You could have gone three times around the globe just by crossing the street at Dún Laoghaire's Festival of World Cultures, writes Peter Crawley

Last weekend, world culture came to Dún Laoghaire and relaxed once again by the sea. For six years now the Festival of World Cultures, which this year is thought to have drawn close to 220,000 people to this coastal town, aims to promote a positive response to integration, to nurture respect and understanding through the arts, and to allow us a mature and sensitive occasion to appreciate the proud culture of other peoples while marvelling at their funny little hats.

Dún Laoghaire has never been slow to embrace cultural influx - indeed, there are few better places to find a soy chai latte - but one wonders about the enlightening benefits in a display of, say, international costumes or origami Samurai helmets. Is this all "exotic" trivialisation, or an effort to prove to us that there really are alternatives to the local costume of Abercrombie and Tommy Hilfiger? However lofty its intentions, a three-day expo of music, dance and outdoor markets can never be more than a colourful and dizzying hotchpotch, offering as many opportunities to learn something about the panoply of global cultures as it does to simply gawk at them.

Taken in its true spirit, as a bright and cheery street party, FOWC is a resounding success; a carnival where you can enjoy a Lebanese falafel wrap while listening to a Mexican folk group and sniffing a pair of Vietnamese cinnamon-scented sandals. You have gone three times around the world just by crossing the street.

The logical soundtrack to this event is "world music", that maddeningly catch-all term for any musical form not sung in English. More specifically, the festival prioritises cross-pollination, the fusion of east and west, old and new - musical proof for the melting-pot ideal.

An electrified Nigerian collaboration between Tuareg and Wodaabe musicians, Etran Finatawa categorise their style as "nomad blues", which, in effect, means droning electric guitar phrases over a bed of unfamiliar percussion instruments - the most fun of which is a reverberant drum called the Algalaba which resembled a leather medicine ball, floating in a wooden basin, hit steadily with a salami.

Any music inspired by life in the arid expanse of the Sahara is unlikely to be densely melodious, and Etran Finatawa tell us of the concerns of the desert: the inevitability of age and mortality and the difficulties of love and separation: sometimes it's hard to love a nomad.

What unites all people, Bronagh Gallagher suggested in her warm, understated performance in Scott's Cafe Bar, it that we all go through good times and bad. What unites Gallagher's music, a smooth concoction of country, soul and occasionally rollicking rock is her smoky voice and sardonic banter.

Still more wry are the wonderful Warsaw Village Band, who, in the ironic proclamations of Maciej Szajkowski, send up the "authenticity" question present in any discussion of world music.

"We don't play commercial polka!" he assures us. "We play hard-core, old-school roots polka."

Between appealingly loose beats and trickling meditative cadences on the suka (a 16th-century Polish fiddle), the music is by turns hunched and menacing, an incantatory exhortation to dance, or shot through with dramatic plaints: polka's most stirring testament to keeping it real.

The chekwa bagpipe, droning lead instrument of the Marzoug Band from Biskra, holds an obvious appeal for the curious ethnomusicologist in all of us, but any appreciation of Soudani Djelloul's technique must come second to heeding his seven percussionists' call to dance. The floor of the Pavilion Theatre, cleared of seats for this purpose, fills tentatively at first, but concludes with clapping, swaying, hip-flinging abandon as the robed musicians invade the auditorium.

One of Saturday night's few non-dancing events, Israel's Toy Vivo Duo, was also its most entrancing, as Avshalom Frajun wove spells on the 90-string qanun and Aviv Agababa delivered robust beats for a smattering of an attendance.

Everybody enjoys the simple uplift of ska and few can resist the danceable patterns of Cuban jazz; but who these days has the time for both? The chipper Ska Cubano fuse the two forms and the parts have soldered together nicely, proving Ska's heavily accented upbeat nicely accommodates the upbeat and heavily accented Cuban son.

For all the emphasis on unlikely fusion and making beautiful music together (in this regard the newly sanctioned activity of speed-dating doesn't seem out of place), no contemporary match-making could produce the winning eccentricity of Russia's Terem Quartet. Pursuing musical fantasies from Bach to Tchaikovsky through accordion, lutes and the hulking contrabass balalaika, the quartet incorporated sound effects and physical comedy to enthralling and invariably surprising effect.

The musical offerings of the festival may tend towards the exuberant and ebullient - as though the world was ever that way - but Emmanuel Jal, the former Sudanese boy soldier turned rapper, has earned his positivity the hard way. Over a ferocious assault of beats, his opening number, War Child, is more stark announcement than mellifluous flow and it is all the more effective for it: "I believe I survived for a reason, to tell my story, to touch lives."

Jal is the true star of the festival, not only for his harrowing background, his bright presence and his enthusiastic dancing, but because these unflinching lyrical depictions of African poverty, Middle East violence and children inculcated into ideologies of hate are the signs of an unapologetic political consciousness. Such realities are rarely indicated amid the Benetton brightness and face-painting of the festival, and that seems amiss.

Jal, in his hope and despair, offers a picture of world culture the way it really is.