Catching Up: 1.65 Million People And Nobody Asked Permission
Our Own Ground • No. 2
1.65 million people walked through Belfast this week for a festival that never once asked permission to exist.
The Argument Ended Without A Vote
They forecast 800,000 across eight days. A million had come through by Friday, with the three biggest days still to run.
5,000 musicians and dancers from 22 countries. 180 competitions. Tents in Ormeau Park, tents in the Titanic Quarter, tents in the Falls Park. The stage at City Hall going from eleven in the morning until eleven at night, every day, for eight days. The whole city centre shut to traffic from six on the Sunday morning and handed over to fiddles.
Children carrying instrument cases bigger than themselves through streets their grandparents would not have walked with a bodhrán. Tunes at bus stops. Tunes in doorways. A hundred and seventy thousand people on the opening Sunday alone, which is nearly twice what that Sunday would normally hold.
Derry drew 430,000 in 2013 and Comhaltas called it the biggest fleadh ever held. Derry’s 430,000 against 1.65 million is now almost four times over. Belfast almost quadrupled it.
Now think about what has been said about Irish culture in this city for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. That it is contentious. That it belongs up its own road. That the city centre is neutral ground and putting it there would be a provocation, or a risk, or premature, and the sensible thing is to wait until conditions improve.
Nobody defeated that argument this week. Nobody debated it. Nobody passed a motion. A 170,000 people showed up on a Sunday for tunes, and by Wednesday it had stopped being a thing anybody had to answer.
Fifty Years And A Sceptic
Their chairman Niall McClean has been going to fleadhs for forty years. Afterwards he admitted he had been “a little bit sceptical with it being a complex city” that it would work at all.
Read that again, because it is the best thing anybody said all week. The man who built it doubted Belfast could carry it. He built it anyway. Then a million people came and answered the question for him, which is the only way a question like that has ever been answered.
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Comhaltas did not spend fifty years proving it deserved the city centre and then apply for one. It built the thing until the permission was beside the point, and then held the door open for everybody. You can only hold a door open on ground you are already standing on.
The Word At The Front
Colum Eastwood MP was in the same city in the same week, chairing his party’s New Ireland Commission at a Féile an Phobail event on the next steps to unity, and he reached for the Fleadh himself. We are at our best, he said, when we come together.
He is not the problem here, and this is not a cheap shot at him. The commission he chairs has had expert panels working on health, the economy and education since 2021, which is more preparation than most people who talk about this have ever done. He has said plainly, more than once, that the case for a new Ireland is a better health service and fewer people in poverty. The man has the concrete material.
Look instead at the vocabulary his project publishes. The party’s page on the commission says “the only path to uniting the people of this island” runs through partnership, cooperation and reconciliation. Its statement of vision is a reconciled people living in a united new Ireland. Reconciled first. United second. In that order, in their own sentence.
Reconciliation is a good thing and nobody sane is against it. But as a precondition it has no definition, no threshold and no finish line. Nobody ever stands up and certifies that we are now sufficiently reconciled to be asked a question. Which makes it perfect for anyone who would rather the question was never asked, and they did not even have to invent it. It was handed to them, at the front of the vision, by the people who want the question asked most.
Then look at what came out of the room. Momentum is “unstoppable,” and significant work remains before we get there. Those two clauses hold each other upright. Unstoppable has nobody in it, because nothing is asked of anyone by a thing that cannot be stopped. Work-still-to-do is why there is no date, no threshold, no number that anyone could check against a calendar this time next year.
Comhaltas never wrote a principle about earning the city centre. It taught children to hold a bow for fifty years and then opened a door.
Catching Up
One half of this tradition spent fifty years in committee rooms and has now taken the middle of this city twice over, this August and next. The other half spent the same fifty years putting a word at the front of its vision that nobody can define and nobody can finish, and then wondering why it keeps being told to wait.
Niall McClean was sceptical it would work. He built it anyway, and he was wrong in the best possible way, in public, with 1.65 million witnesses.
That is the better way to be wrong. Sceptical and building beats certain and waiting, every single time.
And if you were out there this week, in the crowd at City Hall or squeezed into a session with a pint you could not reach, you already know how this ends. Nobody gave us that week. Nobody signed it off. We just played, and the city came.
Part of a wider body of work on Irish politics and unity. Follow on for the rest.
