Transcripts

Introduction

Welcome to The Access Folk Podcast and our special series on Folk Arts, Cultural Policy and the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Over three episodes we will explore Folk arts and policy through the lens of arts organisations across the UKs devolved nations and regions and the Isle of Man. 

My name is Esbjörn Wettermark and I am a researcher with Access Folk at the University of Sheffield, England. 

I started this project together with my colleague Fay Hield, in the context of a sudden change in the UK’s international commitment to its living heritage and traditions. In 2024 the UK performed a u-turn in its stance towards the UNESCO 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage and became the 183rd country to sign up to the convention. As a signatory of the convention, the UK sets out to create an inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage within its borders and a strategy to how this living heritage will be safeguarded for future generations. 

I want to explore what the implementation of the Convention might mean for folk arts on these isles and how it connects with the cultural policy climate that folk arts organisations and grassroots scenes are already working within. 

Over the summer of 2024 I travelled to different parts of the isles and talked to folk arts development organisations in Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and Cornwall. Over the course of these three episodes we will listen to their voices and reflections. Hopefully you as listeners will get a better understanding of how cultural policy affects folk arts across the Isles. 

But first you might wonder what I actually mean when I talk about folk arts and policy? 

There are many different words to describe folk arts, or traditional arts, but in this context I am talking about art forms, and styles of cultural expressions, which have a base in oral transmission, that have a sense of connection to place and are perceived by the practitioners as being a peoples culture, something connected to everyday life rather than being part of an institutionalised art form. 

As any term trying to encapsulate a wide range of practices, it is vague and flawed, but still useful as an umbrella term. Some of the organisations we’ll hear from are focused primarily on folk song and traditional music, others also include dance, storytelling, folklore and crafts. 

What about policy then?

First of all, for anyone from outside of the UK it is important to be aware that, since the 1990s culture has been a devolved issue across the UK’s nations and regions. Central government does have a responsibility for arts and culture through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 

But, regional governments make their own decisions about priorities, policies and funding for arts and culture within their areas. Regional Arts Councils are then charged with allocating culture funding to eligible arts organisations and individuals according to various strategies and investment plans. 

It is hard to define a single meaning of ‘policy’, but to a degree it can be described as ‘a plan of action to achieve a particular goal’. Often we might assume that policy is the direct result of legislation passed by central or devolved governments. But, In reality, the policies that citizens and organisations have to relate to are often quite far removed from the work of elected politicians.

Public policy expert Prof. Paul Cairney at the University of Sterling, notes that Government is simply too big and complex to be directly managed by elected officials, and a lot of policy making is almost by default delegated to public service staff and organisations .

Ministers and politicians may make proclamations about the direction of culture policy, but, there are multiple levels of interpretation and implementation that takes place before government work impacts grass roots organisations. Rather than only looking at official documents and decisions, we therefore need to consider where the action is on the ground, who is affected by policy, how and when. 

The folk arts organisations I am talking to, all have a long standing relationship with their local arts council and as such they are constantly having to adapt and relate to their councils interpretation of government policies and priorities. And I would argue that this is really where the policy action is. 

With this in mind we are going to move onto the first interview and our first stop is the Isle of Man.

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is a small island nation in the Irish Sea, more or less halfway between Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England. Importantly, it is not part of the UK, but an independent nation, one of three UK Crown Dependencies, which also includes the channel islands Jersey and Guernsey. Many people outside of Isle of Man have only heard of its annual, and notorious, motorcycle race, but the island has a fascinating history and culture with both celtic and norse influences.

 Its parliament, Tynwald, itself a norse name, is allegedly one of the oldest continuous parliaments in the world. Manx, the island’s once almost extinct Gaelic language, is enjoying a revival. There is a Manx medium primary school, as well as language courses and training provided for adults wanting to learn or improve their language skills. 

The island's small population of only around 85 000 people, makes its cultural infrastructure unique and the distance between the Government, the Isle of Man Arts Council and other arts organisations is arguably very close. The island’s arts development organisation is called Culture Vannin and I was fortunate enough to visit their director Breesha Maddrell at their arts centre in St John’s on the middle of the island in the summer of 2024. 

Interview with Breesha Maddrell

Hello Breesha, lovely to be here and to talk to you about Isle of Man and Culture Vannin.  Would you like to just introduce yourself and your organisation a bit?

Yeah, I’m Breesha Maddrell.  I’m the director of Culture Vannin and Culture Vannin actually goes under a longer name of the Manx Heritage Foundation. Culture Vannin is our trading name.  We were set up in 1982 by an Act of Tynwald, which is the Isle of Man’s parliament, to support, really, the culture of the Isle of Man and its people.  Its culture and its cultural heritage. We have an incredibly wide remit, so we will support intangible cultural heritage, such as music and folklore and traditions and language, but we also support industrial development, archaeology, ecology.  It’s a really crazy wide remit.  But it gives us a lot of freedom to support things through development work and through giving out grants to the community, and working with people to advocate for Manx culture. 

So, how big is the organisation? 

So, we have three full time development officers and then we have three other staff.  

We’re a charity, so we have a charity board and they will give strategic direction for the organisation and they involve politicians as well, and they are appointed by Tynwald, by our parliament. They will include lay members, they include one representative from the Isle of Man Arts Council and one representative from Manx National Heritage, which is our national museum service.  So, in that way, we coordinate with those other bodies and we have people from the community who might have a different experience. They might be a practitioner, a creative practitioner, they might be somebody who is just interested in supporting Manx culture, or they might have experience in education because our charity has quite a strong educational focus.  

So, what are the main things you do on a week to week basis?  

There’s no typical day here. We have a very small cultural centre in St John’s in the middle of the Isle of Man, and that’s open to the public during the week and our offices are upstairs. So, we have a music and dance officer who might be going into schools. She might be running a festival or event. She might be creating new resources, a whole host of things, answering questions from academics around the world, anything. We have a language officer who on a daily basis will be teaching adults, either in our building or close by in a café, and then she will also do advocacy work, process translation request, do a whole host of things and then an online and educational resources officer, and he will be preparing our social media, he might be editing films, or editing sound files. Because we’re an organisation that has to have a larger reach than this small number of people, and you do that best and cheaply by having a good online presence.  Then we have finance officers.  We need to have a good finance officer, always. Operations officer who deals with the grant applicants with me, and then me trying to talk between the board and their ideas and the officers and try to keep the organisation hanging together and having a good focus. And, there’s a political aspect to what we do as well, because we have two politicians on our board, and our funding comes from Government, so we get a treasury grant and we get lottery duty, which varies. So, it’s a duty on people buying lottery tickets that is shared between the UK and the Isle of Man, and that will vary from month to month.  So, we have a lot of very careful planning.

Interesting then, so there’s an Isle of Man Arts Council, but you get your funding not from the Arts Council, but directly from Government or parliament here?

Yes.

So, what is the relationship between you and the Arts Council?

Thankfully, a very good one.  When I was working somewhere else, I was a volunteer member of the Arts Council, so I’ve experienced it as that sort of member of the board as well.  But we have a good working relationship with our officers.  So, when I came here, as a music officer, and later became the director, I really wanted to have good coordination.  So, we have a really good relationship with them and with representatives from Manx National Heritage. And, we would meet together maybe three times a year or four times a year, to talk about what we’re doing and what our projects are and we will phone each other up and email each other on a daily basis if we need to,  or we’ll go weeks without consulting them.  Then the formal arrangement is through our board.  So, an Arts Council volunteer member then opts to be a charity member of our board as well and they bring a lot of advice, a lot of knowledge of what the Arts Council is doing. The Arts Council is part of the Department of Education, Sport and Culture and it’s a delegated body of the Minister of Education. So, it has a different function, and the Department of Education employs some of those officers. We’re not civil servants here. We are loosely… it’s connected, we’re using public money, but we are not in that same structure. But we would see a lot of what we do supporting the wider Government and we would give a lot of advice, translations, information, information for events.  We will be a point of contact for them, for Manx Culture.  

So, that’s very interesting to see how those different organisations work together and what the remits are. 

Thinking about what you say, you have politicians on your board and you have something you have to produce for the point of Isle of Man’s government.  So, what current policies would you say have the biggest influence on the work you’re doing?

Well, funnily enough, one of the biggest ones is the National Development Strategy for culture and the arts, which we wrote with the Arts Council.  So we worked together to write that and that is something that is a national development strategy that is accepted by Tynwald, and then we report on that every year to the council of ministers, which is all the ministers from the government departments.  So, at the moment, we’re writing that report.  So, that’s one of the main policies that we fall into, but we support a lot of the work that the government does for education, for the education bill references, Manx language, Manx culture, Manx history. So, over our 40 years, we’ve produced lots of school resources. We’ve supported teachers in developing their own and we’ve gone into schools to deliver workshops. We’ve produced films about coastal erosion so that the geography students find it easier to understand in a context that is the Isle of Man. Biosphere is something that… we are the only whole nation biosphere in the world, so we serve on the stakeholders group for biosphere and we will bring information about the cultural elements to pass through that.

Can we talk a little bit more about that? So, the biosphere project, can you explain that for somebody who has not come across it before?  In short?

It’s difficult to sum up in a short way, but it’s about celebrating that this is a very special place to live, but it’s not just about the natural environment. It’s called Man and the Biosphere.  It’s how humans fit into this world, and so culture is a really important part of biosphere and we are reporting on this to UNESCO in 2026.  Biosphere is part of the Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture. They have a very small team, two people. They engage with the community, they engage with schools and everything is about how you celebrate what is special about this island. So, the Isle of Man had to create a very large submission to put into say would we qualify and we do. Then it gives us a focus for how we think about how we live in this environment, in these landscapes, in these seascapes, how we nurture our culture, how we nurture an awareness of everything from that environment. So, we sit on a biosphere stakeholders group, and we can influence that, and we can report there.

So, thinking about that, was the designation of the biosphere… did that change anything in the way you were working?

It didn’t change the way we were working in lots of respects, because we just felt that everything that we do anyway for Manx culture and cultural heritage, just could be lifted up and said, yes, this satisfies a lot of biosphere. But perhaps it changes the perception of what we do and maybe the value of what we do to people outside of our little world, because they have to understand that biosphere is not just the environment.  It’s not just what is happening in the sea, what is happening up the hill.  It’s about people and people carry culture with them and so they’re more interested in the language, they’re more interested in the different traditions and the folklore and the dance. And, it’s helped really spread the word to different people, and to have different voices all advocating for Manx culture. So, I think that’s been the greatest impact that we have seen, and it gives Manx culture a seat around a table, which is the biosphere stakeholder meetings. They’re chaired by a chief minister, which is our top politician, and so he would then hear what has happened in Manx culture. So, it may be our language officer telling him there’s been a New York Times article and it’s reached 220 million people around the world and they’d go, oh, this is exciting. So, they can see that there can be a big impact, or that 1000 children took part in the Manx folk awards, and when you live on an island that has only 85,000 people, this is a significant number. So, it gives us a chance to give a voice to the cultural community, and to take that to the table full of politicians and community stakeholders.  

So, when it comes to the work you do with language, which I know is very important, how does that feed into the folk arts as well?

We don’t have a strong literary tradition for the Manx language.  The song tradition is a huge part of it. We have a lot of religious texts that were translated, but the song tradition is incredibly important. So, the song texts are very important and people have been singing those songs in living history and then there was a very strong revival in the 1970’s, revivals before that in the 50’s and the 20’s, but it’s something… that is where you would hear the songs being sung in different ways, by different people, being shared, people joining in with the choruses, people having their particular song that they always sing.  So, it would be there, but it would also be in different folk sayings, different little things about how something is worth something or the language… the Manx language is also here in the Manx English dialect, and you’ll find lexical items from Manx appearing in Manx English and they would be commonly known.  So, we took one of those names, ‘cooish’ which is having a chat, but it also had another meaning of being a cause, like something you fight for.  So, we took that name, the ‘cooish’, and that’s the name of our language festival, because people are used to hearing it and saying it, because it’s a dialect word.  It’s familiar to them, but they might not have realised it’s from the Manx language.  A lot of it is to do with folk culture, because it’s the names of the dances, the names of the songs, the texts of the songs, the different little sayings and traditions people would have. 

So, thinking about the interest in folklore, the storytelling and the connection to the land, have you got any feedback from your funders, politicians?  What is their thought about that?  Do they see it as important work?

Well, some of them do, because for a long time, when I was growing up, a lot of the MHK’s, the Members of the House of Key’s, the lower house of our parliament, came from farming families. So, it’s something that is important to them. That’s less of the cases now. I think people enjoy that sense of nostalgia sometimes and that’s maybe all that they get from it and they might not see why you’re collecting it, that it’s important to preserve for future generations, where it’s important that people feel their stories have been heard. 

We report annually to our politicians. We give them our annual financial statements and reports. We write an annual review which tells people what we do. We highlight one aspect of our work, but politicians have to read a lot of papers. Some of them will find it very important and some of them will just be pleased that you’ve done your job, it’s all been audited properly and it moves on. But the ways that they really see the work is when we partner with the Department of Education and the Manx Folk Awards: a wonderfully positive experience for all the island’s schools, and they see 1000 children, and they might be invited as a politician to present a prize and they see the standard is wonderful, they’re singing in Manx, they’re singing in English.  They’re playing their own tunes, they’re playing traditional tunes.  The dances are great. And, they see that spirit of inclusion and of being positive to all those young people, and they can recognise that. Some politicians look at our Manx National Week around our National Tynwald Day, and they want to see lots happening then.  They want the children to be able to know they’re from the Isle of Man, or they’ve come to live in the Isle of Man. They want them to be able to sing the national anthem here, “The Land of Our Birth” because that seems to be important to politicians.  What’s great about our anthem is it comes from a very old folk tune.  So, like lots of anthems, it has a longer history.  So, they might want specific things to happen, and on Tynwald Day, our doors are open and quite a few of the politicians will come in and out. They’ll see our Lego model of Tynwald Day, and they might see what is meant to be one of them walking up and down. So, there are times where they become more aware of their cultural identity than others, and I see it in particular when they’re talking to people from outside the island. So, we might welcome visiting politicians here to give them a sense of what this place is about.  When our politicians go somewhere else to meet say the President of Ireland, they might be conscious about this part of our culture and cultural heritage, because it would be more understandable to the Irish politicians. So, I would say it’s evolving.  But how important they find it changes at different points.

So, one thing that started off this project had been the ratification of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage [Convention] and of course you’re not in the UK, but could you say a few things about how you think this might still affect what you do?

So, there’s the option for the Crown Dependencies, for it to extend to us and I know it’s being considered at the moment and I’m very hopeful, because I’m hopeful about most things. I think if you’re involved in culture or cultural promotion, you have to be hopeful about lots of things. And, I certainly think it will not be a simple thing, but it has to be a good thing if it brings the subject of intangible cultural heritage to people’s minds, to politicians minds in particular. Because, we found it difficult being an organisation that didn’t have a physical presence for years. We were dotted around different sites, around the island and not gathered together and when we developed a cultural centre, we were able to say, here’s a tangible thing, here's a place you can visit. This is a place you can come and do your harp lessons or you can come and sit and read some books and find out more. You can visit as a tourist.  So, intangible cultural heritage needs more visibility and if it gives intangible cultural heritage more visibility and a greater sense of value, then it will be a great thing, so we’re crossing fingers. 

Thinking about the geographical position of where you are, you are just opposite …

Tynwald Hill.  So, it’s in a way quite symbolic that you are in the middle of that landscape as well here.

It is and that’s what the original legislation said, we should have been next door, where the school is, the Manx Medium School, unless there was a better use and we’re so glad there was a better use and there is a Manx Medium School, but we’re in what was an old police station. But we’re in a very visible place, and this feels like a cultural heart to the island. One of the older politicians, who died many years ago, he talked about this as the cultural vale of the island, which is quite a poetic way to talk about it, but actually it is, I think it has an importance, Tynwald Hill, as a meeting place since Viking times. As a place where people come together. They read out the laws, where people can present and resolve disputes, where people can come together and celebrate, where they can have a bit of fun, because there’s a fair.  It’s great. Yeah, it’s a good place to be.  It’s certainly somewhere that makes sense to everyone. 

[end of interview]

Culture Vannin is unusual as it is both working together with the Isle of Man Arts Council to develop cultural policies and at the same time is one of the organisations delivering on those policies. This arrangement is of course due to the Isle of Man’s unique context. And, although it allows Culture Vannin to be very proactive in their work, it also means that they are being more closely monitored by elected politicians than many folk arts organisations in the UK.

Northern Ireland

We are now going to move across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland and the Armagh Pipers Club. Over the last 15 years, Northern Ireland has gone through a series of political turmoils and even suspension of its devolved legislative powers. But in 2024 the Northern Ireland Assembly, Stormont was again reinstated after the Democratic Unionist Party agreed to end their boycott of the power-sharing agreement. However, the ongoing political tension has affected policy making and government support to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for many years. 

The Armagh Pipers Club has played an important role for traditional music across Ireland; not only in the north but also in the Republic. As one of the first arts organisations in the North promoting Irish traditional music, and Uilleann piping in particular, they have long campaigned for intercommunity dialogue, promoting Irish music as a glue that brings people together, regardless of their backgrounds. I travelled to Armagh City and sat down with Ciarán Ó Maoláin to learn more about their organisation and relationships with funders and policy makers. 

Interview with Ciarán Ó Maoláin

Hello Ciarán .

Hi, Esbjörn you’re most welcome to Armagh.

Thank you very much. So could you tell me a little bit about the Armagh Pipers Club and what you do, and the history behind it.

Armagh Pipers Club is a voluntary organisation that was founded in 1966. Initially with the aim of preserving the tradition of Uilleann piping in Armagh, but it very rapidly expanded into teaching other Irish traditional music. Today, we have about 200 students who attend weekly evening classes in eight instruments plus singing. And our other main activity, apart from the classes, is organising an annual International Piping Festival called the William Kennedy Piping Festival. 

[Students] are they mostly coming here from Armagh city or?

They come from a very wide catchment area, there are about five counties represented in our intake most years, and in some years, we've had six counties represented, and that's from both sides of the border. So the majority would come from County Armagh, then, in descending order, from Tyrone, Monaghan (IE) and, well, the other counties that have been represented but not big numbers now would be Louth (IE), Caven (IE), Fermanagh, Derry and Antrim. So it's probably a 40-mile radius of Armagh city. The reputation of the club has grown over the years, and we're seen as a very prestigious organisation to come from. A lot of our students have gone on to quite distinguished careers in music, and I suppose our reputation makes us an attractive place to study. 

So thinking about Northern Ireland specifically, and the kind of division between Catholic and Protestant communities. Is that something that you have been working with in your organisation as well.

It’s something that we have been combating since our establishment in 1966. When the Armagh Pipers Club came into being, there was a Unionist one party government which traditionally disparaged anything to do with Irish culture and certainly would not have been associated with funding or supporting Irish culture in any way. There was a perception among the Unionist parties that traditional music in particular belonged to the Catholic side of the community. That was never the case. There were always very important inputs by Protestant arts activists to ensure the survival and flourishing of Irish music.  And from day one, Armagh Pipers Club has resisted the notion that it belongs to either side of the community, and it has sought to ensure that both among its membership and on its, what is now its board, now that it's a company, it was previously a committee, that there's representation from both major sectors of the community and from anywhere we can, you know, to involve people who from who don't identify with either of those communities. So it's problematic for us in that there still is a widely held perception that because we are involved in Irish traditional music, that we must be part of the Catholic culture. It's actually, if you like, but that's something that we strongly resist and always have. We believe that the music is the common heritage of everyone who lives here, and we seek out opportunities to demonstrate our commitment to cross community working by for example, using Protestant churches as performance venues. We have a very good relationship with the Presbyterian Church here in Armagh, which hosts some of the main concerts in our annual festival, and we have also performed regularly in the Church of Ireland Cathedral. 

Well, in terms of funding of traditional arts organisations, Armagh Pipers Club was the very first to receive Arts Council money in 1973, I think it was, and we've had some funding from them, and every year since then. So we have had a very long relationship with the Arts Council, not always, entirely without a little bit of friction. We have been lobbying for years and years to have the amount of funding increased. But in general, the Arts Council recognises us as an important part of the arts infrastructure here, and it has given us what it calls standstill funding, which means that the amount of money remains the same, even though the value is declining year after year with inflation. 

So I noticed that the Arts Council Northern Ireland has a new 10-year strategy. I think from 2024.

Yes.

Have you noticed any difference from the last strategy to now in the way they are talking about …

Not so far, but one change that has been widely anticipated is that they intend to move towards a three-year funding cycle, rather than a one year cycle that we've endured for the last well, for the entirety of our relationship with them. The current system is that we have to apply every year afresh, as if we had just appeared out of nowhere. So even though they know that we have a very long record of delivering our education program, and 30 years now of delivering our festival, every application is treated as a brand new one. And, we have to make the case again as to what we can do, how we can do it, the groups that we serve, the need that we are addressing the outcomes that we anticipate. And then, of course, masses of information about how we intend to use the funding. Then we have to report in the middle of the project and at the end of the project, for the textual report, accompanied with copious amounts of financial data, and before we get to the end of a current financial year, we have to start the application process for the next year. So we do spend an awful lot of time working to produce documentation for the Arts Council. And hopefully a move to a three year funding cycle will mean that is not as onerous a burden as it is now.  

Apart from the kind of economic accounts reporting there, do you have to respond to things like environmental impact or gender balance and all these things directly as well?

The Arts Council and the project forms asks questions about the number and age of audiences, and then we occasionally get served on things like the ethnic origins, the religious or community background, the number of people with disabilities, the sexual orientation of people who attend festival events, and so on. And most of these we are unable to answer because we are unwilling to carry out the types of investigative research that would be needed to be able to break down the community background or the ethnicity of our participants. We don't see any need for it. We don't see that it meets any objective about improving the effectiveness of the Arts Council. There is data that we collect that most arts organisations don't, that we think would be objectively useful to the Arts Council. We use the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency’s data to identify the level of deprivation in each of the areas that our students come from. So we are able to say with objective data that 60% plus of our students, those who live in the north, are in relatively disadvantaged areas. Disadvantages being measured in terms of things like the levels of unemployment, the number of people on benefits and then access to services and facilities. So we can show, we can prove, that the areas that we are serving and the people we are serving are relatively disadvantaged compared to, for example, the types of people that one might expect to attend an opera festival or classical music events, which are also more generously funded by the Arts Council. It would be nice if the Arts Council could insist that all its funded organisations worked in this very simple way, just by matching user addresses to existing public data. It would be nice if they could all show to what extent they were meeting those that, because of relative deprivation, are less likely to participate in the arts. 

I think our main difficulty in working with the Arts Council is just the sheer bureaucratic nonsense we have to put up with. It can take me a week to prepare an application, several days to produce a midterm report, probably another week to do the end of project report, and then there's toing and froing about any queries that they may have or additional information that they want. So it's just a difficult organisation to work within that these are people that sit in offices rather than at the frontline of delivering arts activities, and that they seem to act as though every funded organisation is going to have a multitude of staff able to sit down and produce statistics that will probably be filed away and never looked at again. So that's our problem with the Arts Council, they expect too much of us and give us too little. As for the local council, we have had a very positive relationship with them over the years, and since the Piping Festival was founded in 1994 that was actually part of a council initiative called Armagh Together. It was at the key stage in the peace process here in North of Ireland, and the local council had received money from the European Union to run cross community events, and we came up with the idea of a piping festival that initially brought together pipers from the Irish uilleann piping tradition and Scottish highland pipers, which highland piping in North Ireland is mainly associated with the Protestant community.  But just as with uilleann piping, we would resist the notion that it's the property of that particular community, and there are many Catholics and other people who enjoy and take part in highland piping. So that initiative by the council in 1994 was so successful and the audiences were so receptive to the bringing together of these two musical cultures that we had to reprise the festival in the following year. And it then became an annual event, and we're now coming up to the 30th year of it, and throughout that time, it has been funded and supported by the local council, and we're very grateful to them for that. We believe that the local council has a good understanding of the value to Armagh and the surrounding area of our activity. And, it has been in recent years, it has created a service level agreement with us which gives us a fixed amount of money every year. It's not a huge amount, £10,000 or so per year, to ensure that we keep delivering classes, that we keep delivering the festival and that generally, we contribute to the cultural life of the city and district. 

You mentioned previously as well that the name of the festival was also kind of strategic. 

Yes, the William Kennedy Piping Festival, is so named because in between 1768 and 1834 there lived in Tandragee, a village quite near Armagh, a man called William Kennedy, who became blind in his childhood due to smallpox, and as was the custom in those days, he was sent off to learn music as a way of making a living. And he initially lodged in Armagh with a fiddle master who taught him that instrument. He then met a Piper and learned and became fascinated with the pastoral pipes as they were then known. He made some very significant technical innovations to the pipes, because although he was blind, he was a great craftsman. He made furniture, made clocks, and then repaired all sorts of musical instruments 

As it happens, William Kennedy was a Presbyterian. He was hired by the Church of Ireland, another Protestant denomination, to play in the church at Tandragee. This was at a time when organs were very rare and many churches from both sides of the reformation divide would have employed pipers to play in the churches. So we felt that William Kennedy a Presbyterian associated with the Anglican church, the Church of Ireland, and revered across Ireland for the important contribution that he made to our piping tradition was a man worthy of commemoration, and that's why we called the festival after him.  And as a further effort, I suppose, for us to shout out to anyone who will listen that piping and Irish traditional music are not exclusive to any one part of our community. 

Much though we're inclined to complain about the Arts Council, we must also note that the Arts Council has been lobbying unsuccessfully for years to get its funding restored to something reasonable or comparable with other UK jurisdictions and ideally comparable with the Republic, where twice as much money per head of population goes to arts funding. I don't think that there's any there's necessarily any antipathy or objection in the Arts Council to funding traditional arts. It's certainly the case that vastly more money goes to things like classical music and opera than goes to into the traditional arts sector. 

So thinking for the future, then what kind of policy changes or adaptations would you like to see that would kind of benefit organisations like yours and the North Irish folk scene. 

Well, in terms of legislation or initiatives at the region wide level, I'd like to see some compulsion for every local council to have an arts policy, arts officers and devote resources to the arts. It's scandalous that out of our 11 councils, there are some that have no interest or no apparent interest in the arts and provide no support to arts organisations. So that would be an important thing for me. Then I'd like to see a compulsion on the Arts Council, as the main vehicle for funding, to reflect rurality and relative deprivation in its funding decisions to spread the funding much more evenly across the region, but with extra resources for those areas that have been traditionally underfunded or underdeveloped or are relatively disadvantaged. I'd like to see some way of supporting private sector philanthropic funding for the arts here. I don't know how precisely that would operate, but there's no tradition here, or very limited tradition, of wealthy individuals supporting the arts. I'd like to see some kind of tax breaks or other incentive to release funding from that side of the house. I think the Arts Council and the Department for Communities need to do much more to publicise the value of the sector I mean, the arts employ over 30,000 people in this quite small region, and those people although generally they're in insecure jobs on low pay and in precarious working conditions. They do contribute to the economy, they pay taxes, they bring in tourism that they employ instrument makers. It's an important part of the economy, and it's not sold enough. The benefits of a well- developed arts sector are not sold by those responsible for promoting the arts. 

What about cross border collaborations?

Well, because the establishment in the Republic of Ireland has tended to regard the border as being something like the Berlin Wall, that they're, in general, very reluctant to provide funding for anything that's happening in the northern six counties. We have on occasion, be able to access limited amounts of funds for very specific purposes. For example, when we are sending performing groups to festivals on the mainland in Europe, we're able to get the travel part funded by Culture Ireland, which is their equivalent of the British Council, I suppose you could say. But even though our organisation is itself a cross border body, you know, we have a quarter of our tutors coming from County Monaghan, we have between 10 and 15% of our student body comes from south of the border. We are unable to access any of the very generous funding that the southern Arts Council gives out. So we are, in a way, subsidising arts in the South because we are teaching people from there and employing people from there in the north, but without access to the state support that that arts organisations 15 miles away would be getting from Dublin.  

My ideal would be to see a single Arts Council serving the entire island, and since we have cross border bodies already covering things like waterways management, I don't see why it would be impossible to do away with the two existing arts councils and create one all Ireland arts body. Hopefully funded at the same generous level as the southern one currently is, rather than the meagre amount that is devoted to the northern Arts Council. 

So the UK has now ratified the UNESCO 2003 convention on intangible cultural heritage, and I can see on the wall here, you do have diploma from the Republic of Ireland about the inscription of Uilleann piping.

Yes, and in 2017 after much lobbying by Na Píobairí Uilleann,  which is the national organisation for uilleann piping, and we as Armagh Pipers Club, contributed to that lobbying, the Irish government applied to UNESCO and was successful in having the Illin piping and the music associated with it recognised as part of …

Intangible Cultural Heritage.

… Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. So that was a day for us to celebrate. It's good that the UK has at last ratified that convention, albeit belatedly and without much signs so far, of any concrete actions flowing from the ratification. But if they take it seriously, they ought to be providing extra resources to protect and support and develop those aspects of intangible cultural heritage that have already been recognised by UNESCO. So, for example, since uilleann piping has become much more popular in the north than it was at the time of our foundation. There's no reason why the British government shouldn't feel obliged to support uilleann piping and pipe making. And we wait to see, without sort of excessive hope, we wait to see some concrete support for the arts flowing from the ratification of the Convention. 

[End of interview]

End discussion

The Isle of Man and Northern Ireland represent two rather different contexts but Culture Vannin and Armagh Pipers Club are connected in their attempts to foreground folk arts practices in their areas. These are both regions which are culturally and politically close to neighbouring nations, that is the Republic of Ireland and the UK, but with limited scope for arts organisations to access cross border funding and support. As we heard, the relationship between the organisations and their local Arts Councils can also be complicated and in the next episode we will dig-in a bit deeper in these relationships as we move on to the British mainland to visit Wales and England.

Credits

This episode featured music by Manx singer Ruth Keggin and Scottish harpist Rachel Hair, as well as the Northern Irish Uilleann piper Conor Mallon. Our theme music was by Fay Hield. 

You can learn more about the issues talked about in this episode in our show notes and read about Access Folk’s other research projects on our website. 

This Access Folk Podcast was produced as part of the Knowledge Exchange Project: Folk Arts and Policy in the UK’s Devolved Nations and Regions, and the Isle of Man. The project ran from April to November 2024 and was supported by Policy Support Funding from the University of Sheffield. 

Access Folk is a UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship headed by Prof Fay Hield at the University of Sheffield

The podcast was recorded and produced by Esbjörn Wettermark and Kitty Turner.

Intro

Welcome back to The Access Folk Podcast’s special series on Folk Arts and cultural Policy in the UK’s devolved Nations and Regions and the Isle of Man

I’m Esbjörn Wettermark and in this last episode we will finish our journey across the isles with a visit to Scotland before returning to the University of Sheffield for a conversation about the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Background

This far we have heard about how folk arts organisations negotiate working with arts councils and local government organisations, as well as how language policies and projects like the Isle of Man Biosphere can impact folk arts. The starting point of this project, however, was the UK’s ratification of the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage earlier this year.

So, what is the Convention and how did it come about? 

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organisation, have provided frameworks to safeguard the world's physical and natural heritage since the nineteen seventies. Their most well known heritage scheme today is probably the list of World Heritage Sites, which has been added to by UNESCO since 1978. Over time there was an increasing interest also if, and how, not only physical and natural heritage, but also cultural practices could be safeguarded for future generations. 

This eventually led to the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has now been signed by the vast majority of the world's nations. In short, the Convention asks state parties to make inventories of intangible cultural heritage within their borders and plans on how they will endeavour to safeguard these practices for future generations. State parties and the communities involved can, if they so choose, nominate particular practices to one of three international heritage lists. 

Most known is probably ‘The Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage’ which includes a range of cultural practices, from Italian opera singing to Indonesian martial arts. The second list is ‘The List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding’, which includes practices that are at risk of extinction and where there is need of urgent intervention. One example is Vietnamese Ca trù singing, which at the time of its inscription was down to a handful of proficient performers. The final list is ‘The Register of Good Safeguarding Practices’, which is a bit different from the other two. The register includes case studies of successful interventions to save and promote practices which can be used as inspiration for other practitioners and their communities. 

One recent example in the register is a network of instrument builders and musicians formed to promote the Swedish nyckelharpa, or keyed fiddle. For anyone wanting to explore the three lists further, UNESCO has an interactive website where you can look at examples of intangible cultural heritage from around the world.

The Convention entered into force in the UK in June 2024, following a series of consultations with practitioners, community groups and organisations earlier in the year. However, as we record this in the autumn, formal guidelines for the implementation are still being worked on by the DCMS, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 

We’ll return to the convention at the end of the episode but first we are heading to Edinburgh and the Scottish Storytelling Centre, home of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland. Their director Steve Byrne has long worked in the Scottish folk arts scene and in particular with issues relating to the UNESCO Convention.

Scotland and interview with Steve Byrne

Hello Steve, how are you today?

Good Esbjörn. Great to talk to you here in Edinburgh.

Excellent, so, can you tell me a little bit about your organisation and what is the aim and the purpose of what you do?

So, TRACS, Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, has been around since 2012.  We are what’s called a “regularly funded organisation”, through Creative Scotland, the arts council here in Scotland, since 2015, and we are made up of three forums for traditional music, traditional dance and for storytelling, and those are essentially the three components of TRACS as an organisation, that sets out really to put living heritage as we might call it, really at the heart of life in Scotland, in terms of bringing these traditional arts to the fore within communities and helping people in some cases, reconnect with traditions that they may have otherwise not have encountered before.

So, in what ways do you work? Do you hand out funding or what ways are you doing this?

So, the forums each have their own work programmes in terms of engaging with people.  Some of that is through festivals and through workshops.  One of the things that TRACS runs overall, is a thing called the Scottish International Storytelling Festival, which has been running since 1989, celebrates its 35th anniversary this year.  That’s one of the main delivery models to use that kind of language if you like, for storytelling in particular, although in the coming years, we’re looking to widen that out to other traditional arts.  There’s always been an interplay anyway with music and dance anyway, but that’s one of our targets in the coming years.  Other forum activities include networking days, development days for practitioners, talking around some of the big topics that concern those particular sectors, whether that’s around practice or engaging with schools and education and so on.  So, it tends to be that these forums per se, are networking the practitioners who are already out there doing their stuff and some are more programme-driven as a forum than others.  The Traditional Music Forum for example is much more of a networking and advocacy body for example.  And on behalf of all three of those, TRACS came into being a common voice for these quite marginal art forms in the grand scheme of things, to be heard by government and by funders and by working together, we can achieve a better outcome for everyone. 

So your main funding is through Creative Scotland, is that right?  Do you have other things for your business model as well?

So, our main funding is Creative Scotland.  We also have some revenue funding from the City of Edinburgh Council, where we’re based, which relates in part to the storytelling festival that we deliver in large part in the city, although there’s nationwide programming as well, but also the Scottish Storytelling Centre, where we’re based at the minute is part of that City Council funding.  And we attract other funding from national festivals “PLACE” funding and Expo funding which is primarily aimed at bolstering that international offer, if you like, for Scotland’s cultural sector, as well as the PLACE funding which is “PLAtforms for Creative Excellence”, as opposed to place and local place projects.  So, it’s a little confusing around some of the nomenclature, but yeah, those would be our key funding outlets and there are small amounts of funding from benefactors and from some charitable trusts and so on, but we are looking to see how we diversify that model too, because that is definitely going to change.  

So, you’ve been around since 2012.  So, if you think about, during this period, what policies have had a big influence on the work that TRACS do?

So, I should… I imagine that the main informing report would have been the 2010 Traditional Arts Working Group report, which was the result of… it was commissioned by the then Cabinet Secretary for Culture.  I think it was Linda Fabiani.  So, that was a process of consultation with traditional artists and organisers about the state of the traditional arts sector in Scotland at that time, and I can’t quite remember the impetus for it, but there was something around a loss of funding or some perceived change around the traditional arts sector that prompted that.  So, the reaction by government was to say, okay, well if this is what the sector is telling us, let’s find out in a bit more detail.  So, my now colleague, David Francis, was commissioned to lead that and I contributed to it as at that time, a very active performing musician and so on, and looking at the realities around all that.  So, that would maybe be one guiding document I suppose.  But there haven’t been that many.  There’s been a few iterations of studies around folk arts policy in Scotland.  The most obvious ones that come to mind are the Report on Traditional Arts in 1984, which was really the first time that any level of government had taken seriously that this was a sector or a coherent body of people and interest that should be surveyed and looked at and addressed and engaged with at government level, and there were some quite big names involved with that, the likes of Hamish Henderson had a lot to say around that.  It was the first proper look I suppose.  After that, if you think about the main thrust of the folk revival in the sixties and seventies, by the time we got to 1984, it was clear that there had to be more organisational structures around all of that and a bit more professionalisation.  The next report after that would be 1999, Traditional Music in Scotland.  Again, David Francis, he has got form!  But that was a significant report that I still pull off the shelf now and again, because some of the things are still really current and then the 2010 Working Group report.  Some of those things, I think still remain to be delivered and I think there’s a lot to look back at and say, “what have we actually achieved?” and what… perhaps, “what has TRACS achieved?” as part of that and I think there’s a lot of interest there and things around archiving and resourcing and how we carry that forward into the future that are maybe overtaken by other policies or other bodies who would have a locus in being able to carry those things forward, that we don’t have ourselves.  I think there’s no getting away from the fact that we aren’t… although we’re a regularly funded organisation, we’re still quite a small organisation and we’ve a maximum of about a dozen people working across the year on different projects, and only a handful of those are full time.  So, that limits I suppose what we can achieve, but nonetheless, that has informed our approach and we’re very conscious of the need now to look at the entire policy environment across Scottish society and Scottish government, local and national, because those are the things that increasingly we’ve been asked to address and we realise too that plain, straightforward, arts funding isn’t where it’s at these days.  You basically have to show that you’re able to fulfil other objectives in the policy environment around whether that’s social inclusion or alleviating poverty or equalities, diversity, all of these things as well as now a big push on environmental sustainability.  So, increasingly, a lot of that is taking up our time and we have to think quite flexibly about how we address that, at the same time as doing what we see as our core mission.  That’s a real tension I have to say..

That’s really interesting.  I was looking at Creative Scotland strategies, and one thing that sticks out there is also that Scotland’s national culture is mentioned.  Would you say that is significant for your work, that you get a mention in one form or another there?

I think it certainly is. I wouldn’t put too much store into it, but at the same time, I think it is a change that is welcome, that government, you known, we’re no longer an afterthought in terms of the folk arts.  I think people are recognising that increasingly, however, there is a tendency within government policy documents to mention this thing and then not an awful lot else really comes to fruition after it.  We are traded on as a distinctive element of Scottish culture, and yes, some of the organisations are very well funded and so on, but we could be doing so much more if there was a more dedicated strategy at government level around the folk arts. 

We talked a bit before and you mentioned again that Scotland has several languages that are recognised and some legal protection at least for Gaelic, is that correct?

Yeah.  

Is there anything there that comes together with folk arts would you say?

Yeah, very much so.  The Gaelic Language Act in 2005 brought in by the Labour/Lib Dem administration in the Scottish Parliament was really a product of devolution where a couple of things.  The 2001 signing by the UK of the European charter for regional minority languages, placed an obligation on the national government and devolved governments to take actions for the languages in their territory.  So, for Scotland primarily that’s Gaelic, Scots and to an extent, British Sign Language and some of the Traveller languages of Cant and Beurla Reagaird, but certainly Scots and Gaelic would be the headline ones.  The Language Act placed certain obligations on public bodies to start using the language more in public life and be more visible, and offer services in Gaelic where appropriate.  It’s still very much an evolving process and there’s a Scottish languages bill going through parliament at the moment, in Holyrood, to basically provide this update or refresh of that 2005 legislation but give some more protection for Scots and other community languages as well, and so that’s an evolution. But there’s definitely so many aspects of traditional arts, especially  folk song, would be delivered through these languages and to an extent, storytelling too.  So, it’s important that we pay close attention to those legalistic developments, because we see that the art forms that we work with are really bulwarks of that traditional culture and those modes of expression and the ways that people can actually feel confident in using the languages, which is often through traditional arts.   

So, what kind of policy changes would you like to see if you had a wish list of things you think would make a difference?

The number one thing for traditional arts in Scotland is that there needs to be dedicated funding for traditional arts and we have spoken anecdotally in the past about this, I always look west to Ireland, just in terms of the connection that Ireland has with its traditional arts. Obviously the whole political background there in terms of forming a new nation state and so on and just the closeness in some ways that there is in terms of government to traditional languages but also Irish traditional culture. But nonetheless there is just an immediacy there of understanding that I see.  I say this as well as an Irish passport holder with an Irish father. But it’s just something that I’m quite conscious of.  No doubt there will be people in Ireland who will decry it as well, but there seems to be a set up there, where that filters down, where the traditional arts, Arts Council and governmental approach in Ireland seems to filter down through to County Council level where there are all kinds of heritage projects being done on the kind of level we would like to do at TRACS. But there just seems to be a way to flow that out across the country in a way that’s easily understood and people know why they do it.  I feel in Scotland, we still have a bit of a conceptual barrier about, ‘why would we do that?’ or ‘What’s the value in all of that?’  So, I think dedicated traditional arts funding which would unlock our potential around the intangible cultural heritage agenda, allied with that.  But it would also advocate quite strongly for, as Ireland has, a traditional music, or a traditional arts, archive.  Because I think for all of the arguments about what perceptions of archives are and those kind of collections and the academic nature of that by default, I think the fact that you would say this stuff is important enough to us that we’re going to make a national collection out of it, and it's going to become a resource into the future, we must keep collecting and documenting our traditional culture for the generations to come. I think that would be a massive boost to the traditional arts scene, just in terms of the symbolism of that. So, I think government has a responsibility with the emphasis now of the ICH convention having been ratified in the UK, of actually setting up some of these major structures. It really feels like we’re just messing around at the edges sometimes and paying a little bit of that lip service that we were commenting on earlier, where maybe it’s referenced in a policy document, but there isn’t really the back up of saying, ‘look here is substantial resource and we want to commit to it and show you that we mean what we say’ and certainly something along those lines that we give the visibility that people would say, ‘ah, yes, that’s the traditional arts archive’, and that’s where you want to go if you want to find out about this, that and the next thing.  It would be something that would be a compliment as well, to the university based approach to folk culture. It seems to me that we haven’t really broken down that barrier, and I come from that background, between academic study of folklore for academic sake and engaging with communities whose folk culture it is. That’s really where TRACS sees itself in terms of positioning ourselves as a bridge between communities and practitioners on the ground and that interland of academic study and archiving. 

So, we’re getting to the end here now.  If you could talk a little bit about the UNESCO project that is happening now.  So, the UK has committed now to ratify the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage.  How and if at all, do you think this could affect your work in the wider folk scene of Scotland?

I think it actually gives a bit of legitimacy to what we’re doing.  I think there’s now that legislative back up in a sense that is a little bit lacking.  The cultural policy within Scotland, the cultural strategy here has talked for a while about the phrase ‘everyday culture’ which is a really interesting introduction in the first iterations of the cultural strategy, just before the pandemic.  But it’s kind of stalled a wee bit in terms of the revisiting of the strategy itself.  But that’s very much what ICH is.  It’s that every day culture that we think, from our perspective at TRACS and the folklore background, is just as important as any other cultural practice and in some cases, maybe slightly more important to individuals and communities and families.  So, it gives us a bit more weight to our argument, because we’ve also been able, knowing that this was coming, in April 2023, we applied to become an advisory NGO to UNESCO for ICH,. So that’s one of the models that they have is that organisations that are not states parties, who sign up to the convention, can nonetheless become advisory bodies to UNESCO on what ICH is and what safeguarding practices are.  So, we were recently ratified in June of this year as a UNESCO NGO.  So, that has been a big badge that we’ve pinned to our chest to say, ‘look at us!’. But, in reality, it gives us a responsibility. And, I think it also means that government and policy makers and funders, have a sense of seriousness about what we mean, because we now have to report every four years on what we’ve achieved. 

 We don’t just get the badge and put the plaque up on the wall.  We actually have to deliver, because you can be deregistered if you don’t do what you say you’re going to do.  So, I think that’s given us an additional bit of weight to that argument as I was saying, but ultimately, it’s also informed our approach about really putting ICH centrally into what we’re doing.  It’s not just the slightly esoteric folk arts, well this is just… all the preconceptions about what those might be.  It’s actually got this UNESCO imprimatur of saying, this is something that in national governments around the world, take seriously, and it's a framework to be part of and I think we have the advantage in Scotland of having been in these discussions since about 2006, 2007, when the new Scottish government in 2007 commissioned the first scoping report on ICH in Scotland.  So, we’ve been familiar with it for some time at some level.  There’s still a long way to go in terms of the wider public awareness of what it actually means.  But it’s right there, front and centre in our plans for the next few years. 

So, is there anything that we haven’t touched on?

I suppose maybe just the interplay between cultural policy in other parts of the UK. Because, I think it’s quite easy to listen to me and just see that I’m almost thinking… I’ve got UNESCO here and I’ve got Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament here, but I don’t really feel like there’s a reference point at the moment for us.  Because of the devolution of culture, which is great, but I don’t feel that there’s a reference point coming from UK Government at the moment and ideally that would change obviously. 

I think there needs to be some movement around all of that and I think understanding what the cultural landscape looks like elsewhere in the UK, and I suppose in a large part I mean England, because actually we have some awareness with our friends in Trac Cymru of what has been happening there, and we’re actually involved in a bit of research with them in an advisory capacity. I feel like we should have more of an awareness of what is going on, and especially… I am personally aware of what the English Folk Dance and Song Society has been doing and I would see that organisation as broadly a parallel to ourselves. But, we don’t have any formal tie up or any practical awareness of what each other is doing. And, I’m wondering if that is one of the downsides of the way that the policy has been constructed in the devolved era, but there’s no reason for that to stay the same. 

End of interview

As Steve mentions, the devolution of culture policies has had many benefits but potentially created a situation where there is less communication on shared issues across the devolved nations, regions and crown dependencies. One of the aims of this project and podcast is to address this issue, using the Convention as a natural catalyst to create stronger networks across the isles. 

But what do we know about how the convention might be implemented in the UK?

During the consultation phase, the DCMS suggested a “Lifting not listing” approach, highlighting the importance of intangible cultural heritage more widely rather than putting focus on individual practices. Initially, this could mean not to submit any items to the Representative List at least for the first years after ratification. Nevertheless, the Convention is dependent on defining individual practices in order to safeguard them and as such ‘listing’ is an unavoidable feature of the convention. The UK will have to consider and organise a number of lists, for Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, which then need to be connected to a National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. If, and when, they are added to the Convention, this could also involve separate lists for the Isle of Man and the other Crown Dependencies. Considering the considerable work that will go into organising and nominating items for these lists, ensuring a lifting approach could prove more difficult than it seems. As we will hear in the next segment, the implementation process is something that both engages and concerns folk arts organisations. And they will be at the forefront of working with their communities on these issues.

Policy workshop with Folk Arts Organisations 

 In October 2024 my colleagues and I invited our partners from Wales, Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Cornwall to the University of Sheffield to exchange thoughts and experiences of how cultural policy affects folk arts. We looked for common ground across their different areas of work and in particular discussed the implementation of the 2003 UNESCO Convention in the UK. 

It was the first time all these organisations came together in the same room and I will share a few extracts from the day, starting with Breesha Maddrell from Culture Vannin and Steve Byrne from Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland talking about the terminology around intangible cultural heritage and how it could prove an obstacle to get people involved with the Convention.

Breesha Maddrell: I'd be interested to know in about how people ‘out there’ what they think about the term intangible cultural heritage, because we know from Biosphere that people find it very difficult and the first 10 years of the Isle of Man being a Biosphere nation we've had to explain again and again what it means. So, are we going to face the same with this? We are an organization called Culture Vannin that represents intangible cultural heritage, but until we actually have tangible presence in a physical building, people will be confused who we were and might have confused us with the Arts Council or with the museum service. So you're dealing with something that people, they all can relate to it if they understand what it is, but will they understand what it is? And, are we going to have to find ways to explain it in different, different words, different images? 

Steve Byrne: So UNESCO already realized that problem and the entity that runs the ICH convention is called the Living Heritage Entity. So living heritage is the ancillary term that they seem to use outside of the sort of diplomatic setting. And, so that seems to be becoming more widely adopted. 

Breesha Maddrell: Do you think people understand that though? Because one of the problems you mentioned earlier was that people go straight to museum services as basically guardians for this. 

Steve Byrne:  I mean heritage is the problematic word isn't it? 

Breesha Maddrell: yeah, it is a problematic word

Steve Byrne: Yeah, I think, you know, in the Scottish context we agreed that we had to, it's a bit like, you know, nobody knew what social distancing was five years ago. We had to keep using the term so that it gets currency. But at the same time, it is developing a lexicon alongside to make people understand. So we, for example, drafted ‘A Wee Guide to ICH’, when we had our conference last year in Perthshire. just as a starting point, you know, sort of an FAQ. So we just need to keep doing those kinds of things and getting it into discourse. My issue with it is, with that lack of understanding at the outset, why are they moving so quickly to the inventorizing process. That makes no sense to me at all until you do more of an advocacy and awareness raising thing.

The process and potential barriers around creating regional and national inventories of Intangible Cultural Heritage was a particularly complicated discussion. Not only with regards to the power relations between different art forms, practices and their communities but also what listings could mean for regions like Cornwall, which has a strong regional identity but is formally a part of England. Dan Woodfield from the Cornish folk arts organisation Lowender, gave us some perspectives.

Dan Woodfield: One thing I've seen in Cornwall already is that just even the knowledge that this convention will be coming into play is allowing different cultural organisations to have a vehicle in which to collaborate. And I see that as a really positive thing. And, what's interesting about this group is that, well actually, we're probably going to be talking about four different lists, because the UK government have said there's going to be a Scottish one, an Irish one, a Welsh one, and, and an English one, which, okay, so five lists, because then it will all feed into the UK list. If, for example, there were aspects of folk arts that we felt were, you know, if, if these organisations felt strongly there was an aspect of folk arts, say, for example, the session culture that was roughly unified but had distinctive elements from within, then it would make sense that these organisations put in one thing onto one list to, to, and collaborate on the way that it works. Which is, in effect, not taking the model that the UK government is suggesting. So I find that quite interesting because there will be aspects that will be similar and maybe like from a Cornish perspective, that's a really useful thing to have understanding and, and, and knowledge of what's maybe likely to be listed in other, in, in all of the four devolved nations lists, plus Isle of Man, which, yeah, when they sign up, you know -  so many lists! Because that would help us to piggyback onto things which assert distinctiveness in line with our national minority status while still being on an English list, if that makes sense. So it could, it could be that from a Cornish perspective, there's a nuanced way that actually the personal relationships allow us, as an organisation, better represent our community. Because our community will take that personally if there's not a Cornish thing within a broader thing. 

As a group we recognised that folk arts and practices that were already formally organised would be better placed at getting their activities recognised on an inventory of local or national intangible cultural heritage. Katy Spicer from the English Folk Dance and Song Society and Danny KilBride from Trac Cymru highlighted how this could become a real issue for the nomination process and what they as folk arts organisations can do about it.

Katy Spicer: How do you, how do you make this, this, you know, really equitable so that it doesn't sort of end up really only coming down to. the types of, or forms of, of cultural heritage that have some sort of body, organisation, that can disseminate the information, get people to sign up. So I think it's going to be hugely, you know, it's going to be time consuming to say the least. And as you say, about getting people to volunteer, to be on, panels to make some of these decisions, as you say, whether that's, yeah, that's, that's a Cotswold Morris, masses and masses of thousands of people do that, that's definitely on the list. Oh, that form of dance, we only seem to have one person in the country doing it, so that can't be on the list, you know. 

Steve Byrne: Although it could be on the endangered list 

Katy Spicer: That's true. 

Steve Byrne: So it's maybe playing and reworking the list again. 

Danny KilBride: Okay, so for me the question is not so much how do we make it fair, but how can I make that work for me? Because I think like many of us around this table, part of our work to do with the preservation of our traditions is acting as a guardian against cultural extinction. And so, yeah, it's nice to know there's an endangered element of the list, and there is a good piece of safeguarding. But like Dan was saying about Cornish dance, when compared and cast with Morris dancing, it's very tight. The traditional Welsh dances, the Cymdeithas dance, in Wales is a tiny group of geriatrics with no throughput of social dancing except for teenagers doing step dancing. And so, Okay, this is great, but my thing is how, how does that work for me? How does, how, how can I, either on my own or with my communities or collectively around this table and with others make this work for us? I think that's really the most important thing.

Ciarán Ó Maoláin from the Armagh Pipers Club continued the discussion with Danny in relation to the difficulty of separating culture across national borders, and in Northern Ireland, in particular. There clearly needs to be some cooperation to avoid intangible cultural heritage becoming a politicised issue and formal models to ensure that nominations are handled sensitively. 

Danny KilBride: So there's a, there's a whole world of stuff there that, that these four models and a Union Jack list, quite possibly, it's going to disincentivize people to be part of it and incentivize others and create a really whole minefield or [be] highly negotiated. 

Ciarán Ó Maoláin: there will be a problem in trying to identify Northern Ireland elements of the UK's intangible cultural heritage because so many of us in the North are already covered by the National Inventory for the Republic of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland has 30 or 40 um, elements in its inventory, most of which are relevant to the North. You know, things like, I mean, Irish traditional music is actually an element on its own, although the very first, well, two of the three internationally nominated elements that UNESCO have adopted are from Irish traditional music. Uilleann piping was the first in 2017, and then Irish harp music in 2019, it was. So very soon after the ratification by Ireland. But Ireland has a dynamic living process for nominating local elements even of cultural heritage. Some of them are hyper local activities. They only take place in one small parish in West Cork or whatever. Others are national things like beekeeping. So I think there is value in having that. An open ended nomination process that anybody can put forward, as long as there is some kind of filter mechanism in them. 

How to create an equitable process and support for nominations, the filtering mechanism mentioned by Ciarán, was discussed at length during the day. Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland in particular, has been engaging with UNESCO and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland and internationally for many years. And, Steve Byrne, Dan Woodfield and Breesha Maddrell, summarised the day by highlighting the importance of working with grassroots practitioners and drawing on their organisations’ expertise in supporting the implementation of the convention. 

Steve Byrne:  Are there structures in place? And if there are not, how can we help support those? Um, and there's lots of sort of good practice and evolutions of practices that have been happening over the last 20 years in other countries who've been grappling with this. So we're speaking to the Dutch Centre for ICH - I mean, they have a center for ICH, wow - in the summer, and they had kind of got to that point where what you were describing, Dan, the capacity of local organizations to engage with their sort of application and approvals process just wasn't strong enough, it wasn't there, so they were looking at kind of making that lighter touch so that people could actually feel that it was something they could engage with. So I think, I think that's my overriding thing is that the sector, such as it is, and the various groups that we think would probably want to be involved, are not ready to engage. And I think we almost need to all start making our own lists and then making contacts with organizations and groups and practices that we think. You know what, because I mean we have, we've got the expertise, you know, for all the privilege, we've dedicated our time, you know, through the studies and all the things that we've done and the organizations we've set up and run both voluntarily and professionally that we know what we're talking about and I think that's the input that as a collective we need to give to government otherwise it does end up being taken over by other interest groups.

Dan Woodfield: We operate as I said kind of when we're talking about education or like how can we get these the practices in which our organizations engage with to a wider sphere. Our organizations generally actually have direct links into grassroots communities. So actually, I think we, I'm going to speak from Lowender here, have a really unique perspective on kind of the opinion of grassroots communities and then the expertise to understand how that could implement and interact with policy. And I think that if, you know, if there's a thing that joins the organization around this table. Now, as I said, it's probably that. The practices are one thing, but it's actually, it's the links between grassroots and, and the knowledge held. 

Breesha Maddrell: Yeah, without those communities, we're nothing as an organization. So that's been the focus of our work for decades, if not much longer. 

Dan Woodfield: Which does position these organizations well in being able to interact with how this framework is implemented. 

End discussion

As we record this podcast there is still much to be decided with regards to the UK’s implementation of the Convention. But folk arts organisations are ready to engage with the process and to develop their networks to provide support for artists and communities. Intangible Cultural Heritage is now on the agenda for policy makers and that in itself is an opportunity to work together and argue for better support for folk arts across the isles. 

I hope you have enjoyed listening to this special series of the Access Folk Podcast. Maybe you learnt something new, or got interested in how you can get more involved in supporting folk arts and other intangible cultural heritage. Why not look out for volunteering opportunities with a local folk arts organisation, join a dance or music group, or buy a ticket to see some of the many amazing folk artists touring across the isles. If you need some inspiration, check out the artists who kindly lent their music to this podcast. More information in the show notes and thank you for listening.

Credits

This episode featured music by Scottish singer Iona Fyfe and our theme music is by Fay Hield. 

You can learn more about the issues talked about in this episode in our show notes and read about Access Folk’s other research projects on our website. 

This Access Folk Podcast was produced as part of the Knowledge Exchange Project: Folk Arts and Policy in the UK’s Devolved Nations and Regions, and the Isle of Man. The project ran from April to November 2024 and was supported by Policy Support Funding from the University of Sheffield. 

Access Folk is a UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship headed by Prof Fay Hield at the University of Sheffield

The series was recorded and produced by Esbjorn Wettermark and Kitty Turner.