Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann is one of Europe’s biggest music festivals and in her new book, Méabh Ní Fhuartháin explores its origins and early years. Musician Méabh who is Head of Irish Studies at the University of Galway tells JUDY MURPHY how researching and writing this book brought her back to her roots.

“I love stories and I love listening to stories,” says Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, who also happens to  be able to tell a good yarn.

One of Méabh’s other passions is music and she has gone back to her traditional roots to tell the story of the early years of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in her book, Heading to the Fleadh: Festival, cultural revival and Irish traditional music, 1951-1969, published by Cork University Press.

“I’m kind of fascinated by the Fleadh. It’s one of the biggest music festivals of any genre in Europe. Glastonbury is only in the ha’penny place compared to it,” says this “accidental academic” about the annual celebration that is Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann.

Méabh, “a competent but not brilliant musician”, wanted to explore how the Fleadh became so central to Irish society, and the result is this book about its origins and early years.

The ethnomusicologist and Head of Irish Studies at the University of Galway, where she specialises in Irish Music and Dance Studies, explains that much of the material for the book was gathered while she was researching her PhD, which focused on Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Founded in 1951, Comhaltas is the organisation responsible for establishing the Fleadh, which was first held in Mullingar in 1951. And while much has changed in Ireland since then, Comhaltas remains at the helm of this annual event.

The popularity of traditional music in current times owes a great deal to Comhaltas, which was set up when Ireland was a very different country. In the 1950s, the economy was struggling, emigration was at record levels and external cultural influences were making their presence felt. This all had an impact on the music and singing tradition.

Into that mix came a group of musicians and Irish language enthusiasts who decided to hold a Fleadh and to locate it in Mullingar, on the basis of the town’s musical strength and its central location. That was in 1951, and the organisation that hosted the Fleadh – although it had no name at the time – was Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.

Méabh gives context to that first Fleadh and to Comhaltas, and paints a fascinating picture of the festival’s evolution in its early years, with competitions and other events being added, removed or adapted until the celebration came to more closely resemble today’s Fleadh.

For her day job, she writes extensively about music but it’s mostly contemporary, focusing on people like Joe Dolan and the Nolans, she says.

This book, which is “a coming back to my roots”, has been a  true labour of love.

“It was astounding to me that there was no scholarly work about Comhaltas or the Fleadh when you think of its importance to Irish music.”

Méabh’s own grá for music started in childhood, growing up in a large, busy family in East Waterford, an area where “there was very little traditional music” and where Comhaltas didn’t have a strong presence.

However, her parents were interested in Irish music and when she expressed an interest in learning, they encouraged her. Méabh’s mother ferried her to classical piano lessons, while her father “determined I would play traditional music”, she recalls, laughing. He did that by bringing her to neighbour, Dan Mulcahy’s house to learn the flute, something she has great memories of to this day.

But while the Fleadh later came to be a source of fascination to her, Méabh rarely competed at fleadhanna in her youth.

“I could only compete solo, because there weren’t enough people playing music in our area for group competitions,” she explains. “And I was terrified doing solo.”

After secondary school, she went to UCC, studying Irish and music. At the time, in the late 1980s, UCC’s music department was run by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin who later went on to set up the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in UL.

“I was in that stable and it was so exciting to be there,” says Méabh of her experience in UCC, one of group who “were deeply invested in traditional music, in thinking about it and not just playing it”.

They’ve remained close and several gathered last year for a commemorative concert for Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, who died in 2018.

“They were all much better musicians than me,” says Méabh, mentioning people like Mel Mercier, a mature student who went on to forge a reputation as a percussionist and composer, as well as an academic.

“There was a great energy,” she says of that time in UCC, adding that, for her, the experience was “probably more a musical rather than intellectual awakening”.

Although Méabh had no great career plan after UCC, she ended up going to Boston College and followed that with further post-grad studies at the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island, focusing on ethno-musicology.

Pictured: Dr Méabh Ní Fhuartháin’s early love of music was nurtured by her parents in her native Waterford. PHOTO: JOE O’ SHAUGHNESSY.