For all its kudos, and in spite of magnificent performances, traditionalmusic struggles to attract a paying crowd, writes Siobhán Long

Traditional music is in a bind. Never has its pulse been so healthy, rarely has it enjoyed such kudos, yet increasingly its practitioners are faced with emigration in order to make a living from it.

The trouble with a commodity as readily available as traditional music is that familiarity breeds not so much contempt as freeloaders. Why fork out good money for the music when you can catch it in the local snug? It's a predicament that's strangling a generation of musicians with talent to burn but barely enough money to pay the rent.

The music is suffering from the converse of the old Irish adage An rud is annamh is iontach: what's seldom is wonderful. In the case of the tradition, its ailments are directly linked to its ubiquity - yet if most musicians took to the planes, trains and automobiles that would promise a better livelihood, we'd probably rear up at their audacity in abandoning their home turf.

The year has offered a feast of magnificent music, scattered throughout the country. Galway's impish and genius box player Mairtín O'Connor shocked and stilled a packed house in Killarney with a bravura performance of age-old tunes and new creations, buoyed by his limitless imagination and by the glorious cross-fertilisation offered by Garry Ó Briain, Ken Edge, Cathal Hayden, Dervish's Seamie O'Dowd and the percussionist Danny Bert.

This was music to shake your booty to, and O'Connor relished navigating its uncharted terrain as much as the rest of us.

Then there was the inspired partnering of Matt Molloy and the West Ocean String Quartet at the National Concert Hall, flute, cello and fiddle neither intimidated nor diluted by the heady environs of Earlsfort Terrace.

Similarly, Liam Ó Flynn and Steve Cooney communed with the superb young Dublin fiddler Liam O'Connor in one of the capital's most underrated venues, the refurbished auditorium at Liberty Hall, while La Bottine Souriante reminded us to lubricate our hips, shoulders and ankles before attempting to keep up with their effervescent mix of boot-slapping French Canadian polkas and Acadian, Basque, jazz and salsa rhythms.

There were memorable nights at Mother Redcap's, a venue that made a particularly welcome return this year, including one with Sliabh Notes, another with the Donegal singer and guitarist Kevin Doherty and yet another with his first cousins, the deliriously rabid 4 Men and a Dog.

But the sessions that tickle the memory cells with greatest pleasure are a couple of low-key performances in the depths of west Kerry.

One was in Feoghanach, at An Cúinne, where Seamus Begley and Johnny Óg Connolly followed a particularly rambunctious night with one of the most sublime couplings of the box, each player lending local tunes and local tinctures to the other's repertoire.

Another was in Dingle, where the Cork box player Dave Hennessy and the guitarist and banjo master Mick Daly jousted merrily with the singer Pauline Scanlon and a plethora of local musicians and singers.

With barely enough room to inhale the next set, they buoyed us all home on a wave of fine tunes and seafaring stories.

Ciarán Ó Maonaigh, this year's TG4 Young Traditional Musician of the Year, was another great find, tucked shyly in the midst of a session in Dingle's An Droichead Beag during the summer.

And, yes, amid the highs lurked the occasional low. The gifted piper John McSherry let an entire houseful of disciples down with a particularly disappointing performance, but such occasions were a mercifully rare sight on the radar during 2003.

And, yes, traditional fans are capable of enjoying most other music too. A clear stand-out on the live front this year had to be Gillian Welch, an American singer-songwriter whose poetry distils to a level of purity that only the finest whiskey stills can match: a snapshot of Americana to be relished and revived again and again.