Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 76<br />
(who later had to emigrate for lack of orders) was making and<br />
exhibiting ‘<strong>Union</strong> pipes’. 269 The instrument and its traditional<br />
terminology seemed to limp on: in 1882 the pipe-maker Michael<br />
Doogan was exhibiting three sets of ‘<strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Union</strong> Bagpipes’ at an<br />
exhibition of <strong>Irish</strong> arts and manufacturers, in the Rotunda, Dublin, 270<br />
and in 1888 he was still in business as a bagpipe dealer in Dublin. 271<br />
It would seem that Courtney’s term was by now hallowed by usage<br />
and by association with the older race of pipers and the vanished<br />
glory days of the instrument. Even in the Dublin periodical<br />
Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, dedicated to the promotion of the <strong>Irish</strong><br />
language, a blind Galway piper Peter Kelly is reported in 1897<br />
without any adverse comment as playing ‘<strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’ at a Gaelic<br />
League meeting in Belfast. 272 The Cork Pipers’ Club, the first <strong>Irish</strong><br />
pipers’ club, was founded in Cork city in March 1898 when the<br />
bellows instrument (as distinct from the recently revived mouthblown<br />
pipes) seemed on the verge of disappearance. 273 For bellows<br />
pipes, the Club seems from newspaper reports of its early years to<br />
have favoured the term ‘<strong>Irish</strong> pipes’ but not infrequently used ‘union<br />
pipes’. The term had survived the vicissitudes of the second half of<br />
the century and was being used naturally by a purposeful group of<br />
nationally minded piping revivalists and Gaelic League supporters.<br />
‘The piper with whom we are best acquainted’, said Fáinne an Lae,<br />
a national Gaelic League newspaper, in the very last days of the<br />
century, ‘is the player of the <strong>Union</strong> pipes... the <strong>Union</strong> piper’. 274<br />
269<br />
Grainger 1986: 2. For his emigration to the United States or Australia see<br />
O’Neill 1913: 159, Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 38.<br />
270<br />
Exhibition of <strong>Irish</strong> Arts and Manufacturers, Rotunda, 1882, catalogue in NLI<br />
Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8117 (3).<br />
271<br />
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 14 June 1888 (reference courtesy Seán<br />
Donnelly).<br />
272<br />
Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. The Gaelic Journal, Dublin, Oct. 1897.<br />
273<br />
Mitchell-Ingoldsby 1998: 6–12.<br />
274<br />
Fáinne an Lae, 9 Dec. 1899.