It is difficult to overstate the scale and ambition of the Fleadh.
For eight days, until next Sunday, Belfast has become one big cultural stage. Music and songs spill from concert halls into pubs, venues, street corners, hotels and public spaces. Formal performances sit alongside impromptu sessions. Competitors arrive from across Ireland and around the world to take part in traditional music, song, dance and language competitions, while audiences wander through a programme of more than 200 events spread across venues and neighbourhoods.
There are great performers and emerging talents; children carrying instruments as big as themselves and players whose mastery has been shaped across lifetimes. There are concerts, céilis, workshops, competitions, gigs on the street, seisiún and new musical connections that can only happen when musicians find one another. Friendships will be made and songs will be written.
The range is truly breathtaking, almost overwhelming in fact.
Way more than a festival, the Fleadh is like a temporary cultural townland within a city: participatory, intergenerational, intercontinental and diverse. This week, the distinction between performer and audience starts to blur. The music isn’t confined to the main stage. It appears around the next corner, down an alley, or in venues, big and small.
It is a remarkable logistical and cultural undertaking. Belfast City Council, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, Ards CCÉ and a network of partners, venues, performers, workers and volunteers have attempted something enormously ambitious. They have not simply brought a large event to Belfast; they have allowed the Fleadh to occupy the city, opening it to visitors while encouraging residents and communities to see themselves within it.
The emphasis upon accessibility, families, local activity and cross-community participation matters too. Belfast’s musical and cultural identity is complicated, rich and of course drawn from more than one tradition. The wider programme has sought to reflect that. Maith thú
It is, in the fullest and most complimentary sense of the word, Fleadh-bergasting.
And the impact may be breathtaking as well.
According to Belfast City Council; around 800,000 visitors are expected to experience the event, with an estimated £53 million in economic benefit anticipated (says DfI in the Irish News). Hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops, taxis and transport, will all enjoy the effect. The world is tuning in. My uncle contacted me this morning from Australia having watched the news - he left Belfast decades ago and whilst he has visited regularly, to him, after seeing the Fleadh on his tv in Sydney, “Belfast is unrecognisable”. I did reassure him that there was still plenty he would remember, but that powerful message is being broadcast to the globe.
That is unquestionably something to celebrate.
But, (isn’t there always), amid all the music, bustle and entirely justified civic pride, it is worth sparing a thought for the arts organisations in the same city facing funding stagnation and, in some cases, substantial cuts.
The Fleadh does not arrive in a cultural vacuum. When civic cultural managers were bidding for the event, they understood that there was a supportive cultural environment in the city for just such an event. They were undoubtedly confident that sufficient infrastructure was there. And so they programmed accordingly. The wider programme surrounding the Fleadh offers a vibrant representation of not only Belfast but the region’s cultural life: artists, musicians, venues, community organisations, producers, technicians, teachers, volunteers and audiences. The programme draws upon relationships, knowledge and creative practices developed patiently over many years. It can represent and amplify that ecosystem wonderfully, but the Fleadh itself, for all its substantial presence, cannot create or invent it.
And that ecosystem is under considerable pressure.
Many arts organisations have been held in a funding limbo since 2010. Standstill government funding since then has translated into real term cuts, while the costs of salaries, utilities, insurance, buildings and artistic production have continued to rise. Some long-established Belfast organisations are now facing further substantial cuts from the Council at precisely the moment the city is celebrating the scale, vibrancy and economic power of culture.
That seems counterintuitive doesn’t it?
Now, this is emphatically not an argument against the Fleadh. Belfast should host it. And indeed next year, it promises to be even better. We should enjoy it, support it and recognise the sheer effort involved in bringing an opportunity of this magnitude to the city. Nor should this become another wearisome contest between major events and year-round arts provision. A culturally confident city requires both.
The question is what happens next…
If culture can generate an estimated £53 million for the wider economy in a single extraordinary week, surely the time has come to consider how some of that value can flow back into the cultural ecosystem itself.
The economic benefit will not arrive as a single cheque in the City Hall postbox. It will be felt across hospitality, accommodation, transport, retail and the rest. But public policy can still recognise where that value begins and where it could be most impactful. A meaningful Fleadh legacy could include renewed and sustained investment in the artists, organisations, venues and communities that provide the platform for Belfast to be capable of hosting such events, but also supporting our diverse community of creativity and participation.
The Fleadh will leave behind memories, friendships, inspiration, new musical discoveries and, very likely, more than a few sore heads! But its legacy could be greater still. It could pinpoint another moment when Belfast more fully appreciates that cultural vibrancy does not suddenly appear when the banners go up, the stages arrive and the television cameras roll.
It is created and sustained throughout the year—often quietly, and on increasingly precarious resources—by an artistic community working in venues, meanwhile or temporary spaces, schools, studios, parish halls and neighbourhoods across the city.
So enjoy every minute of this extraordinary Fleadh.
But when the last seisiún finishes and the instrument cases finally close, let us ensure that the cultural life so magnificently represented throughout this week is supported to flourish long after the crowds have gone home.
The Arts Matter. Stop the Cuts. Fund the Arts.
