Tin whistle, fiddle, ceili dancing, mid-Atlantic accents - it could have been a set for yet another "green theme movie", but it wasn't. There was even a visiting US benefactor, whose first experience of Ireland was Kiltimagh, Co Mayo.
The occasion? The "grand opening" of the Glore Mill Follain Arts Centre last Friday at a renovated stone building just outside the Mayo town, at Treankeel. The 1910 mill, which worked for just 20 years, has been given a new lease of life by a couple from Arizona.
Artist Sally McKenna and her partner, Ray Cooper, describe it as the realisation of a dream. The link was Father John Cunningham of Phoenix, Arizona, whose mother comes from Kiltimagh. He recently brought 81 members of his parish to Mayo, where they visited the mill and relatives in the Glore River valley.
Ms McKenna and Mr Cooper were entranced, and engaged the support of Integrated Rural Development Kiltimagh to transform the derelict structure about a mile outside the town into a centre for the arts. Robert Hixon Glore, a businessman with "banking interests" from Chicago, Illinois, is the main benefactor. He said he only met Ms McKenna last week, and hasn't a clue as to whether his family comes from the area or not. But the local schoolchildren know him as the man who bears their river's name.
Ms McMcKenna engaged Thomas Forkan Construction and the Malcolm Jackson architectural practice to carry out the work, and she has already set up an art school, a working studio for herself and exhibition space for local artists. Visiting children from Chernobyl attended the first art class, and flowers from the river bank have already been pressed by participants at a summer camp. Ms McKenna is the tutor. A professional artist, she is a graduate of Arizona State University and has taught both young and old in the US for over 20 years. She intends to run an autumn programme, and to extend the mill's activities to art therapy, yoga, massage, music and dancing - and to encourage use of the Irish language, where possible. She has attracted a lot of local support.
If it was his home state of Illinois, the centre would already have become a university campus, Mr Glore told this reporter as the dancing, led by girls from the Redmond Academy, and general merrymaking continued late into Friday night. "I don't know whether the university in Galway ever has any serious plans to set up in this area, but this is the sort of thing they should be doing," he said.
The Glore Mill Project on the Swinford Road, just outside Kiltimagh, can be contacted at (094) 82184 and fax (094) 82185.