Music is part of Brendan Begley's heritage and it's what keepshim sane. As he prepares to play his accordion at the Gathering festival, hetalks to Siobhán Long

It's the genealogy that reveals the pulse of traditional music. Never mind the plethora of releases or the sessions that emerge from the snug or the front room. Trad's heartbeat is healthy only if the music is passed on. Songs and tunes are given and got, not simply snatched from the ether as they are buoyed from session to session.

Brendan Begley, youngest of nine - every one of them a robust musician - and a man with a reputation for manic box playing and sublime singing, is one of the lucky ones: lucky enough to have had tunes and songs passed on to him for safe keeping.

And there can be few safer houses than the one that nestles at the foot of Mount Brandon, on the road to Brandon Creek. This is the place where St Brendan set sail for America. Little wonder that the entire Begley clan of Cuas and Feothanach has revelled in the lonesome cadence of the low tide and the jig rhythms of the naomhóg as they've immersed themselves in the traditional music of west Kerry.

This weekend sees the third annual Gathering festival, a coming together of the best music and musicians that traditional music boasts, at a time when the tradition is thriving. Altan, Dervish, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Seamus Begley, Beginish, Johnny O'Leary, Tim O'Shea and a rake of Sliabh Luachra musicians are poised for action, fiddles, bows and squeeze boxes at the ready. And Brendan Begley is set to take his place on the high stool, his haymaker's arms dwarfing the accordion, his tall frame embracing even the delicate songs with paternal devotion .

For a man who grew up eating, sleeping and breathing the songs and tunes of his home place, Begley is uninhibited in his insistence that the music is ultimately a breaker of boundaries rather than a maker of them. His unequivocal love of the music has seeped deep into his DNA, and he's adamant that it's what binds him to others rather than setting him apart.

"I don't think we ever thought we were a musical family," he says. "Music was just always there, like laptops and computers are nowadays. I was the youngest, and I can remember being sent up to bed, and listening to them all down in the kitchen, singing. And I can remember my father sitting down with the hobnail boots, knocking sparks off the ground, playing on the single-row melodeon. And of course we did most of our practising out in the cow-house!

We all played at the ceilí in Muiríoch in a dance hall that my father and my two uncles owned. And for me, to play at the ceilí was like playing in Carnegie Hall. Music opens so many doors for you. You realise how much it does after you've played a concert, and you walk down into the foyer and you're signing CDs for people, and then you walk out into a strange pub - and absolutely no one at all knows you. That's when the stark reality of just how many doors it opens for you is so obvious."

West Kerry tunes were born from the local passion for ceilí dancing. Far from being fodder for a polite drawing-room session, the raison d'être for polkas and slides was the dancer, and no musicians worth their salt would dream of playing the music solely for those whose hips or ankles were static.

"I'm glad that I learned by playing for dancers," says Begley, "because I feel, if I'm playing well, that dancers could dance to this. I don't like playing too fast - though I know I always do - but the dancers wouldn't be long telling you anyway! These days, though, I'd be totally wrecked if I played at a ceilí: three or four hours' non-stop tunes. I'd have a pain in my neck and my back and my hands - just shattered."

Begley is poised to release his third solo album, Oíche Go Maidean/It Could Be A Good Night Yet! It's a mostly bare-boned collection of tunes and songs, some of them local, others given to him by friends and fellow musicians, such as the late lamented Junior Crehan, from Clare. "Junior was a wonderful man," Begley smiles. "He did all the wrong things, from the point of view of diet. He loved whiskey, he ate white bacon, eggs. He smoked about 60 cigarettes a day and he lived to be over 90. There was always one thing missing in his life, though: stress. You'd never see him in a hurry. And I'm crazy about the hornpipe I got from him: Her Long Browne Hair Flowed Down Her Back. I love its simplicity. It's what you don't do to it that's enjoyable."

Other doors have also been opened to Begley. The presenter of Geanntraí, a traditional-music series on TG4, founder member of Beginish and now almost permanent guest with The Boys of the Lough, he's as comfortable in front of a camera as he is behind a box or singing. His facility as a master of ceremonies stretches from the Dingle Skellig Hotel, where he ably corralled six elder statesmen of traditional music - including Seán Maguire, Joe Burke and Jimmy and Vincent Campbell from Donegal - to Mooney's snug in the Ring Gaeltacht and to the US, where shortly he'll be interviewing some of traditional music's elder statesmen for a second series of Sé Mo Laoch, also on TG4.

"Your personality is your music, surely," he says. "Belfast music is so attacking, so up-yours, whereas the Campbells' music is so traditional and so gentle. And if you listen to any of the players like Sean Potts or Johnny O'Leary, their personality is all over their music."

Begley left his teaching job in Dublin in 1997, after 18 years in the city, and headed for home, where music could finally take centre stage. It was a decision a long time in gestation, and one that could be made only with the benefit of experience, and maturity, he hints.

"There was always a fear of going at this professionally, in case you might go off the rails," he says. "I might have been on the verge here and there, but I managed to pull myself back on again. Everywhere you go there's drink, and so many musicians have gone off the rails. But to me, now, all the madness that you want in life is in the music; all the love that you want to express you can put into your music, and the sadness, too.

"I think that playing a slow air is a nice sadness. It's a kind of suaimhneas. Even if it makes you want to cry at times, it's a happy kind of a tear. One thing I do know, though: if I were to take music out of my life now, I don't know what I'd do. I'd probably end up depressed. Anyway, I think that music is the only acceptable form of madness. If you were to do it anywhere else, you'd be handcuffed."

The Gathering Festival of Irish Music, Dance & Song is at The Gleneagle Hotel, Killarney, until Sunday. Further information and booking: 064-71555

Oíche Go Maidean/It Could Be A Long Night Yet! is due to be released at the end of the month. Further details from Brendan Begley at breanndan@eircom.net