Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 60
‘the union-pipes’ as píob na comh-sheinm (pipes sounding
together). 168 When the Dublin Museum catalogued sets of Irish
bellows pipes in the late nineteenth century, it called them ‘Irish
Bagpipes’ but explained their other name ‘union pipes’ as being
derived from the chanter playing in unison with the drones. 169
These related explanations, based on ideas of physical or sonic
bagpipe union, fit in neatly with the date of the introduction of
Courtney’s new term, when seen in retrospect. And they had a
robustly rational basis to them, much more so than had Courtney’s
long-forgotten original explanation. They are the explanations that
have been most commonly accepted in recent times.
The Workhouse
One further meaning for the term has been proffered, but only with
tongue in cheek. A bitter joke circulated among the members of the
Dublin Pipers’ Club, founded in 1900 when uilleann piping seemed
in great danger of disappearing with the few last elderly and povertystricken
professional pipers who had survived the post-Famine years:
that they were called union pipers because most of them were
reduced to the ‘Union’ workhouse or poorhouse. 170
168
Armstrong 1825: 443.
169
NLI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 5452.
170
Plain Piper 1912. From 1838 in Ireland parishes were amalgamated into Poor
Law Unions, each of which had to have a workhouse.