Polka country, mapped from the green
The heart of Sliabh Luachra
Sliabh Luachra is a region, not a town — a high rushy plain where Cork, Kerry and Limerick meet — but every region has a centre, and Scartaglen is as close to Sliabh Luachra's as you'll find on a map. Brosna is twenty minutes north. Knocknagree is fifteen minutes south, across the Munster Blackwater into Cork. Gneeveguilla is twenty minutes west. Castleisland sits on the N21 just below. Padraig O'Keeffe walked and cycled the lot of them for forty years. The triangle is the music. Scartaglen is the pin in the middle.
A village hall that does the work
The Sliabh Luachra Heritage Centre
The Heritage Centre opened in May 2000 — a 200-seat auditorium, a kitchen, meeting rooms, the kind of building that ten years earlier would have been a closed-down dance hall. It runs the Handed Down series, the Young Musicians Gathering, World Fiddle Day, archive recital nights, and a céilí or three a year. The point is not to museum the music. The point is to keep playing it in the room where it gets played. The centre is the reason you can drive to Scartaglen on a wet Saturday in November and find sixty fiddlers in the hall.
Why it sounds different from the rest
The polka and the slide
Most of Irish trad is jigs and reels in 6/8 and 4/4. Sliabh Luachra is polkas and slides — 2/4 and 12/8 — faster, lighter, made for set-dancers in farmhouse kitchens. The bowing is short and hammered, the ornaments tight, the swing a little lonelier than what you'll hear in Clare or Galway. The Napoleonic dancing-masters left polkas and quadrilles around Munster in the 1840s; up on the rushy plain the dancers kept dancing them, and the players kept playing for them, and the radio collectors arrived a hundred years later to find a tradition that had not been told it was meant to die.
Padraig O'Keeffe in bronze, 1983
The bust on the green
On the 29th of July 1983, twenty years after he died, the village unveiled a portrait bust of Padraig O'Keeffe on the edge of the green. It looks across the square at Lyons' Bar, which is where you would have found him most evenings. He had no statue when he was alive — he was a fiddle teacher in a country that didn't make statues for fiddle teachers. The village made him one anyway. World Fiddle Day every May ends with a tune in front of it, more or less by accident, more or less the right thing.