The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora

Community and Conflict

David Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351542074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

For at least two centuries, and arguably much longer, Ireland has exerted an important influence on the development of the traditional, popular and art musics of other regions, and in particular those of Britain and the United States. During the past decade or so, the traditional musics of the so-called Celtic regions have become a focus of international interest. The phenomenal success of shows such as Riverdance (which appeared in 1995, spawned from a 1994 Eurovision Song Contest interval act) brought Irish music and dance to a global audience and played a part in the further commoditization of Irish culture, including traditional music. However, there has been until now, relatively little serious musicological study of the traditional music of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland remains a divided community in which traditional culture, in all its manifestations, is widely understood as a marker of religious affiliation and ethnic identity. Since the outbreak of the most recent 'troubles' around 1968, the borders between the communities have often been marked by music. For example, many in the Catholic, nationalist community, regard the music of Orange flute bands and Lambeg drums as a source of intimidation. Equally, many in the Protestant community have distanced themselves from Irish music as coming from a different ethnic tradition, and some have rejected tunes, styles and even instruments because of their association with the Catholic community and the Irish Republic. Of course, during the same period many other Protestants and Catholics have continued to perform in an apolitical context and often together, what in earlier times would simply have been regarded as folk or country music. With the increasing espousal of a discrete Ulster Scots tradition since the signing of the Belfast (or 'Good Friday') Agreement in 1998, the characteristics of the traditional music performed in Northern Ireland, and the place of Protestant musicians within popular Irish cult

Chapter 1
The Geographical, Historical and Social Construction of Northern Ireland

We’ve settled the question that rankles,

How everyone crosses the Boyne,

Hibernians live in the Shankill,

And the Orangemen march to Ardoyne.¹

Andrew Cummiskey, a member of the editorial board of the fictional Irish-American republican newspaper The Irish Eagle in George Henry Jessop’s late-nineteenth-century novel, Gerald Ffrench’s Friends, observes that ‘since Dermot MacMurragh [sic] – bad cess to him for that same – invited the English into Ireland, the counthry has nivir been quit of them’.² The Welsh-Norman Baron Richard fitzGilbert de Clare, better known as Strongbow, arrived with his troops in Ireland in 1170 on the instigation of Dermot MacMurrough the King of Leinster and captured the Norse town of Dublin, and for the following three-quarters of a millennium the island of Ireland remained in a more or less subservient position to its easterly neighbour. After 1921, direct United Kingdom control was restricted to the newly-created territory of Northern Ireland where a Protestant majority rendered its primary allegiance to the British Crown while most within the Catholic minority looked to the independent Irish state across its borders.

Northern Ireland (see Figure 1.1) was actually created as a political entity by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 from six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties – Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Londonderry and Armagh – and enclosed two-thirds of the historic province of Ulster.³ This has been, and remains, a contested space however, and at least three of the identifiers I have just used – Ulster, Northern Ireland and Londonderry – are culturally and politically loaded. Designations such as the North of the island of Ireland or the Six Counties may be used to refer to the same geographical location as Northern Ireland, but from different political and ideological perspectives.

In Ptolemy’s Geographia, a distillation of the cartographical information of his day, the second-century Greek scholar placed the island he called Ivernia (or Hibernia) on the extreme north-western periphery of the known world. Although Ptolemy indicated the territory we now know as Ireland through a single name, it is almost certainly inappropriate to imagine that its inhabitants held any shared sense of ethnic identity at that stage in its history. Like Albion, the name by which Ptolemy referred to Britain, Roman Iron Age Ireland was populated by a number of regionally-dispersed tribes. As archaeologist Simon James has remarked, in the period from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Middle Iron Age:

Figure 1.1 Map of Northern Ireland⁴

Most people, most of the time, probably had no conscious ‘ethnicity’ at all beyond their own kin-group because it was not needed. In the absence of any major external cultural Other, there was no reason to develop a sense of island-wide identity in either Britain or Ireland.⁵

Nevertheless, the cultural identity of what has been regarded as the autochthonous population of the whole of Ireland has increasingly been presented as ‘Celtic’ since Edward Lhuyd (or Llwyd), the Welsh scholar and second Keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, invoked the term at the beginning of the eighteenth century in his Archaeologia Britannica, in relation to the shared features of a group of languages.⁶ Lhuyd’s scholarship would be cited in the preface to the magazine of the republican United Irishmen, Bolg an tSolaír (1795), where Irish or Gaeilge is described as ‘the best preserved dialect of the Gauls and Celtiberians’ and the ‘mother tongue of all the languages in the West’. Thus an acquaintance with it was necessary ‘to every antiquary who would study the affinity of languages, or trace the migrations of the ancient races of mankind’.⁷

More recent findings from both archaeology and genetics have rendered problematic notions of Irish ethnicity that are premised on large-scale invasions of Ireland by Celts from mainland Europe to supplant the original inhabitants. John Collis, a leading scholar of the archaeology of the European Iron Age has observed that ‘the belief promulgated by most authors that Ireland somehow became “Celtic” in the third/second centuries BC is ... founded on virtually no evidence, or rather a lack of evidence’.⁸ McEvoy et al. consider the implications of the pattern of distribution of genetic markers and conclude that:

Whatseems clear is thatneither the mtDNA pattern nor that of theY-chromosome markers supports a substantially central European IronAge origin for most Celtic speakers – or former Celtic speakers – of the Atlantic facade. The affinities of the areas where Celtic languages are spoken, or were formerly spoken, are generally with other regions in the Atlantic zone, from northern Spain to northern Britain. Although some level of Iron Age immigration into Britain and Ireland could probably never be ruled out by the use of modern genetic data, these results point toward a distinctive Atlantic genetic heritage with roots in the processes at the end of the last Ice Age.⁹

A.T.Q. Stewart notes in his monograph The Narrow Ground that ‘the term “Celtic” is a linguistic one and cannot properly be related to race: the Gaels were anthropologically very mixed. Yet one still hears the Irish described as “a Celtic race”. The point is that the language became a unifying agent.’ While La Tène cultural artefacts have been found throughout Ireland and their presence has often been taken as proof of invasion and settlement by Celtic tribes from mainland Europe, evidence from archaeology and genetics increasingly seems to suggest that Celtic ethnicity in both Britain and Ireland may be a relatively modern construction and reflect a state of heart and mind, a conscious selection of identity as much as a condition of race.

Contemporary Irish Celtic identity has tended to be mediated both by the Irish language and by the Roman Catholic religion, despite the relative strength of Protestantism within the regions of Britain which are also popularly considered as Celtic (Highland – and for some Lowland – Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Cornwall) and the general decline in religious observation. In the bipolar model of ethnicity which has habitually been used to explain the conflict in Northern Ireland, aboriginal Catholic Gaelic-speaking Celts are pitted against planted Protestant Anglophone Anglo-Saxons. This is undoubtedly only a partial truth, for the history of the region involves complex processes of inward and outward migration as well as ‘plantation’ or colonization on both sides of the religious divide.

In postcolonial situations, primacy of occupancy (whether actual or assumed) is often used as a principal token of authenticity, and on this basis, Northern Irish Catholics might reasonably regard themselves as having the greater claim to indigeneity. A characteristic expression of this view was given to Robert John Buckley in Portadown in July 1893 by a Catholic Home Rule supporter:

We were a conquered people, and these settlements of Methodists, and Presbyterians, and Quakers, and all the tag-rag-and-bob-tail [sic] of dissent, were thrown into the country to hold it for England, and to act as spies on the real possessors of the land, in the interests of England. They were, and are, the English garrison. They have no part with the natives, the original sons of the soil.¹⁰

More recently, in a study of Irish traditional music, Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott rather casually assert that ‘Gaelic chieftains were descendents of the Celts, who entered Ireland sometime between 500–300 BCE’,¹¹ and ‘the political divisions between Protestants of English descent and Irish Catholics fuelled the struggle for power and control in Ireland’.¹²

Such a mind-set will inevitably tend to characterize the Protestant population in Ireland as a whole as an alien colony whose presence lacks moral and legal justification. A contrasting perspective, founded on a model of return, was advocated by Ian Adamson in his book The Cruithin: The Ancient Kindred which first published in 1974 at the height of the most recent round of ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. This examines an ethnic group called the Cruithin (the Q-Celtic version of Pretani/Pretannoi or Britanni) who are understood to have inhabited the eastern part of Ulster. Adamson portrays the Cruithin as having been largely extirpated by the Gaelic invaders, proposing ‘that the Irish Gaels suffered under later English domination is but one side of a coin which carries on the obverse the long cruel extermination of the population and culture of the Ancient Kindred of the Ulster People’.¹³ According to Adamson, some of the Cruithin migrated to the region of Galloway in South-West Scotland and over two hundred years from the late eighth century ‘occupied ... the whole area from the Solway to the Clyde’.

While the archaeological evidence of a Cruithin migration to Scotland may be rudimentary, it is generally accepted that during the second half of the first millennium a thalassocracy – a kingdom centred on the sea – called Dál Riada (or Dál Riata) traversed the coastal fringes of north-eastern Ireland and western Scotland.¹⁴ In his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Bede contended that Ireland was...