Clare's trademark festival at home in exile

Review: So this is how the summer ends: with a heroic collective bluff. The last of 2003's outdoor music festivals was always going to require punters to look the other way.

But when, in the heart of Dublin 4, Christy Moore sings We like music in the open air/ So every summer we go to the County Clare, Lisdoonvarna's illusion shatters. Most of Moore's songs sip energy and poignancy from a well of exile, dispossession and the pain of separation. D4, however, just doesn't do exile. Diaspora may be a drag and all that, but aren't we, like, so over it?

Consequently everything about Lisdoonvarna in the RDS becomes a perplexing contradiction. It's neither here nor there.

Lest we forget, this is a festival of Irish music, a fact trumpeted by Glen Hansard during The Frames' set. Such is Hansard's avuncular ubiquity today, lending backing vocals to the wonderful Nina Hynes and later contributing guitar to Mark Geary's exuberant set, that the event feels more like a party that Hansard is hosting in Moore's honour. "This is a great day to be Irish," he announces.

Utah's Josh Ritter and Welsh-Breton Wunderkind Katell Keineg might well agree. Arriving on the back of a pantomime donkey, Keineg delivers an engaging set, her idiosyncratic phrasing disarmingly augmented by electric guitars, a drum machine and, of course, Hynes. Ritter, meanwhile, boasts songs as graceful as his sartorial elegance. Geary and Hynes support him, naturally.

Despite such winsome cliques, homogeneity seems neither virtue nor reality in Irish music. The muscular folk of Damien Dempsey may rage against imperialists on Colony, but his music assimilates Jamaican reggae and New York rap as much as the complicated nationalism of Shane McGowan.

Everywhere, in fact, the "we" and "they" get confusing. It is up to Moore to try and make sense of it all. Mercifully, he does.

In the affluent heart of one of the richest cities in Europe, Lisdoonvarna sparkles and hums like a brand name with a theme tune. And in this new land of opportunity for prodigal songsters such as Geary and Dempsey, Moore still frowns on Clare County Council.

Heaven knows why. They have given this pleasant day the one thing it secretly craved - a real sense of exile.