Neon costumes, wigs and pushy parents. When did the feiseanna take a wrong turn, asks Fiona Gartland
I catch a glimpse of her before she turns away, a thin 11-year-old in jeans and jumper, waist-length blonde hair, clear, milky skin, and a delicate smile. In her hand she carries a shoebox and over one shoulder a triangular dress bag.
Her mother pushes from behind, carrying a make-up case and a cardboard box. They both disappear into the ladies' toilets in our local GAA hall just as the accordion player launches into his 95th jig of the day.
This is not the first feis I have been to. I have two daughters who enjoy Irish dancing and have taken lessons for a couple of years. The school they attend is of the sensible kind, with a simple, pretty costume and a healthy attitude toward competition. But from what I can tell, it is not the norm.
I can't help overhearing the high-pitched voice in the row behind me. A teacher berates a nine-year-old.
"I won't let you come to a feis again if you make mistakes like that, and then smiling about it, you smiled when you made that mistake. I won't bring you again," she spits the words out and successfully wipes the smile off the face of the child, who blushes and blinks back tears.
A mother, whose daughter has danced the wrong step and left the floor crying, is offering no comfort.
"What did you do that for?" she barks, holding the child at arm's length.
"You know it, we went over it a hundred times." I believe her.
No, this is not my first feis. I have packed my two girls into the car at ungodly hours on Sunday mornings and driven them to halls to sit on plastic chairs, to eat plastic sandwiches and drink grey tea and to watch, along with hundreds of other mothers, while they reel and jig for hours on end.
There is a rhythm to the feis, it is dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, diddle, diddle. And when I've spent a day listening to it, it seeps its way into my dreams and I wake up at 3am with a headache throbbing to that beat. But I go along anyway because the children enjoy it.
I would have expected by now that the shock at what some parents are willing to do to their children would have worn off.
It has not. I am aghast when I see the blonde girl emerge from the ladies' toilets. She is transformed, or perhaps the better word is transmogrified. Gone is the clear skin, hidden beneath orange-tinted foundation and bronzing rouge, her smile is a gash of colour, her pale lashes darkened and curled. The jeans and jumper are replaced with a costume so bright I reach for my sunglasses. Predominantly neon green, the dress is trimmed with orange and blue. Its glitter- ball fabric is enough to bring on a seizure.
Her legs are glowing with false tan, above white poodle socks glued in place. But worst of all her blonde hair is no longer visible, imprisoned beneath a yellow polyester wig and topped with a sparkling tiara. She walks across the hall to take her place in the queue of dancers and the tight, synthetic curls spring with every step.
I look around, and of the 200 dancers present, more than half are wearing wigs. And as the older girls arrive to compete at higher grades, the wig-to-hair ratio increases. At a glance it appears that the children have entered an overgrown Shirley Temple look-a-like competition, but there is nothing cute about it.
Feiseanna are no longer dance competitions, they are American-style beauty pageants.
How did it happen? Who said it was acceptable to cover a child's own hair with synthetic curls? Who benefits when a child is dressed like a Christmas tree in a costume that costs €1,500? I sip my dishwater tea and the penny drops. The dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, diddle, diddle is not only the rhythm of the feis, it is a queue of six parents handing over their hard-earned cash, while the profiteer sniggers at the till.