Ellen Coyne

I got this weird anonymous email.

I still don't know who it was from or why it was sent to me.

Has it ever written about Irish dancing before?

And it had all this weird stuff in the subject line about how there was brown envelopes and backhanders and even...

an allegation of some sort of sex scandal in the world of Irish dancing.

So obviously I knew nothing about Irish dancing, but I did know a little bit about what a scoop is.

And I think that I could tell instantly that if even half of what this person was saying was true, it would be a very important and relevant story.

But had I known in 2022 that I'd still be writing about it in 2025, I don't know if would I have been as eager to reply as quickly as I did to that email.

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.