Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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9 5 25 20131126 25 As can be seen, the only piper named, and the first to appear in the accounts, is a ‘Mr. Mc- Donald’. This was doubtless the well known and comparatively well documented Irish bel- lows piper James McDonnell who first comes to notice in Cork in 1774 and who also per- formed for elite audiences in Scotland and London in the 1790s. 11 The honorific ‘Mr.’ is otherwise hardly ever used of musicians in the accounts; 12 McDonnell was obviously of a su- perior status. The fact that he is named and the high remuneration he received suggests that this engagement was a new and high-profile departure for the Conollys. It was presumably a success, ushering in half a decade when bel- lows pipers were featured at Castletown musi- cal events and especially at Christmas. While the accounts are unclear on the length of their engagements and the demands made on the pipers, as they are for Castletown musicians in general, the differing remunerations listed here indicate that several pipers of different status were engaged over the period. The half-guinea (11/4½) paid to a piper at Leinster Lodge, a hunting lodge of the Earls of Kildare near Athy, Co Kildare, was probably a standard fee for playing at a single night’s post-hunt dining and drinking. Travelling expenses are sometimes cited for visiting musicians playing at Castle- town; that none are cited for pipers may indi- cate that some were local. Sparse as the entries are, they add to our knowl- edge of the history of the bellows pipes in Ire- land. It would seem certain that the pipers were playing for the Conollys and their guests, not for their servants, and, from the way they are sin- gled out in the accounts, that they normally played solo rather than with other musicians. The accounts thus provide evidence that the pipes had become fashionable at the highest so- cial levels in Ireland by the 1780s, after they are known to have been enjoying increasing notice at gentry level in the 1760s and 1770s. 13 A reg- ular guest of the Conollys at Castletown in those same years was particularly appreciative of Irish piping: Charles Manners, 4th Duke of Rutland and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1784 until his death in 1787, a noted patron of the arts, knighted Denis O’Grady, a blind piper whose playing had pleased him. 14 In social terms, the bellows pipes had become fully acceptable; the musical implication must be that they had by the 1780s developed to a melodic and harmonic pitch that could satisfy a privileged audience ac- customed to listening to the best professional musicians that Ireland could provide. 15 The po- litical symbolism of the pipes as a distinctively Irish instrument would also have appealed to this audience, many of whom were in the early 1780s engaged in the Volunteer-supported ef- forts of Ireland’s Protestant ascendancy parlia- ment in Dublin to throw off the parliamentary Castletown House

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