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9 4 11 20130930 11 Ordinary Irish life: music, sport and culture Editors, Méabh Ní Fhuartháin and David M. Doyle Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013 T HIS PUBLICATION is about Irishness. Nine essays on music, sport and culture which expand debate beyond the traditional lit- erary-historical parameters of Irish Studies, to include popular and folk culture. As Ireland commodifies and brands Irishness to a global community, such research becomes even more important in challenging us to question self- perpetuating cultural myths. Irish traditional music demands the same challenge, as it too repackages and presents itself to ‘itself’, as well as to audiences in Ireland and abroad. Lauren Weintraub Stoebel & Verena Commins both observe the powerful image of ‘the west as a cultural heartland’. For Commins, in her essay on the Willie Clancy Summer School, this geographical positioning, and the master- apprentice model of teaching, have imbued the Willie Clancy Week with an unstated ‘cultural authority’ that has led to its continued success. When put in a Dublin context, this image of the validating west is challenged. In interviews with Dublin musicians and observations on the Cobblestone Pub and organisations such as CCÉ & NPU, Stoebel shows how the realities of urban life have created a different musical community with its own geographical axis. Extending analysis to historical material, Guy Beiner follows printed and recorded references to the ballad “The Night Before Larry Was Stretched” to investigate its longevity and pop- ularity. Rather than evidence of a direct line in oral transmission from the eighteenth century, ~REVIEW ~ he sees the ballad reinvent itself to fulfil differ- ent roles – historical; stereotypical; literary; ro- mantic and popular – people ‘hearing’ and finding meaning within the context of their own time and place. Editors, Méabh Ní Fhuartháin and David M. Doyle have presented us with what is the com- plexity of Irish life, including that of the tradi- tional music community. Ordinary lives are not simple, one-dimensional narratives but are rich in intangible meaning. This publication shows how Irish Studies will benefit from developing concepts, models and terminology which artic- ulate such meaning and in turn inform and chal- lenge our understanding of what it is to be Irish. Reviewed by Grace Toland

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