An Irishman's Diary

AS THE father of a female Irish dancer, I have for several years now tried to turn a blind eye to the use of artificial performance- enhancing substances by other competitors.

This is easier said than done. Those wigs are bloody-well enormous and there’s never any attempt to make them blend in with the heads of dancers using them. Even so, as far as I was concerned, this was a matter for others. If they thought that looking like prize poodles was a price worth paying for success, it was their business.

Now, however, the dreaded day has dawned when my daughter too is being encouraged to consider getting a head extension. The problem is that, already a dance veteran at the age of 12 and three-quarters, she seems to have reached one of those plateaus with which all athletes are familiar.

The trophies she used to cart home from feiseanna in barrow-loads have become scarcer of late. So have the numbers of her rivals still using their own hair in competition. If she wants to go to the next level, we are told, it may have to involve synthetic ringlets.

This is in keeping with the unofficial motto of competitive Irish dancing: “Altius, Citius, Crispius” (“Higher, Faster, Curlier”). And yet the prospect of my daughter having to wear one of those grotesqueries brings out my inner fundamentalist. At the mere mention of the W-word, I turn into Ian Paisley, circa 1970: “Never! Never! Never!” Is this reasonable? Probably not. Apart from anything else, I’m conscious that, because of a rare medical condition that causes me to have severe nose-bleeds when I get within half a mile of one, I don’t actually attend feiseanna myself. But I’ve seen enough to know that wigs are just the start.

There’s also the whole “céilí bling” phenomenon that also includes hideously-expensive (and sometimes just hideous) dresses, tiaras, and rhinestone earrings; not to mention the make-up and fake tans. Most of which things, I understand, are not encouraged. It’s just that they don’t seem to be discouraged either.

There is, I know, an argument that the wigs are pieces of equipment, designed for a practical end, like the sock glue competitors also use (seriously – hosiery slippage costs marks).

And there is no doubt that artificial ringlets, enhanced for maximum springiness, do accentuate a dancer’s performance. At rest, as suggested earlier, a wig-wearer may resemble a poodle. But in action, the ringlets come into their dynamic own: flying around at all angles like the ears of a cocker spaniel leaping at full speed through a hedge.

The equipment defence could also, I suppose, be made for the dresses, and the mini-chandeliers that some female performers have swinging from their ear lobes.

And yet, I also notice – albeit with my untrained male eye – that boy dancers do not use any such accessories. You don’t see many boys at feiseanna, full stop. Yet those who do dance can somehow reach very high levels of performance, world titles included, without moving a hair.

It’s traditional to blame America, now the home of Irish dancing, for all the excesses, with some justification. Nevertheless – and excuse me while I put my neck on a block here – an even larger sub-group of humanity may also need to have a hard look at itself. Yes, mammies of the world, I mean you.

Of course, it’s a generalisation to say that all Feis mothers are mad. I know several myself who seem perfectly sound of mind. Even so, I suspect that prolonged exposure to the same endlessly repeated bursts of diddly-eye music, played perfunctorily in echoey parish halls, does cause many women to become at least slightly unhinged. Only this can explain the get-ups they let their daughters out in.

By coincidence, this week sees the release of a documentary called Jig, filmed at the World Irish Dancing Championships in Dublin earlier this year. It’s a BBC Scotland production, interestingly, itself a tribute to Irish dancing’s global dominance.

The Scots have their own closely-related dance form, of course, but it has nothing like the reach of the Irish version. In a way, their contrasting fortunes are the reverse of what happened to the countries’ whiskey industries.

Anyway, I haven’t seen the film yet, only a trailer. Which, on the one hand, makes the competition look very exciting. But which also suggests that madness is a running theme.

“These people are insane,” says one woman. Another speaks of “dancing with a broken foot”. Then there’s a man – yes! – who calls himself “Irish” (in an American accent), and yet explains that he used to have no idea “this whole world existed”.

Then he and his family became infected. “You get drawn into it,” he says with a resigned smile. “You buy the dress. You get the wig. You go to Ireland.” That last bit of the quotation I find encouraging, suggesting as it does that we on this side of the Atlantic may still have some influence, however small, on the way Irish dancing is performed. Which is why I’m appealing to all this island’s dance mothers – those who haven’t yet lost their wits yet – to use that influence, while they can, and organise.

A public meeting of Feis mammies should be called, at which the first item on the agenda (as always) would be the split. The resulting breakaway movement could perhaps be called the Campaign for Natural Dance (CND) But whatever it’s called, I promise, my daughter will be among the first to join. Act now, mammies, please! I’d do it myself if it weren’t for the medical condition.