Ellen Coyne

speaker

622 appearances 9 recordings 5 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Ellen Coyne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 4.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Last Word with Matt Cooper · How A Cheating Scandal Shocked The World Of Irish Dancing · 21 Apr 2026 podcast

Okay.

So tell us, first of all, how many children are involved in Ireland in organised Irish dancing?

And then how much does it happen overseas as well?

Well, there's tens of thousands of children in Ireland and probably if you expand it into the schools, the people who go on to professional dancing in Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, the people who go on from competitions to running their own schools, it's a massive industry.

But as everyone knows, from the 1970s on in particular, it really boomed across the world in the parts of the world like, you know, New York and Boston, where you have a lot of expats.

But then post Riverdance, you had this trend where Irish dancing was popping up in parts of Asia where people had never been to Ireland before.

They had no claim to Ireland.

This was like the first generation that was doing it.

So globally, like you're talking about an industry, and I don't want to be offensive using that word, but if you think about the addresses, all these little economies that are kind of like satellites around the world of Irish dancing, it's worth billions and it has...

you know, it's priceless as well when you think about the value that it has as a cultural export.

Because it's not just a sport.

It's kind of like a cultural art form and it's a part of our heritage as well.

And it carries a lot, an awful lot of soft power for Ireland too.

Okay.

You mentioned there about the clothing and the hair.

I mean, there's an awful lot of hair extensions and wigs and even for children, fake tan, isn't there?

Yes, and I think the one lesson that I learned from covering this story is that every single thing in Irish dancing is there for competitive reasons.

So the reason that people wear double wigs, so they actually stack two wigs on top of each other, is because if you look taller on stage, if the wig is bouncier, it highlights the

the scale of the jumps that you're doing so you'll get marked up at competitions.

The reason the costumes looked like that is after Jean Butler went on stage with her stunning kind of svelte black velvet dress the year after that loads of girls rocked up in like similar kind of like Riverdance tribute costumes all of them got marked down so the following year that was completely gone and they reverted to type to the you know these gowns that cost more than my wedding dress.

Showing 341–360 of 622 · page 18 of 32