) playing with deafening sound, the one upon the bagpipes, the other upon the fiddle." One of the young men was most likely Turlough, later to gain fame as the "Donegal Piper" at the World Fair in Chicago in 1893. He died as recently as 1916.
The playwright Brian Friel has spoken of the pathos and irony of this meeting between the dispossessed chieftain Eamon McSweeney and the state official O'Donovan, "the tattered old and efficient new".
Back in Letterkenny in 2005, there are new clothes for old traditions. Michael Gallagher's menswear store is issuing dress suits for the first function of Fleadh week, Monday's banquet for the new "Ard Ollamh" in the Radisson SAS hotel.
The days of the Chief Bard are back. This year's incumbent is Charlie Lennon, noted musician and composer, and holder of a doctorate in nuclear physics.
The Fleadh machine is running towards full power. Accommodation is booked for miles around. The All-Ireland Fleadh is expected to bring €25m in revenue to the area, and Paddy Tunney hopes it will stimulate more interest locally in traditional music.
The backdrop is also encouraging - an Arts Council allocation of €3 million to the traditional arts in 2006, and €500,000 this year from the government. Yet another Donegal fiddler, Liz Doherty, is centrally involved as the Council's traditional arts specialist.
IN DONEGAL, AS elsewhere, the lore is that music is a bridge between the worlds temporal and spiritual. If so, the spirits of Eamon and Turlough McSweeney - and many more - will be flitting merrily through the sessions in the pubs and streets of Letterkenny this weekend.
Perhaps the survivors of that epic session in Fiddle Week might play McSweeney's Reel in celebration of it all - if they have the energy.
The Fleadh runs from Aug 21-28. Details from www.fleadh2005.com