Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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DeMISe OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
simple ‘píobaí’. 301 Clearly the members of the Dublin Pipers’ Club
did not enthusiastically take up Flood’s term when he presented it to
them, but resisted it. As late as 1928 Séamus Ó Casaide was pointedly
referring to the ‘Irish Union Pipers of Dublin’ being represented at
the funeral of the bellows piper Pat Ward in Drogheda. 302
The reaction of the Irish traditional-music collector and writer
Francis O’neill (1848–1936) of Chicago to Flood’s new term is
particularly interesting. reared in Irish-speaking rural west Cork
until 1865, and a good performer on bagpipes of several kinds,
O’neill had a keen life-long interest in the instrument, its music and
history. 303 In his first major study of Irish music Irish Folk Music:
A Fascinating Hobby, published in 1910, O’neill throughout refers
in normal Irish and Irish-American parlance to ‘pipes’, ‘bagpipes’,
‘Irish pipes’, and, commonly, ‘Union pipes’ (thus capitalised). his
favourite formulation is ‘Irish or Union pipes’ and in this he seems
to have been influenced by the london publications of P. O’Farrell.
It is not until over three hundred pages into the book that ‘Uilleann
or Union pipes’ occurs for the first and only time. The term is not
otherwise explained, and it might seem that he was postponing a
decision on it. O’neill was a correspondent and friend of grattan
Flood’s, but not an uncritical one. In O’neill’s second study, the
massive Irish Minstrels and Musicians, published in 1913, he refers
a small number of times to ‘Uilleann pipes’ (sometimes in reference
to the Irish mouth-blown warpipes), 304 and gives the uilleann =
301
Programme of Cumann na bPíobairí Pipers’ Festival, 23 May 1914.
302
Drogheda Independent, Drogheda, 14 April 1928, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3,
no 27 (July 1996): 20.
303
See Carolan 1997.
304
O’neill 1913: 41. By applying the term to warpipes O’neill again seems to be
keeping his distance from it. All bagpipes are after all elbow-pipes. ‘Uilleann pipes’
was also used to denote warpipes by the well known Kerry-born uilleann piper
Br gildas O’Shea in a lecture he gave in 1922 (Southern Star, 10 June 1922).