Here is a question: what major annual arts prize will be won tomorrow night? It is a question which will be mostly met with resounding silence - but a small, dedicated group will immediately think of the Corn Ui Riada, coveted by seannos singers with the same avidity as the Booker Prize or the Turner Prize are coveted by artists in other disciplines.
Oireachtas na Gaeilge has been running all week in the Waterford town of Dungarvan, and by the end of the weekend, it is estimated that it will have brought 5,000 people to the area. Tomorrow night's competition will be attended by up to 1,000 people, and will be broadcast live on Raidio na Gaeltachta, as will tonight's mens' and women's competitions.
Don't feel too ignorant if you know nothing about it, however. The event, over 100 years old, has tended for years - and perhaps always - to be content to attract the small family of fluent Irish speakers. Perhaps seannos needs a tightly-knit community in which to thrive, a circle of listeners which understands the language and the idiom of the story. Because geographical ones hardly exist any more, the one created by the Oireachtas may be necessary. This is, in any case, the feeling of one young Corn Ui Riada hopeful, the much-acclaimed Roisin Elsafty (23).
She would - you think, when you come face to face with her huge video image singing A Stor Mo Chroi in the introductory section of the Ceol interpretative centre - seem the obvious person to carry seannos into the mainstream, where almost every other Irish traditional art has, in the end, found a place. The purling clarity of her voice combines with the desolate words of this 19th-century song - words whose sense must have been repeated less elegantly, and often silently, hundreds and thousands of times: "When the road is tiresome and hard to tread/and the lights of their cities blind you/ Oh! turn a stor to Ireland's shore/ And the one you leave behind you."
The minor key leaves you in no doubt: he never will.
But Roisin, who came second in the Corn Ui Riada in 1997, and tonight competes in the women's competition in the hope of clutching the Corn itself tomorrow, doesn't think her singing will ever find a wide audience. "There is no wider scope for seannos," she says. "I'm a sean-nos singer, not a singer.
She teaches every year at the Feile Dubhghlas de hIde in Roscommon, has toured to Scotland and to the Interceltique festival in Lorient, France. She has brought out one CD on a French label with her mother, Treasa Ni Cheannabain, and has one song on another French CD. But that is as far as it has gone.
She is not interested in using accompaniment with her songs, which might bring her to the wider audience which enjoys singers like Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, Karan Casey and Cathy Jordan. "My personal point of view is that I don't like it," she says. "I wouldn't like to see the tradition of someone singing a song at face value going away. I can appreciate that accompaniment is important to sell CDs to a wider public, but seannos is unaccompanied. That is the essence of what it is. If you go into accompaniment, there is a chance, and it's a very scary chance, that you'll fall into a steady beat. But it's a story and you can't tell it the same way every time like a story you'd rhyme off in national school. You could leave out notes one time and add them the next. If you have to stay in a steady reprise you're cutting the legs off it."
People do have the oddest ideas about sean-nos singers.
So Roisin Elsafty is going to sit at home in Bearna, Co Galway, cooking griddle cakes, weaving St Brigid's crosses and being a repository of the pure tradition. Actually, she's doing a Ph.D in biochemistry at Nottingham University. She doesn't reckon the singing will ever pay, and so she reckons she'll end up working in industry.
The origins of the songs, both in Irish and in English, are shrouded in mystery, but some of them can be traced back 400 years. They were the pop songs of their day - there are versions of An Clar Bog Deil from Tory Island to deepest Munster, for instance. The stories still grip - love and treachery haven't changed - and it is impossible to see why melodies which are constantly improvised upon, constantly ornamented in different ways, are now so unattractive to a wider public compared with that "steady beat". Perhaps the ornamentation went with a deep understanding of the words. Although a wide public could never now be found which could understand the twists and turns of archaic and sometimes fragmentary Irish in the older songs, Roisin insists it is melody which attracts her to a song, and which can keep an audience listening.
"I sang Eleanor A Run at a wedding in England - it's a love song for this woman who could bring the dead to life - and I got absolute silence. And they were pure English speakers. They couldn't understand the words but they could pick up when something was emotional, happy, sad. That's another reason I'd go for music rather than words."
Her singing came to her the way the story books say it should, however, through her mother, who is a noted seannos and native Irish speaker: "She always sings non-stop around the house and I was always trying to mimic her." Roisin grew up in Castlebar, however, and only moved to Galway when she was 16.
She moved so she could be closer to the pure sources of the tradition.
Actually, she moved because her father, who is an Egyptian doctor, was working at UCG.
Egyptian doctors are not allowed into stories about sean-nos singers.
Actually, Roisin sees a lot of worth in the theories of Bob Quinn's Atlantean, that there is a cultural link between North Africa and the West of Ireland. "I have some tapes belonging to Um Kasoum, who is one of the greats of singing in Egypt. It involves her singing on the stage with a big orchestra behind her. She's singing in the seannos style - there are these twirls and some words can seem like a sentence you can pull so much out of them. She'd sing a line and get a line of applause; and so she'd sing the line again."
Her mother had many women's songs, which seem to document in a fascinating way the emotional lives of women which had no access to written expression. Roisin came second in the Corn with a song called Paipeiri Dha Saighnail - The papers are being signed - which is, she says, "a woman's song about a man going away and she's desolate without him". On her CD, L'Irlande: l'art du sean-nos, she also sings that magnificent woman's song, Donall Og, with its chilling address to the faithless man, which translates: "You have taken the East from me/ You have taken the West from me/You have taken the sun and the moon and the stars from me/ You have taken the bright heart in my breast from me/ And great is my fear that you have taken God from me."
However, Roisin says she is "in a happy mood" at the moment, and this will affect her choice of two songs for the competition. "I was sitting in bed last night making a list of eight big songs and four small songs. Some, I'm not in the mood for. Molly Ni Mhaoileoin, I'm not in the mood for her now. It's about a murderer. He's lamenting the fact that he coaxed that one and he got her into trouble. Then he pushed a knife into her and killed her stone dead and she comes back as a ghost." The choice of song depends, she says, "on where your voice is. I'll sing whatever seems to come with me."
And, yes, it is going to be terrifying: "We're a strange group, the sean-nos singers. There's rivalry although you don't want there to be. There's the young people and the big guns - there is that." There is the awful fear of forgetting the words in front of 1,000 people "in their finery", and worse still, in front of the radio mike "and the people at home who are listening to you".
The relatively small number of people, it must be admitted, who will be listening to Raidio na Gaeltachta tonight and tomorrow night. Even if you have got to the end of this article, you will probably have forgotten by tonight, when passion, fear, and joy are electric in the night air in Dungarvan.
Comortas na bhfear and na mban takes place at the Park Hotel, Dungarvan, tonight at 7.30 p.m. The Corn Ui Riada competition takes place tomorrow in the Sports Hall, Dungarvan at 7.30 p.m. Both will be broadcast live on Raidio na Gaeltachta.
