THE Hayes's farm house shelters under Maghera mountain near Feakle in East Clare. All weekend it was snow bound, and the family holed up in a kitchen which is like a womb to which we all long to return a stove pumps out heat, a Sacred Heart and an old crib have warm lights, and a power house of a woman, Peggy Hayes, emerges from the kitchen with things like roast goose, fresh brown bread, flowery potatoes and cider cake.

This home has been cradle to sounds which have helped define nearly a century of traditional music. Just as it would be wrong to simplify and sentimentalise the warm County Clare farmhouse, so it would be wrong to think that the music it nurtured was born without a struggle, however. Both P.J. Hayes (75), fiddler and founder member of the Tulla Ceili Band, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and his son, Martin Hayes (33), arguably the country's greatest living fiddler, had to find their own ways through the jungle of social and political issues which grow around traditional music like reeds around a pond: "Irish music is like a barometer of how we re dealing with our culture at a particular time," says Martin.

The Tulla Ceili Band's first album on the Green Linnet label subtitled A Celebration Of Fifty Years and produced by Martin Hayes, came out last autumn. A week ago, they won a National Entertainment Award, today they are going to tea with President Robinson at Aras an Uachtarain, and at the end of the month, P. Joe Hayes will be named Clareman of the Year. But there was a period when they went Almost completely out of fashion, for reasons entirely social and political, rather than musical.

"The ceili band was inextricably linked with a way of life, which was everything Lemass's Ireland was not," explains Martin. "Dev's Ireland nurtured the ceili band, but Lemass's Ireland didn't."

When the "cultural elite" went looking for a version of tradition, the Ceoltoiri Laighin or Sean O Riada version was more acceptable to them, says Hayes. And when the folk revival happened, it skipped a generation, going back to the pre ceili band era. "It's only at this stage that we've been big enough to embrace it all," he explains.

As he writes in his sleeve notes for the anniversary album, ceili bands were in fact far from being the simple expression of the peasant people, (something which does not exist). They were consciously constructed to appeal to the taste of the time, which in the 1940s was for big dance bands: "They wore formal suits and bow ties, used a piano and drums and sometimes a stand up bass."

The Tulla Band always had a line up of between eight and 10 musicians, and always had a PA system, so that it produced what Martin calls "the rock and roll version of traditional music." Among the 50 or more members who have passed through it have been musicians like Michael Coleman, Hugh Gillespie, Joe Cooley, Willie Clancy, Paddy O'Brien, and Tony Mc Mahon.

The band played two nights a week, at halls all over the country, but they made it back to their Clare homesteads by dawn, whatever the distance: "Everyone had to farm," explains P.Joe: "When Martin was playing with us, I'd send him out for the cows at five in the morning, because there was early milking on a Sunday."

"But there was one big advantage, there always had to be a dinner for the band before a dance," prompts Martin. "Ham and tea."

"After the dance, they'd be trying to make a bargain with you, and you'd have no sympathy for them if the tea wasn't good," chuckles P.Joe.

COMING to grips with how popular the band was in their glory days is difficult. In 1958, they played the Carnegie Hall in New York, and 1,000 people came to see them off at Shannon, partly due to the charisma of one musician, and later politician, Dr. Bill Loughnane. That same year they played the Galtymore in Cricklewood, London, packed with 5,000 people: "They stood in a ring around the stage, listening to us. A lot of them were crying. Some of them had emigrated when they were only 17 or 18, the craythurs," remembers P.Joe.

At one stage there were 14 ceili bands in Clare alone, he says, but the Tulla and the Kilfenora became the most famous, partly due to the fleadh cheoils. This is a chapter of ceili band history which has to raise a giggle: "Each band had its supporters, thousands of them, like football teams, but it all came down to a subjective decision. It wasn't goals or points, it was a person behind a desk making a decision of taste", says Martin.

"I remember one night the Tulla won, and one fellow outside was saying the Tulla only got it because of the time they spent in America, when one of the band's fiddles hit him by mistake. `I'm a peaceful man', he said, defending himself," laughs P.Joe.

The Kilfenora won one more title than the Tulla, in their years of competing. "They spent more time at it," says P.Joe, "and they were determined to win." "Were you not?" teases Martin. Whatever about the supporters, however, there were always good relations between the bands, and a picture of the two bands playing together hangs proudly on the sitting room wall.

P.joe, who learned to play the fiddle from a first cousin of his father's, bought his eldest son a half sized fiddle for Christmas when he was a small child: "He only ever taught me to play when I would ask him," says Martin. "He would sit in front of me and I would mimic him visually and aurally. I would sit in my room alone and practise the same way as other kids would play soccer against a wall."

FROM the age of 13 or 14 he was playing regularly with "the band", which he describes as "so completely exciting". He became obsessed with traditional music, and only took notice of rock and roll in his late teens, due to the good offices of a friend who was trying to help him to integrate socially.

Martin Hayes's virtuoso solo playing has moved traditional music into a new sphere; the breathless quiet of his concerts is a world away from the Tulla's dances. The perfectionism started early: "I would go into the room with the best acoustics in the house, the bathroom. I remember heating my fiddle in front of the fire and moving around the soundpost. I would listen to Stephane Grappelli and think: `Why can't I sound like that? What's my excuse?' I have a violin, it's a thing of beauty. If I was born 40 years before, I would never have heard music like that."

Martin moved to the US in 1985 and is now based in Seattle. He started by playing any and every style of music in bars, and reached, he says, "a point when I felt no social links to Ireland and felt free to break all the bounds." Now he listens to, and is presumably influenced by, music as various as Grappelli, American big band music, "jazz fusion", world music, modern composers from Estonia, and sean nos singing.

He returns however again and again, to the tunes he played with his father in Clare, reels like The Hum ours Of Tulla and jigs like Tell Her I Am. And if you listen closely to him, you can hear echoes of the Tulla band in the swing of his music and the way he slides into a note.

"The message of music", he says, "is always yearning to be expressed and is never totally expressed." This `Muse' of music is always the same, he explains; all that changes is the style, due to the particular time and place in which the Muse speaks: "I don't see much distinction between Micho Russell, Miles Davis and Bach."

He is part of a new generation of traditional musicians which is winning the war with the ideologues for the soul of music - even, retrospectively, the battle for the ceili bands, which the ideologues had long thought won: "The Tulla Ceili Band weren't out to define Irish culture," he says. "They were out to play music in a hall."