Dancing at the epicentre of Irish suffering

No one could sing away the politics at the first Fleadh to be held in Belfast

At the arrivals gate at Belfast International Airport, you are confronted with two selling points for Northern Ireland’s capital. The airport bookshop has a row of recommended reads beside the baggage carousel: The Sorrow and the Loss, A Short History of Ireland’s Famine, A Short History of the Troubles, Shooting Crows: Mass Murder, State Collusion and Press Freedom, Reporting the Troubles, Reporting the Troubles 2, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People.

Along the walls are signs for Titanic Belfast (it was in Belfast that the unsinkable was built, after which it steamed off and promptly sunk), a museum in which visitors can submerge their hands in -2°C water to feel what it would be like for your body to grow frigid before descending to the bottom of the Atlantic. In case there were any doubts, Belfast International Airport is there to remind you: you have arrived at the epicentre of modern Irish suffering.

But for one week at least, Belfast was putting on a smile. From 2 to 9 August, Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the world’s biggest celebration of Irish music, song, language and dance, was taking place here. Occupying school halls, concert rooms and bandstands, the 75-year-old festival transformed the city. It was the first time Belfast had hosted, and by the second weekend, visitor numbers had surpassed 1.6 million. Milling around, you might have seen the president of Ireland, the Taoiseach, the Northern Ireland secretary of state, Gerry Adams, Kneecap and Greta Thunberg.

England is used to looking at its vestigial folk traditions – like maypole dancers – with a mixture of embarrassment and disdain. But in Northern Ireland, they matter. It is a place renowned for deeply politicised street performances, though these tend to be of the loyalist marching-band persuasion – think martial percussion with a historical grievance. But for one week, the city, where just 35 per cent of the population identify as Irish, settled in for a celebration of Irishness. It was a scene that only a generation ago – when bodies were being exhumed not far from Belfast – would have been unimaginable.

One of the Fleadh’s traditions is busking, and so, from City Hall towards Royal Avenue, paddy caps brimmed with loose change. Fake-tanned tweens with austere faces danced in rigid formation, while lilting champions in the under-ten category puffed out streams of nonsensical syllables. Dynasties of siblings had been produced for the sole purpose of furnishing “The Irish Rover” with its full instrumental complement: from little to large, they lined up with fiddles, uilleann pipes, bodhráns, tin whistles, banjos and concertinas. “This is just so nice,” an elderly woman said, her eyes filling with tears. “Why can’t it always be like this?”

Enterprising merch-makers had capitalised on the rhyme between fleadh (pronounced “flah”) and ’Ra, the colloquial name for the IRA. “Ooh, ah, up the Fleadh” read one particularly popular shirt, although the genius minds behind the “I Was Never in the Fleadh” T-shirt, accompanied by a picture of Gerry Adams, will surely be dining out on their proceeds for years to come.

Not everyone saw the funny side. In the event’s opening days, a food-truck owner had to apologise for “any offence caused” after a video had circulated that appeared to show him playing “Celtic Symphony” by the Wolfe Tones (from which the “Up the ’Ra” chorus originates) as “Guinness burgers” were flipped and gravy and cheese poured over chips. The loyalist group Let’s Talk Loyalism lodged a formal complaint with the organisers. The Stormont Speaker, the DUP’s Edwin Poots, said he would write to the Chief Constable.

Outside City Hall, a small group of loyalist protesters also remained uncheered by the week’s festivities. A group of five stood beneath Union Jack flags, including an elderly woman with her arm in a sling and a Union Jack scarf knotted around her neck. “Speak to The Historian,” they told me, pointing towards an elderly man in a brown paperboy cap. The Historian explained that they were members of the Belfast City Hall flag protests. They had been demonstrating since 2012, when Belfast City Council voted to limit the number of days on which the Union Flag flies from City Hall.

“It’s important that I note,” he told me, clapping me on the back, “that there are usually more people here.” The others were in Derry for an Apprentice Boys parade (whether they were marking the closing of Derry’s gates or their opening, he couldn’t remember). When I asked about the Fleadh, he clapped me on the back once more and sent me on my way. A teenager walked past carrying cans of Coors and headed for the music. “Jealousy is an awful thing,” he shouted at the protesters.

The organisers were aware of the risk of this tension and, in the spirit of inclusion, had welcomed loyalist performances and talks from guest speakers. Even so, I was surprised to discover that one of the talks was to be given by Gordon Ramsay at the Grand Opera House.It was not what I had envisioned. Before me stood not the chef but the former soldier and ethnomusicologist, Gordon Ram-sey, who specialises in the social, economic and political history of parading music.

I was, by several centuries, the youngest person in the room. Marching bands are to unionists as Gaelic football is to republicans. The region has 600 bands, which parade every weekend from April to September. The lecture featured phrases such as “meanwhile in Ulster: suppression” and “decentralised: the band world is fiercely independent”. For two hours, I learned bands had been both “demonised” and “ignored” by Stormont, while remaining “largely unappreciated”. The bald heads in the crowd nodded. Beside me, a man scrolled Facebook. His thumb hovered over a meme: “FUCK YOUR FLEADH” across an AI image of a bulldog. He decided against liking it. As the Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band closed the evening with a rendition of “Rule, Britannia!”, he smiled, tapping his foot.

Journalists are romancers of cynicism, and so, across the Fleadh’s seven days, many online commentators went looking for the Belfast of their headlines: angry, divided, murderous. But that Belfast was not to be found. Even Jamie Bryson, editor of Unionist Voice, who described himself to me as the “most hard-line of hard-line unionist loyalists”, seemed content. “When someone like me is, at worst, ambivalent towards the whole thing, then clearly they’ve achieved something,” he told me.

Ten minutes from the festivities, on Sandy Row, the city’s working-class loyalist heartland, another Belfast remained. White-gloved men in black suits marched in step past murals of the Queen, King William III and Ulster Defence Association member Robert Dougan, “murdered by the enemies of Ulster”. Most of the businesses on the street were shuttered. Signs that read “Friend to Israel” and “Justice for Soldier F” sat outside one house. Flags proclaimed “Stop the Boats” and “Protect our Kids”. Older men emerged from the Rangers club. Young boys sat atop a stack of wooden pallets they had already begun collecting for next year’s Twelfth. “God Save the King” played as the crowd stood to attention, and the Lambeg drums thundered.

But afterwards, some of the younger men made their way towards the city centre. Entire families from the Shankill Road went to the Fleadh, too, I was told. Men in Rangers jerseys wandered merrily through the crowds.

Belfast in the Fleadh is not forever Belfast. Anyone who thinks that, as Bryson put it to me, is “for the birds”. But to walk around Belfast for that week was to experience a kairotic moment in its history: a celebration of Irishness, Northern Irishness and Britishness, cohabiting. This was not Troubles or Titanic Belfast, but a convivial, even joyous one – a future that surely both sides of this old conflict want.

[Further reading: The far right are stoking the violence in Belfast]