Heading to the Fleadh is the first comprehensive academic study of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the largest annual festival of Irish traditional music. Using a combination of original fieldwork, archive research, and theoretical frameworks of festival and revival, the book builds the story of the Fleadh Cheoil during its first two decades, from 1951 to 1969. The augural Fleadh was hosted by a nascent Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in Mullingar, County Westmeath, in 1951, modelled as a competition-festival. Over the course of two decades, the festival developed a core set of material and symbolic components, creating a distinct Fleadh identity and embedded itself in the social and cultural world of Irish traditional music, becoming a key driver in the revival during this period. Peopled by musicians, administrators and patrons, the Fleadh can be situated in broader festival literature within the distilled confines of the competition-festival frame. Concerts, competition and its adjudication, céilithe and sessions formed the bedrock of that essential festival life, in a delicate and sometimes fraught balance of formal and informal Fleadh objects explored in this book, all essential to the heightened concentration of the festive experience. In addition to a thorough exploration of these fundamental elements of Fleadh experience, the book identifies the importance of the Fleadh as it is recalled in music making, story and song after the Fleadh, breathing new life into the festival in a process of continuous reenactment. During the 1960s, tensions arose when (it was believed) the common interest of Irish traditional music was not shared by all Fleadh goers, challenging the authority of the Fleadh structure and Comhaltas in the process.

This book presents a critical study of the Fleadh as a transformative, cultural phenomenon and is of interest to students, scholars and to all those with an interest in Irish social and cultural history of the twentieth century.