Sherkin is back in tune
QUESTION What is the story of the Sherkin Island Music Festival of the 1970s and are there any plans to revive it?
THE Sherkin Island Music Festival staged in the mid-1970s was dedicated to traditional Irish music. In the past couple of years, it has been replaced by the Open Ear festival, which promotes original and experimental Irish music.
During the 1970s, festivals devoted to traditional music were very popular throughout Ireland, such as the Éigse na Tríonóide at Trinity College, Dublin. A high point was Christy Moore’s performance at the Carnsore Point anti-nuclear protests in 1978. As part of this musical movement in 1970s Ireland, Sherkin Island set up its own festival, in 1975 and 1976, and it attracted performances from the likes of Planxty, Clannad and De Dannan.
The Co. Cork island was helped in its promotion of the festival because it is the most accessible of the 600-odd islands around the Irish coastline; it’s a mere tenminute ferry trip from Baltimore.
Sherkin Island was also helped at the time by one of the bestknown traditional fiddlers of the time settling there. Séamus Creagh had been born and brought up in Co. Westmeath, but in the late 1960s, he drifted down to Munster and ended up living on Sherkin. He used to say that while the post was often late, the craic was absolutely terrific. Creagh also teamed up with a noted accordionist Jackie Daly.
But although the trad festival on Sherkin Island went well for a couple of years, it fizzled out. It took many years for a replacement to arrive, presenting a totally different kind of music.
Two years ago, the Open Ear festival started on the island, offering experimental and original Irish music, including ambient, electronica, noise and techno – almost as far as it is possible to get from traditional Irish music.
This festival had been inspired to start by similar events in places as far apart as Krakow in Poland and Rathlin Island, off the north Co. Antrim coast.
In 2016, the first year of the Open Ear festival on Sherkin, more than 300 music fans came to the island to hear performances in such places as a site beside the North Shore guest house and in the Jolly Roger pub.
This year’s June bank holiday will see the third of the Open Ear festivals taking place on Sherkin as part of the Sherkin Island Gathering. But there will also be a place for traditional fiddle music.
Sherkin Island, in Roaring Water Bay, may have only 34 permanent households and a resident population of slightly over 100, but it has a strong artistic tradition. Artists working in various media have found the island an ideal place to live and work and people can even do a visual arts degree programme there, run by the Dublin Institute of Technology and the Sherkin Island Development Society.
And given its artistic bent, this year’s Open Ear festival will feature its first Sherkin Island resident on its bill – Juno Cheetal who performs under her pseudonym, Flowers At Night.
Even though the Open Ear festival has been such a success on Sherkin Island, there’s little sign at this stage that the traditional music festival there, which flared in brief popularity some 40 years ago, will ever be revived. Daithí Ó Murchú, Dún Laoghaire.
QUESTION Are my memories of X-ray machines for shoe fitting in the Fifties correct?
THE shoe-fitting fluoroscope, sold under the trade name Pedoscope, was made by the Pedoscope Company Ltd of St Albans, England. It created X-ray images of a customer’s foot without the need to remove the new shoe.
The X-ray machine was stored at the bottom of a lead-lined oak box. To use it, you’d place your foot in the platform at the bottom while the shop assistant would view the X-ray on a screen through the viewer at the top.
The length of X-ray exposure could be altered depending on age and gender. Across Europe and the US, more than 15,000 Pedoscope machines were installed.
By the Fifties, concerns were being raised about the safety of X-rays. In 1957, the British Medical Journal reported a case of chronic dermatitis in a shoe shop assistant exposed to ‘very large doses of X-rays’. In 1958, the Medical Research Council called for a ban: ‘We hope the use of X-rays in shoe-fitting will be abandoned except when prescribed for orthopaedic reasons.’
The lack of regulation was a major factor in the decision to phase out the machines in the mid-Seventies. Jeannie Murray, Inverness.
QUESTION Where did the saying ‘Going Dutch’ originate?
THERE are a number of derogatory phrases, such as Dutch widow (a prostitute), Dutch feast (a party at which the host gets drunk ahead of his guests) and Dutch reckoning (a non-itemised bill that seems irregularly high).
These were probably coined as a result of the long-standing enmity between England and Holland. This was over everything from trade routes in the East Indies to North American colonisation.
Dutch courage (bravery fuelled by alcohol consumption) is thought to have a related origin.
It is widely assumed, therefore, that going Dutch, an informal agreement that each person will pay his own expenses, has the same origin, yet this does not seem to be the case. It is thought to have come from the practices of the German (Deutsch) expats living in the US in the 19th century.
The first recorded use of the concept is ‘Dutch treat’ in an 1873 editorial in The Baltimore American. It was suggested that drinking to excess could be curtailed if saloon owners insisted on a Dutch treat policy: ‘A German in the Fatherland is constitutionally opposed to doing anything in a hurry, and especially to drinking beer with rapid speed. The consequence is that we do not see men here with great, huge paunches, as at home, capable of swallowing a keg of beer after supper.
‘They seldom treat one another, but sit down to the tables, and though they drink together, each man pays for what he consumes, whether it be beer or food.
‘If our temperance friends could institute what is called the Dutch treat into our saloons, each man paying his own reckoning, it would be a long step toward reform in drinking to excess.’ P. T. Thomas, Cambridge.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.