On a hot midweek night in the Cobblestone pub in Smithfield in Dublin, Ispíní na hÉireann, a rising, raucous traditional music band, explain their origins. Made up of Tomás Mulligan, of the Mulligan family who run the Cobblestone, Adam Holohan, Aongus Mac Amhlaigh, Pádraig Óg Mac Aodhagháin and Kinko Ceallaigh, the band formed in January of 2018, after Mulligan and Holohan had been playing together for a couple of months. When they bagged a slot to perform in the back room of the Cobblestone for a group of American festival directors, they needed a name. Ispíní na hÉireann made them laugh and it stuck.
That gig wasn’t exactly a success, “because we were terrible, and locked,” Holohan explains, but they kept playing and, about a year and a half later, were selected for a Cobblestone Folk Orchestra trip to Lithuania. While rehearsing, they noted the prowess of Mac Amhlaigh, a cellist and fiddle player. He agreed to join the band. “I was very drunk at the time,” Mac Amhlaigh qualifies.
Then Covid hit. “We had nothing to do but to practise at home,” Mulligan says. That period away from live music disconnected and reconnected many musicians to their craft in different ways. “I had a totally renewed appreciation for trad music,” Mac Amhlaigh says of the pandemic era. “I always played it, but during Covid I just realised how important it is.” They recorded their debut album, The Hard Working Men, with studio time Holohan and others had gifted Mulligan for his 30th birthday at the end of 2019.
Of that long stretch at home during the pandemic, Mac Aodhagháin says, “People honed in on what they’re interested in. Even myself, not that I wasn’t playing a lot of music, but I took it for granted. It was a case of, Jesus, I need to use my time on things that really matter to me. For hours a day I played and played all the time.” Ceallaigh feels that time “gave everyone a chance to realise what made them happy in life. Sitting at home, you couldn’t wait to get back to doing what you want.”
The first night the Cobblestone reopened, Mac Aodhagháin was “raring to go, waiting for this day forever”. Many others had the same idea, and, with no room in the pub, Mac Aodhagháin and Mac Amhlaigh began playing tunes out on the street. Mulligan asked Mac Aodhagháin to join the band, and the line-up was complete.
Simultaneously, something else was happening in this pocket of Dublin. Hynes’ pub on Prussia Street in Stoneybatter reopened after many years. Meanwhile, across the river in the Liberties, another pub, Dudley’s on Thomas Street, was born. Both of these pubs, alongside the Cobblestone and Walsh’s in Stoneybatter and others, form a connected network of spaces with trad sessions. Whereas the Cobblestone and Walsh’s are long established, these newer pubs are also incorporating traditional music sessions into their offering. The first session Ispíní na hÉireann played in Dudley’s was the night of John Francis Flynn’s album launch gig at nearby Vicar Street. “If there’s any gig on to do with traditional music or folk [at Vicar Street], everyone goes to Dudley’s,” Mac Aodhagháin says.
Ispíní na hÉireann now play three regular sessions a week: the Cobblestone on Mondays, Hynes’ on Thursdays, and Dudley’s on Sundays. “The music is really hot at the moment,” Mulligan says. He played the accordion as a child, but quit “in a ball of teenage rage” when he was around 16. “In school, it was so uncool. I got picked on for going to grúpa cheoil on a Saturday evening. I wouldn’t be able to hang out with my friends, and they’d be like, ‘oh, are you going playing that fiddle-ma-piddle music?’ I didn’t have the constitution to let that roll off me at the time. I took it really badly. Those same people that slagged the crap out of me come to our gigs now.”
Their experience of this shift in attitudes among younger people towards traditional music is uniform. They draw a correlation with young people’s increasingly enthusiastic attitude towards the Irish language, although Mac Aodhagháin, who went to school in Coláiste Eoin in Dublin, had a slightly different experience. “Music is a big thing in Coláiste Eoin. The music is central to everything. The lads there always have an appreciation for it.” Ceallaigh says. “This music is a young people’s thing now.”
It’s impossible to ignore this burst of creativity, and the growing, younger, audience for it. If a decent session is taking hold, word of mouth spreads in real time, with pubs filling up. And the audience is expanding to the UK, Europe, and the US. At the end of 2021, the Guardian named John Francis Flynn’s debut album, I Would Not Live Always, the best folk record of that year. Lankum are widely regarded as the best Irish band of their generation in any genre, and their latest album, False Lankum, has been lauded internationally. In March, folk singer Lisa O’Neill sold out the Barbican in London. When Other Voices recently posted a clip of the concertina innovator Cormac Begley playing his tune To War on TikTok, it amassed 1.5 million views in a few days. The Scratch, The Mary Wallopers, the singer Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Lemoncello and many more groups are also in ascendence.
“We know a lot of all these bands personally. We have the same ideology, politically as well as everything else. The music has that layer as well,” Ceallaigh says. “It’s a rejection of the traditional restrictions, but also the fact that you’re not getting offered a helping hand,” Mulligan adds. “The Government will sell this country on the idea that we’re such a poetic, musical people, but they’ll do everything that they can to stifle the blooming of that. It’s becoming very much a protest [scene] against the fact that we have clowns running this place, and it’s a country, not a circus.”
It’s the music of everyone on this island. It doesn’t just belong to a few pipe-smokers in the corner of a pub who think it’s a badge of honour that no one has ever heard of them
There’s also a clear echo of innovations made in traditional music in the 1970s. “We’re f**king things up with trad and making our own sounds,” Mac Amhlaigh says. “The best thing about it,” Mac Aodhagháin says of this new wave (an tonn nua), “is it all comes back to it being very tasteful to the core of traditional music. Whereas for a while, anyone trying to do contemporary traditional music, it ended up sounding like music in Temple Bar.” Anything that veers towards fodder for tourists is avoided. “People want to distance themselves from the Temple Bar image,” Mac Aodhagháin says of Ispíní and their peers, “especially the way Dublin is going. You don’t want to be branded a sellout by going down that road.”
Their 2022 album, The Hard Working Men, contains a fair representation of the balance the band strikes, a rambunctious approach that can lean towards laughs before pulling back to demonstrate their musical talents. A highlight is Talk to Joe, an ode to Joe Duffy wrapped in a beautifully tender melody. Surprised by how positively people responded to their first album, the band are in preparation for the second album. “That’s so much scarier,” Holohan says, “Not that there’s an expectation, but you have one in your own head… and just for yourself, for no one else, in my opinion.”
“The whole reason that we started the band was I was raised in here, around all this stuff,” Mulligan says, gesturing to the pub’s surroundings, “We’ve all spent a significant amount of time around Irish music. A lot of people in Irish music take themselves very seriously. I think that’s a massive barrier to entry. I stopped playing for years, and I found it hard to get back into it. I was able to with people like Mick O’Grady and Pat Goode giving me the encouragement to join in with them. They loved stirring the pot. If they saw somebody who was muck and wanted to sing a song, they’d be like: ‘Sing a song’. And they’d look around for some purist sneering or twitching. It’s the music of everyone on this island. It doesn’t just belong to a few pipe-smokers in the corner of a pub who think it’s a badge of honour that no one has ever heard of them. It belongs to all of us. Do whatever you want with it.”
Ispíní na hÉireann play the Otherside Festival in Slane, Co Meath, on July 9th, All Together Now in Waterford on August 5th, and a headline concert at the Academy in Dublin on December 21st
