Sung by Barry Gleeson at the Góilín Singers Club, Tom Maye’s Pub, Dorset Street, Dublin, 12 March 2004.
From the Brian Doyle Collection
You’ve heard of St. Denis of France he never had much for to brag on
You’ve heard of St. George and his lance who killed d’old heathenish dragon
The saints of the Welshmen and Scot are a couple of pitiful pipers
And might just as well go to pot when compared to the patron of vipers
St. Patrick of Ireland my dear.
He sailed to the Emerald Isle on a lump of pavin’ stone mounted
He beat the steamboat by a mile which mighty good sailing was counted
Says he The salt water I think has made me unmerciful thirsty
So bring me a flagon to drink to wash down the mullygrups burst ye
Of drink that is fit for a Saint.
He preached then with wonderful force the ignorant natives a teaching
With pints he washed down each discourse for says he I detest your dry preaching
The people in wonderment struck at a pastor so pious and civil
Exclaimed We’re for you my old buck and we’ll heave our blind Gods to the divil
Who dwells in hot water below.
This finished, our worshipful man went to visit an elegant fellow
Whose practise each cool afternoon was to get most delightful mellow
That day with a barrel of beer he was drinking away with abandon
Say’s Patrick It’s grand to be here drank nothing to speak of since landing
So give me a pull from your pot.
He lifted the pewter in sport believe me I tell you it’s no fable
A gallon he drank from the quart and left it back full on the table
A miracle everyone cried and all took a pull on the Stingo
They were mighty good hands at that trade and they drank ’til they fell yet by jingo
The pot it still frothed o’er the brim.
Next day said the host It’s a fast and I’ve nothing to eat but cold mutton
On Fridays who’d make such repast except an un-christian-like glutton
Said Pat Stop this nonsense I beg what you tell me is nothing but gammon
When the host brought down the lamb’s leg Pat ordered to turn it to salmon
And the leg most politely complied.
You’ve heard I suppose long ago how the snakes in a manner most antic
He marched to the county Mayo and ordered them all into the Atlantic
Hence never use water to drink the people of Ireland determine
With mighty good reason I think for Patrick has filled it with vermin
And snakes and such other things.
He was a fine man as you’d meet from Fairhead to Kilcrumper
Though under the sod he is laid let’s all drink his health in a bumper
I wish he was here that my glass he might by art magic replenish
But since he is not why alas my old song must come to a finish because all the liquor is gone.
Song words attributed to: William Maginn (1794-1842)
To celebrate St Patrick’s Day in 1901, the Gaelic League in London organised a mass at Holy Trinity Church, Dockhead, Bermondsy in which the responses where in Irish. This service proved very popular among the London Irish community and grew to become a regular feature of the calendar. In 1905 the event moved to Westminster Cathedral.
In the ITMA Collection there are three original booklets from those early masses in 1901, 1902 and 1905. As well as the mass rites in latin, Irish and English, they feature the music and words to familiar hymns in the tradition like Dóchas Linn Naomh Pádraig and Gabhaim Mólta Bhríde and remind us that the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day has been an international event for over one hundred years.
Shown below is the cover of the booklet from the first Gaelic service at Westminster Cathedral, 1905.
Irish dance continues to serve as an enduring emblem of St. Patrick’s Day festivities, lending colour and spectacle to parades across the globe.
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising to know that there is a dance and tune specifically named after our patron saint and the festival.
St. Patrick’s Day is a traditional set dance that is believed to have originated in Limerick, and has endured as a popular dance among the Irish diaspora. One of the most common versions of the set dance is credited to the early 20th century composer, Stephen Comerford.
Orfhlaith Ní Bhriain writes that the aim of the set dance is to highlight “the virtuosity and technical prowess of the individual dancer”. (Terminology of Irish dance, 2008). There is no better exemplar of this, than the late Celine Tubridy. Watch her version of the St. Patrick’s Day set dance featured at the Willie Clancy Summer School in 2004. She is accompanied by her husband Michael Tubridy on flute.
We also thank Orfhlaith Ní Bhriain and Mick McCabe for permission to share an excerpt on the St. Patrick’s Day step dance from their 2018 publication From jigs to Jacobites (https://trad.dance/)
Written, researched and presented by ITMA Staff
Michael Tubridy was born in 1935 in Kilrush, Co. Clare. He plays tin whistle, flute and concertina and is also a step dancer. He was a member of Ceoltoirí Chualann, led by Seán Ó Riada, and was a founder member of The Chieftains. He also played with the Castle Céilí Band.
As a child, one of his first musical influences would have been his mother’s brother who lived nearby and would visit every Sunday morning. There was a fiddle in the house that he would take down for his uncle to play. He had no formal lessons in his youth, but learned to pick up tunes and musical ideas from other musicians in the bands he played with.
In my interview with Michael Tubridy on the 29th of March, he recalled going to the horse races near his home. One of the stalls had a gramophone that played the tune Off to California on a loop. When he got home that evening he went out onto the family farm with his tin whistle and tried to bring out the tune he had been listening to all day. At that time, he was not certain he would ever hear it again.
He also told me that the flute he plays was made by a man named Wylde, who had worked with Rudall and Rose in London, and dates from the 1830’s/1840s. He bought this instrument for thirty shillings when working in London and continues to use it to this day.
Michael’s style of playing is not forceful, yet it creates a strong rhythm which is maintained by the subtle use of ornamentation and articulation. He does not overpower the sweetness of the melody, and remains faithful to the pure traditional music he heard as a child.
Later in his life, he pursued an interest in Irish traditional step dance. This gave him a unique perspective on the collective unit of both the music and the dancer – each complementing and guiding one another. His wife Céline, a wonderful step-dancer, taught him the dances she had learned – both as a child in Northwest Donegal from the travelling dance masters, and later from Dan Furey and James Keane.
As a dancer myself I was delighted to get the opportunity on my placement to work on the digital edition of Michael Tubridy’s dance book A Selection of Irish Traditional Step Dances. This book was first published in 1998 with 9 dances and a DVD. A digital version of the first edition was made available on the ITMA website in 2015, and a 2nd edition of the book with a further 9 dances was published in 2018. It is a guide to step dancing featuring the steps of renowned Clare dancing masters James Keane and Dan Furey, using a unique system of notation of Michael’s own invention.
Michael told me in the interview that at the time he was developing the notation his wife Céline was teaching a dancing class. He explained the notation to the class and it gave him great encouragement to continue when a Danish girl was able to dance the steps directly from the page.
Nine dances from the first edition of the book were already on the ITMA website, and for my placement I would work with ITMA staff to publish the next nine dances from the second edition, and create a page on the site that would pull all of the resources together in one place. Michael had very generously given ITMA permission to publish the book alongside the videos, making both the instructional video and the notation available for anyone who wanted to learn a dance. It was exciting to be part of this endeavour which I knew would go a long way to help keep the step dancing tradition alive.
Pat Murphy, the videographer, had given ITMA two videos containing all the material for the second set of dances. My first task was to identify the start and end times of each dance in the video and this information helped ITMA staff to edit the original video into nine separate ones. I also detailed the spoken instructions and individual steps as they were presented in the video footage itself. I learned that these time-codes would make it easier for users to learn the dances, as it would allow them to go directly to a particular step within a dance.
The next task was to upload the material to YouTube and then create a page for each dance in the Content Management System of the ITMA website. The link to the YouTube video was included on this page, along with a link to a PDF of the dance notation and the metadata about the recording of the video. The final step was to bring all of these pages together into one place.
The result is a page on the ITMA website featuring videos of all eighteen dances – each performed in full and then slowly with voice-over instructions – the notation for each dance and a download of the full book itself.
Dan Furey / unidentified photographer
I am very familiar with reading scores for vocal or instrumental music but the notation for the steps of the individual dances has helped me see Irish dancing differently. I decided to use the notation from Michael Tubridy’s book and learn a step dance myself. As a former contemporary Irish dancer I was used to dancing on my toes, with my feet turned out and hands by my side. The whole body is one with the music. In traditional step dance however, it is what the feet are doing that is of the utmost importance.
I learned a dance called An Gabhairín Buí. This was a dance that Michael and Céline had learned from Dan Furey and it is danced around two sticks placed on the ground.
It turned out that the tiles in my kitchen were the perfect measurement for me to practice, and I cut myself a pair of sticks for the video recording.
Thank you to Michael Tubridy, ITMA Librarians, Treasa Harkin and Róisín Conlon, and Stephanie Ford for their guidance in this musical project.
This blog was created in association the Department of Music at Maynooth University. Students undertook a five week placement as part of their course and gained experience in research and web publishing.
For those of you who are not familiar with the collection, you can read about Dr John Cullinane and his donation to ITMA here. Many people are excited about my appointment to this job (trust me – I am too!), most people ask me: What do you actually do there all day long? I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the experiences I’m having here at ITMA, and explain a bit about my role as a project cataloguer and the tasks involved with working on the CAC. But let me start from the beginning.
The very first day I was given an in-depth tour of the ITMA premises – I had been in ITMA before for different personal research projects, so was already familiar (and in love with!) the building and especially with all the media which has been made available to the public. It was nice to see “behind-the-scenes” and see how, and where ITMA’s wonderful treasures (records, books, CD’s etc.) are stored. On my first day I also had a chance to get myself acquainted with what John Cullinane had already donated to ITMA, and I braced myself for the collection of his 4th accrual (by the way – accrual was a new word for my vocabulary… I am learning new things every day!).
Stephanie's ITMA Office
The next morning, battling the rain, Maeve Gebruers, head archivist at ITMA, and myself, headed down to Cork to meet with John in his personal office at the Music Department at University College Cork. I hadn’t seen John in a few years, so it was good to meet again, especially to meet him in his personal research haven, where he has stored his collection for many decades. Of course, stories were shared, photographs and hand-embroidered sashes shown, and, as a passionate dance lover, everywhere I looked I found things of interest that made my dance-researcher heart beat that little bit faster. After carrying 12 big boxes full of material down several flights of stairs, and listening to stories about John’s life as a marine biologist over a shared meal afterwards, it was time to tackle the long journey back to Dublin – me with a very humble heart, as John had gifted me a few goodies along with a set of his published books, which are now decorating my new office and are being referenced regularly as I look up dates and names while cataloguing his collection.
John Cullinane and Stephanie SK Marbach, Music Department, UCC
The following day my actual work began. My background lies in primary school teaching and dance research, but I’ve always made a point of complementing my main careers with different small jobs. But like any job, getting familiar with new tasks (and computer systems) takes a bit of time. I work manually, handling the different donated items, while describing and cataloguing them on the computer. The materials are then placed in archival folders and boxes and stored in a specific location at ITMA. All this is documented in a digital file, so that once the collection is made available to the public, the location of specific items of interest can be tracked and brought to the researcher for viewing.
Archival tools and research resources for processing the CAC
For the first part of this process, I got a loan of – would you believe – clay crafting tools from Maeve. These I used to flatten any creases in paper documents and to carefully remove staples. All metal needs to be removed because of the damage that rust can cause to documents. Plastic folders also need to be removed and replaced by either thin plastic paperclips or Mylar – an inert plastic used by archives (another new word for my vocabulary!) Post-its are removed from the original document and stuck on thin tissue-paper, the glue of the post-it can also cause damage to pages in the long run. All these steps ensure the long-term preservation of documents.
I tackle the collection binder by binder – open it up, see what’s inside, clear the documents of unnecessary plastic and metal, sort through them and place them neatly into archival folders, thereby reducing the overall volume and ensuring long-term preservation. This whole process can take quite a significant amount of time, but it’s very rewarding to see the re-housed collection in labelled folders in archival boxes.
Processing the CAC, before and after!
Handling these old documents is not only a very interesting task, it is also a privilege. It offers me an insight into the mind of a passionate collector of dance history. I come across things I myself have collected over the years, but also things I would never have thought of collecting, so I am learning all the time. I see and understand the importance of the different items with regards to the preservation of an art form that is so important for this country, and yet sometimes I feel it’s not validated enough (but don’t worry, I won’t go down that road now…). What I love most about the process, and is something that some people may perhaps find trivial, but I cherish tremendously, are John Cullinane’s personal notes.
John spends many months describing his collection for ITMA before their transfer to No. 73 Merrion Square. In these Word documents, he offers a lot of additional information to the items he has donated. It ranges from factual to humorous, very often offering more information on a specific date, meeting, dancer, competition etc., and is often annotated with small personal anecdotes about his relationship to the item or any similar context. Very often I find myself laughing out loud – his humorous way of explaining or describing situations is a very valuable insight into his personality, his way of thinking and researching, and his way of seeing things. I very much appreciate this insight into the man behind this collection.
A recurring theme in these personal notes is his frustration with undated documents. Providing each item with a date is such an important thing in any field relating to history. I can literally sense John’s frustration of having undated documents through the notes attached to material! Now this is something we can all learn from – next time we write a story, a post, or a letter: always write down a date!
No date! Post-its from the CAC
While handling the material – and if my office-roomie isn’t around – I listen to interviews with John Cullinane, and conducted by him with other dancers. By doing this, I hope to get a better sense of the man and his way of thinking. This will improve my understanding of the material and inform how best to preserve his collection for the benefit of future users.
It is certainly not an easy task, especially as I become more and more aware of the magnitude of his work, and the impact it has had across several continents. It is my hope that in making this collection accessible that people will realise and truly understand the great work that John Cullinane has achieved in documenting the origins of Irish dance and its development over the years to where it is now. There is so much more to Irish step dance than the simple glitz and world cup… and, who knows, perhaps it might also even inspire people to document their own journey and leave a mark on the wonderful world of Irish dance history.
Next month I’ll be telling you about a new challenge I’ve been currently facing, and I hope to let you look over my shoulder as I work. Until then – see you soon, take care, and stay safe!
by Stephanie SK Marbach, September 2022
The Cullinane Archive Collection will be made available to the the public when all transfers and processing is complete.
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