'Whack fol lol le rah!' Inside trad's roaring resurgence

With traditional Irish music hugely connecting with younger generations, Roisin O’Connor speaks to veteran performers and relative newcomers to find out what’s behind its appeal

- Roisin O’Connor

At the Courthouse Tavern in Cork, Irish folk-rock band Kingfishr perch precariously on the world’s smallest stage while their fans, a few hundred strong, cram as close as they can to the front. They roar the lyrics to Kingfishr’s recent No 1 single “Killeagh”, written for bassist Eoin “Fitz” Fitzgibbon’s local hurling team and led by singer Eddie Keogh in his barrelchested baritone: “They’d go raring and tearing and fighting for love/ For the land they call Killeagh and the Lord up above.”

“It’s like Beatlemania,” the pub’s stunned bar manager Emmet tells me, squeezing past to draw another pint of Guinness. Outside, around 1,500 fans are clamouring for Kingfishr to emerge for an acapella session. The gardai (police) turn up to tell them to leave, to no avail. Just your typical Monday evening for a band at the forefront of a massive resurgence in Irish trad (traditional) music.

Suddenly, the sound of banjos, fiddles and tin whistles is everywhere, from newcomer Myles Smith’s breakthrough song “Stargazing” to Ryan Coogler’s genre-melding film Sinners. Riverdance, the Irish entertainment phenomenon, is back out on the road – 30 years since it first ignited an international obsession with Irish dancing at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin. Ed Sheeran brought an Irish-themed pub to Coachella Festival, and there’s a looming threat that we might run out of Guinness. But why is Irish trad resonating so fiercely with younger generations?

“I think a lot of young people have been starved of communication, of human interaction,” renowned button accordionist and trad legend Máirtín O’Connor suggests. Hailing from Galway, O’Connor began playing aged nine and was one of the driving forces in the original