Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 78
Demise of ‘Union Pipes’
In Ireland however, as a nationalist separatist political movement
gathered momentum at the turn of the century and as the Irishlanguage
revival spearheaded by the Gaelic League was enjoying
considerable success, the term ‘union pipes’ must have stuck in the
craw of many, in spite of the strong traditional attachment of others
to it. Its perceived (though spurious) connection with the despised
Act of Union would have made it anathema to many of a nationalist
political mindset, as would its association with Ireland’s nineteenthcentury
move towards the speaking of English and away from Irish.
The fact that it was an English-language term with no parallel Irishlanguage
equivalent made it alien (and awkward to use) for Irish
speakers, and the available Irish-language terms píob and píob
mhála made no helpful distinction between mouth-blown and
bellows-blown bagpipes.
The time was auspicious for another turn of the terminological
wheel, and for the introduction of a new term. When it came, it was
again one with little history or logic behind it, but one which would
eventually succeed, like ‘union pipes’ itself, for socio-political
cultural reasons.
The new term was ‘uilleann pipes’. Although he claimed that ‘Union
pipes’ was a ‘strange Anglicised corruption’ which had been in
decline since he had first pointed out the correctness of uilleann in
1890, 282 the idea of it was first publicly introduced, as far as is
known, at a lecture given in Dublin in October 1903 by the Co
Wexford professional church musician Dr W.H. Grattan Flood:
Uillean or Cuish pipes are synonymous, insomuch as we have Uille
or Uillean, elbow, whilst cuish is the forearm… The name “Union”
282
Grove’s Dictionary 1910: V, 194.