Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

55
MeAnIngS OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
What seems from The Times of 15 May 1788 to be Courtney’s understanding
of his imprecise new term may not have been understood
even by those pipers who used it immediately after his death.
Certainly none of them, not even those who edited or published music
books in the next ten or so years, give any explanation for it. But they
continued to use it because for them also it was a usefully neutral
term, and a prestigious term, one that had received approval at the
highest social levels. It was a label associated with a hitherto unachieved
level of public professional success for a bagpiper, and it
would be strange if they were to discard it, especially since ‘union’
did not at first have the negative political connotations that it would
later take on in Ireland. even when it had, it was by then a well
established term that had created its own tradition. As will be seen,
pipers associated its use with their predecessors, and developed a
loyalty to it that lasted well into the twentieth century. nevertheless,
it would appear that while it soon became an established term, it was
one with no firm established meaning, and one that was ripe therefore
for having further meanings assigned to it.
Act of Union 1800
It has occasionally been said that the union pipes derived their name
from the Irish Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish
parliament in Dublin and provided Ireland instead with reduced
political representation from Westminster. 163 The Act was brought
into effect by bribery and corruption rather than by consent, and it
led to more than a hundred years of economic, social and political
decline in Ireland. The word ‘union’ shrank in meaning there to
into question (Proud & Butler 1983: 3). William hogarth has also been criticised
for the inaccuracy and carelessness of his eighteenth-century bagpipe depictions
(Barlow 2005: 225).
163
For example, ‘The name of Union pipes probably originated from the instrument
having appeared about the time of union of the Irish and english parliaments...’