Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 74
The disaster of the great Famine of the 1840s and the continuing
damage done to traditional social life by high consequent levels of
emigration to Britain and to the United States had of course a catastrophic
effect on Irish bellows piping, and the instrument came close
to disappearing from Ireland by the end of the century. The terminology
for it was not however affected. The popular terms continued
to be used and ‘union pipes’ held its ground (although the pipes themselves
are referred to less frequently, and even then usually in terms
of their decline). In the Dublin directories Maurice Coyne appears
from 1839 to 1861 as a ‘Maker of Union and Scotch Bagpipes’, and
John Coyne similarly from 1855 to 1864. 268 In the early 1850s a
‘most ingenious mechanic, Denis harrington of Cork’ (who later had
to emigrate for lack of orders) was making and exhibiting ‘Union
pipes’. 269 The instrument and its traditional terminology seemed to
limp on: in 1882 the pipe-maker Michael Doogan was exhibiting
three sets of ‘Irish Union Bagpipes’ at an exhibition of Irish arts and
manufacturers, in the rotunda, Dublin, 270 and in 1888 he was still in
business as a bagpipe dealer in Dublin. 271 It would seem that
Courtney’s term was by now hallowed by usage and by association
with the older race of pipers and the vanished glory days of the
instrument. even in the Dublin periodical Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge,
dedicated to the promotion of the Irish language, a blind galway
piper Peter Kelly is reported in 1897 without any adverse comment
as playing ‘Union Pipes’ at a gaelic league meeting in Belfast. 272
268
Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 27, 29.
269
grainger 1986: 2. For his emigration to the United States or Australia see O’neill
1913: 159, Donnelly 2002: 2.14, 38.
270
Exhibition of Irish Arts and Manufacturers, Rotunda, 1882, catalogue in nlI
Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8117 (3).
271
Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, 14 June 1888 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
272
Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. The Gaelic Journal, Dublin, Oct. 1897.