February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Fifteen years later, the Irish Cultural Centre is built, laid out on 46 acres of pristine land in Canton, about ten miles from Boston.
And the Irish festival – re-christened the Irish Connections Festival and set to take place this weekend, June 10, 11 and 12 – is now the largest and most successful Irish event in the New England region.
The festival, and the Centre itself, are now viewed as a means of pulling together the region’s sprawling Irish-American community.
“We’ve become like the Ambassador’s Residence for the Irish community,” says Brendan Morrisroe, co-director of this year’s festival along with Michael O’Connor, president of the Irish Cultural Centre.
“The festival offers a sounding board for a lot of smaller, Irish groups that basically have the same audience as we do,” Morrisroe says.
The festival’s role has become central to the vitality of greater Boston’s Irish community.
Boston was 40% Irish early in the 20th century, but today it is down to 17%. Many Irish have moved to the suburbs and smaller towns of Massachusetts. The parish, pub and polling place, once the gathering points for the urban Irish, are being replaced by culture and heritage as the context for many Irish-Americans.
Irish festivals, which also take place this summer in Blackstone Valley, Newport, Lowell and the Catskills, have in many ways become the harbinger of where the Irish community is heading.
Cultural programs, genealogy, step dancing and traditional music as viewed by many suburban families as appropriate ways to tap into a heritage from which they’ve become separated.
“The fine arts aspect of the Festival is really expanding by leaps and bounds,” Morrisroe says, citing the Authors Tent and the number of vendors like Aisling Gallery and Lorica ArtWorks, two local galleries that deal exclusively with art from Ireland.
Another new feature of this year’s Festival is The Tonnes: A Meeting of the Waters Exhibit” by South Boston artist Michael Dowling. It’s a public art project featuring the northwest region of Ulster and the River Foyle.
Headlining this year’s musical line-up are fiddle greats Eileen Ivers and Cape Breton rock fiddler Ashley MacIssac. They’ll be joined by Grada, the innovative traditional band based in Dublin that mixes Irish with Breton and Eastern European genres. Singer Sean Keane is returning again this year after a great reception at last year’s Festival.
Boston-based traditional veterans Joe Derrane, Seamus Connolly and John McGann are playing at the intimate Bard’s Tent on Sunday.
This year the Festival has added a couple of tribute bands to appeal to the rock ‘n’ roll audience. 2-U, influenced by U-2, will be joined by Evolution, a tribute band to Journey, the 1980s arena rock band. Both bands are performing Friday and Sunday.
Other musical highlights of the weekend include the Comhaltas Ceili Tent, which holds several hundred people twirling in unison to the upbeat tempo of reels, jigs, polkas and hornpipes. The Irish Harp Tent features a full schedule of concerts, workshops, exhibits and lectures on Ireland’s national instrument.
Under the direction of literary committee head Paul Doyle, the centre’s literary activities have developed steadily in recent years. This year’s Authors Tent includes ten front-list authors speaking on Irish topics. Novelists Frank Delaney, Michael C. White, Bob Flaherty and Richard Marinick are also reading from new works of fiction. T.J. English is talking about the Irish-American Gangster, while Edward Conlon weighs on the side of law and order with his book, Blue Blood.
Paul O’Neill, radio host of the Harp & Bard program in Southern Maine, started his show the same year the festival began, and has followed its progress closely.
The Irish community in Maine and New Hampshire, O’Neill says, “view the festival as the best opportunity to see and hear this caliber of Irish music. Some years you hear the music and wonder if it can ever get any better than this, and then the next year it does. It’s also a place where you can taste the culture and history of the Irish.”
He expects that a lot of people from Southern Maine will make the two and one half hour journey down to the Festival. The Irish have recently opened an Irish Heritage Center in Portland, and there is always an opportunity to make new connections at this type of large Irish gathering.
O’Neill, who is also president of AOH Division One in Maine, has spoken to many of the vendors attending the Festival each year, and says they consider it, along with Milwaukee, to be the best festival in the country.
Morrisroe said he had tour bus inquiries from western Massachusetts and other parts of the region, and is expecting more people than ever to come in from other states.
This year’s festival will miss the ubiquitous presence of the late Eddie Barron of Donegal, who was instrumental in starting the Festival in 1991. Along with Rev. Bartley MacPhaidin, president of Stonehill College, Noel Connolly, Michael O’Connor and a few others, Barren helped envision the Irish Cultural centre as a place where people could gather year round to preserve and celebrate their heritage. That early vision has proven to be successful.
For more information on the Irish Connections Festival, visit www.irishculture.org or call 1 888 Go Irish.