*Photograph: Arthur Ellis
MILTOWN MALBAY’s economic is readying itself for a surge with the return of the Willie Clancy Festival.
Having been held online for the past two years, the summer school returns in-person running from Saturday (July 2nd) to Sunday (July 10th) in Miltown with surrounding areas of Spanish Point, Mullagh and Quilty also set to benefit.
In what will be the fiftieth annual festival, Willie Clancy week’s return is set to lift the people of West Clare.
Director of the festival, Harry Hughes said, “The excitement levels are gathering among ourselves, the local community and the business people are looking forward with great expectation to the first live event since 2019, we’ve been online in 2020 and 2021, all we’ll say about that is it kept Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy in contact with our constituency”.
It is viewed as an important cultural event which commemorates the town’s best known uilleann pipier, Willie Clancy and has been running since just after his death in 1973. The idea was initiated by Clancy himself, and implemented within six months by teacher Muiris Ó Rócháin in collaboration with CCE’s timire ceoil Séamus Mac Mathúna and local musicians Martin Talty, Paddy Joe McMahon and Junior Crehan.
The school is focused around the teaching of instruments and set dancing in formal classes, but stresses the value of the oral/aural tradition. In its fleadh-style volume of music-making in bars it has become something of a Mecca in the music, its retinue of up to a hundred and fifty teachers, and hundreds of improving and competent musicians, dancers and singers drawing in thousands of listeners.
