Further Reading

Everything asserted on this site rests on publicly accessible institutions rather than on secondary summaries. This page lists them, and says what each is actually useful for — which is not always what its name suggests.

Music and tune repertoire

Irish Traditional Music Archive — the central repository for Irish traditional music, holding sound recordings, printed collections, manuscripts, photographs and video. This is the first place to go for the tune side of the tradition: the reels, jigs, hornpipes and set dance tunes discussed throughout this site, in both their printed and their recorded forms, including a substantial body of material recorded from emigrant musicians.

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann — founded in 1951, an international organisation devoted to keeping traditional music, song and dance in active practice through classes, sessions, branches and competitions. Useful less as an archive than as evidence of the living tradition and its present geography.

Folklore and social context

dúchas.ie — the digitisation project of the National Folklore Collection, and the single most rewarding free resource on this list for anyone interested in what ordinary dancing was actually like. The Schools' Collection alone, gathered from Irish schoolchildren in 1937 and 1938, contains a very large quantity of incidental description of house dances, crossroads dancing, local musicians, calendar customs and festival practice, in the words of people who remembered the nineteenth century.

National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin — the collection itself, of which dúchas.ie digitises a part. Its manuscript, sound and photographic holdings are the primary record of Irish vernacular culture.

Objects, images and print

National Museum of Ireland — relevant twice over. Its archaeology collections hold the early medieval metalwork, including the great penannular brooches, that revival-era costume design used as a pattern book; its country life collections document the rural material world — kitchens, crafts, clothing, everyday objects — in which the dancing masters worked.

National Library of Ireland — printed, manuscript and photographic material covering the revival period, when the competitive structure and the costume conventions were being invented. Good for seeing what the movement said about itself at the time rather than what was later said about it.

The competitive structure

An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha — the Irish Dancing Commission, established 1927, which certifies teachers and adjudicators, publishes the standardised céilí dances and sets the competition rules described under grades and championships. Its own published rules are the authority for anything specific about grades, tempos or eligibility; general descriptions, including the ones on this site, go out of date.

Irish Dance Teachers Association of North America — the North American teachers' organisation, through which the regional structure on that continent is administered.

Several other organisations also certify teachers and run their own championships internationally. Any claim that a single body speaks for Irish dance as a whole should be treated with care.

Broadcast and spoken language

RTÉ — Ireland's public service broadcaster, with a long history of recording and transmitting traditional music and dance, and an extensive archive.

TG4 — the Irish-language television service. For anyone working through the vocabulary in the glossary, hearing the words used naturally is worth more than any written approximation.

A note on this site's method

This is an independent editorial reference with no affiliation to any dance school, competition, organisation or governing body listed above, and no relationship with any of them. Institutions are cited because they hold the relevant material, not because they endorse anything written here.

Where the tradition is genuinely contested — the age and continuity of the technique, the invention of the costume, the effects of standardisation — this site says so rather than picking a side, and where a rule or a threshold is administrative it points at the body that sets it rather than quoting a number that will be wrong within a few years. Corrections of fact are the only currency that matters in a reference; readers who find an error should assume it is ours.

Return to the front page, or start with the feis.