Ellen Coyne

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.

Really, everything in Irish dancing, the only reason it exists and the only reason it has evolved is with the sole aim of getting marked up at a competition.

Like really, on Comisíon Larinca Gaelica, it's the biggest and oldest governing body in the world.

And it kind of has this prestige as being like the cultural custodian of Irish dance.

But to be honest, when I was writing the book, I'm not really sure how true that claim is.

I think CLRG and Irish dancing really revolves around competition more than it revolves around celebrating the culture or the history of Irish dancing at all.

Okay, competition.

And this, I suppose, is where I find it difficult.

I love a sport where you have a ball goes into a net or into a hoop or whatever and you get a score for it.

Or even if it's things like athletics or swimming where you see the person who touches the wall first or breaks the tape to win a race.

There's an enormous difficulty, isn't there, in actually judging.

It's a bit like, I suppose, figure skating and other sports like that, gymnastics.

But there's a big difficulty, isn't there, in actually deciding really who is better than others when they're all at a pretty similar level.