Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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9 2 22 20130417 18 ~ REVIEW ~ THE OTHERWORLD Joe Crane S OMEWHERE DEEP in the dark lair of the departed Celtic Tiger there is a part of Ireland that seems to have always been with us, but perhaps we didn’t understand it. It is a world of Holy Wells, Fairy Bushes, Wart Stones, Mermaids and An Sí who figure every- where as Fairies straying, piping and fiddling. The old people talked of them with a reverence and wariness until recent times out in the coun- try areas of Ireland, and indeed in the parts of the cities that have spread their tentacles of housing estates into the land that until recently, was very much what they use to call ‘out in the Páirc’ where no street lights illuminate the dark and the night is very black and scary. We have all talked to old people who spoke in all seriousness about things that on the surface don’t appear rational in the 21st century: of tunes that pipers and fiddlers won’t play for fear of bad luck, or songs like “She Moved through the Fair” with its tale of a “dead love whose feet made no din”. Even a seemingly in- nocent children’s song about “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” which were, appar- ently, the ingredients used to ward off witches! Jackie Small in his excellent notes to “The Gravel Walks” (The Fiddle Music of Mickey Doherty, Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann CBÉ 002, c. 1990) wrote about the musician and the supernatural world that “belief in fairies and ghosts was no whim affected for the benefit of an audience or collector: it was an everyday part of the Doherty’s thinking and their lives, and to challenge it was to insult them deeply.” Séamus Ennis once described the air “Paddy’s Rambles in the Park” as having something of the occult about it. As a child in Sligo I would listen to the tales of my uncles about Fairies and Leprachauns. I didn’t understand nor could I rationalise until much later, including a photograph of my Fa- ther as a two-year-old dressed in a girl’s dress, seemingly which was the old people’s way of preventing him being exchanged for a Down’s Syndrome child by the Fairies. That and the in- nocent looking St Bridget’s Cross made from reeds amongst the religious statues. Was it re- ally a throwback to the old religions before Christianity, a kind of extra insurance, just in case? THE OTHERWORLD Music and Song from The Irish Tradition Edited by Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock (Comhairle Bhealodeas Eireann. 2012 University College Dublin HB, 160 pp, Illustrated. ISBN 978-0-9565628-3-8) Price €22.50 from the Four Courts Press, www.fourcourtspress.ie

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