Let Dermot Bolger make it clear at the start: the atmosphere is so special and intimate at the Seamus Ennis cottage in Naul, Co Dublin, that he is telling you about it only on condition you keep it a secret.
ailI never met Seamus Ennis, who spent the last decade of his life in a mobile home in the tiny village of Naul, but I heard a lot about him because he was born in my native Finglas when Finglas village was still only the size that Naul is today.
As a boy with an artistic bent growing up in Finglas, there were not many local figures that I could look to for inspiration. But what was special about Ennis - born two streets from the house where my mother gave birth to me - was that he had a slight whiff of sulphur about him. Perhaps he rubbed some people up wrong by not suffering fools gladly, perhaps the motion of a master uilleann piper seemed incongruous in a bustling suburb, or perhaps back the nation had an inferiority complex about Irish music. But it is hard not to think that he did not always receive his due recognition in his lifetime.
Still I think he would have liked the fact that one of Finglas's main streets has, by popular local acclaim, been renamed Seamus Ennis Road. He would have been even more pleased at the notion of a small, thatched cottage being restored in his name in that remote, most northerly Co Dublin village to which he retreated late in life. And he would have been especially pleased at the success of Scoil Sheamuis Ennis, the Fingal festival of traditional music celebrating his life, which runs all next week in Naul and Ballyboughal. Crammed with recitals, workshops and sessions (one highlight being the fiddle master class that Kevin Burke will come from America to give), this festival is in its tenth year and the Ennis cottage - now permanently open with a café - grew out of its success.
Ennis never lived in this cottage himself, but his caravan was parked behind it, close to the land his family once owned. He must surely often have visited the cottage where the Naul Fife and Drum Band used to practise around the time of his birth. It was a house of music where the young Sinead Flanagan often danced at Gaelic League parties. Sinead rejected the attentions of one young Gaelic league member who went on to write Juno and the Paycock. Instead she chose a tall mathematics teacher and became known as Bean de Valera. When her spurned suitor went on to write Shadow of a Gunman he based the character of Maguire on Michael Ó Maoláin, a travelling Irish teacher who gave classes in the Naul cottage.
Although Seamus Ennis was best known as a piper, he devoted decades of strenuous travel to recording music for the Folk Lore Commission, the BBC and RTÉ. Without collectors like him, not only would a whole generation of musicians have died out without leaving any record, but a vast array of songs would have died with them. Indeed, in his sometimes troubled final years, Ennis used to complain to one doctor who nursed him back to health that the man wasn't trying to save him, he was only anxious to save the songs.
When writing Father's Music (the only novel about traditional music, drug trafficking and adultery) I listened to many of the field recordings he made in remote kitchens with no electricity where the primitive recording equipment had to be powered by the battery of a car left running in the yard.
Perhaps that is what makes the Seamus Ennis Centre in Naul magical. Almost every Irish traditional musician of note has gone there at some time to play in that kitchen which is so like the environment where Ennis recorded many musicians (though larger events are held in the hall behind the cottage). There is little sense of being at a concert; it is more like a gathering of friends. A lamp is in the window as dusk settles over the great square outside where, beneath an old tree, a life-size sculpture of Ennis sits playing his pipes. Children love to put their hands over his and marvel at how long his fingers were (although his father's were longer still).
Naul lies in an unspoiled part of north Co Dublin, mid-way between Balbriggan and Ashbourne. It can be reached from the newly opened stretch of the M1 motorway. But a marvellous road runs out past the side of the airport, over the bridge at Knocksedan and on through the village of Ballyboughal, where the footsore Wexford rebels in 1798 made their final stand; about 250 of them were buried in a mass grave there.
When you reach the Naul the road falls down a steep hill and at the end you will see the tree, the sculpture and the lamp burning in the Ennis cottage. Scoil Sheamuis Ennis will be fantastic, but events go on all the time without receiving much publicity outside the area. You can phone 01-8020898 for information or a newsletter, or receive e-mail updates from seamusenniscentre@eircom.net.
The one thing you mustn't do is tell anyone. After attending an event there you will want to keep the secret to yourself.