Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

83 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
elbow rationalisation. But it is evident that he is keeping a distance
from the term. His preferred terms throughout are again ‘Union
pipes’ or ‘Irish pipes’.
In Ireland however Flood’s term was creeping in, certainly in print.
As early as 1904 the nationalist Weekly Freeman of Dublin in an
obituary of the famous Galway piper Martin Reilly referred to him as
a performer on the ‘Uilleann (Union) pipes’, 305 a term which would
certainly have been unknown to Reilly. The Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen,
a leading Irish lexicographer, included ‘píoba uilleann’ in the 1904
first edition of his famous Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla. An Irish-
English Dictionary and (an each-way bet) translated it as ‘union
pipes’, although oddly it appears only under the head-word uille and
not under píob. 306 A Meath Chronicle festival report of 1907 speaks
of prizes being awarded for performances on the ‘Union or Uillean
pipes’. 307 The programme of the national Irish-language Oireachtas
festival of 1912 uses the heading ‘An Phíb Uilinn’ for the bellowspipes
competition. 308 An Claidheamh Soluis, the national Gaelic
League newspaper, in 1915 speaks of a good performer on the
‘Uilleann pipes’. 309 The two terms then seem to coexist, on a more or
less equal basis, during the years of national turmoil following the
1916 rebellion. When an unsuccessful attempt was made in 1921 to
1922).
305
Weekly Freeman, Dublin, 9 July 1904.
306
Dinneen 1904: 775. The term is treated likewise in Dinneen’s second edition
of 1927, which is still a standard work (Dinneen 1927: 1292). Since Flood’s
term was being widely used in the 1920s, and might be thought to have
warranted an entry under píob, it would seem that Dinneen also was keeping his
distance from it. The term does not appear in his A Smaller Irish-English
Dictionary for the Use of Schools (Irish Texts Society, Dublin, London, 1917).
307
Meath Chronicle, Navan, 3 Aug. 1907.
308
In NLI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8117 (5).
309
Claidheamh Soluis, 2 Jan. 1915.