OPENING ADDRESS: ‘FairPlé – The Story So Far’

Saturday September 8th 2018, 10:30am, Liberty Hall, Dublin

Speaker: Dr Karan Casey.

Karan Casey has long been one of the most innovative, provocative and imitated voices in Irish traditional and folk music. Her career has spanned twenty-five years, from New York with the band Solas to a well-established solo career, and she has sold over half a million albums.

TRANSCRIPT

Good morning everybody, and you are all very welcome to ‘Rising Tides’ on what is a momentous day for FairPlé. It marks the culmination of more than seven month’s work from many committed people. As a starting point for our weekend’s deliberations, I want to set those months in context for us this morning and tell the story of that timeframe: the hopes and the fears, the laughter and the tears, the merciless soul searching and endless hard work that have got us this far along the way.

As you are aware, FairPlé is a movement of people founded to change the working environment for women in the worlds of traditional and folk music. We are advocating for deep societal change: an improvement in the imbalance of line-ups that discriminates against female performers particularly instrumentalists, an end to sexual harassment, an end to the macho cultural bravado that is endemic within the community.

We aim to deliver a code of practice and are working with the Arts Council towards a policy on dignity and respect for female performers.

We will soon have our Directory for female performers up and a sharing of the stories and truths about women’s lives in order to achieve these aims. And we are involved in organising a symposium on the 9th of February 2019 in collaboration with The Centre for Irish Studies in NUIG 2019 on women in Irish music.

How did we get here? Well, it all started as many women worldwide started to reframe how we were being treated in the workplace and particularly in the arts. We were inspired here in Ireland by Waking The Feminists and Sounding the Feminists and by the #MeToo movement in America. And of course, we were inspired by the strong women in Irish traditional and folk music and groups such as Macalla who have spoken out over the years.

Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin wrote a Facebook post in the summer of 2017 asking why there were so few women on the line-up at a festival in Killarney’s INEC.Niamh Dunne wrote into a festival which had no women on the bill, and received a lot of online abuse because of this. We all started talking backstage. It’s great when people start speaking up and sharing our stories. There was a feeling of solidarity; it was dynamic, enriching and empowering for all of the community.

I ended up on a stage in January 2018 being the only women out of 17 performers and I spoke up about this. Síle Denvir after the gig leaned in to me and said “So needed, well done, what can we do?” Many people were very supportive on the night. The timbre of my speech that night was an impassioned and a passionate call for change. Also a bit ad hoc, as I gave out my email address and said “We need to organise more gigs for women and include women more at gigs!”. And so, here we are.

We believed then that some of the programming in Ireland is unconsciously biased against women; we acknowledged this then and still do today. Crucially, we also understand that we need to work to explain our point of view to bring people along with us to enact any real change.

Then I wrote a Facebook post asking for a change in our thinking. I then rang Pauline Scanlon who was at that very moment in time rehearsing a piece with Úna Monaghan called “What we Haven’t Heard,” - astonishingly, a piece about gender balance. Serendipity or what? (This piece will be performed at the concert tomorrow night by the way, so please make sure you get there!).

Meetings

We then had a meeting in Dublin, where 20 people showed up in the lobby of Jury’s Inn ... which was followed on by another meeting in The Cobblestone (who very graciously supplied a venue, teas and coffees) where 40 people showed up. Then we hit the ground running and decided (under serious time pressure) to apply for a grant from the Arts Council. Pauline Scanlon, Niamh Dunne, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, Síle Denvir and Úna Monaghan and myself applied for the grant. And Ellie Byrne was also a great help to us.

The Arts Council

We were successful and are deeply indebted to them for their strong support and display of leadership in the arts; particularly Paul Flynn and Catherine Boothman who have been fielding so many of our questions. We are also indebted to Frank Connolly, a campaigner for years with various left-wing movements, who without hesitation said he would see if we could have Liberty Hall for the first FairPlé festival. We are very grateful to the MUI for the use of the building and indeed their endless patience with myself in changing the dates three times! Thank you, Ethel Buckley and Karan O’Loughlin.

Social Media; www.FairPlé.com

We then entered the world of social media, set up a website, and again were really helped by Éamon Murray. We received a huge amount of support and goodwill. The number of people ringing us and emailing to say “At last!”, and “Well done!” was overwhelming. We then realised that this was an enormous amount of work and started to ask ourselves, “Are we mad?!” Clearly the answer is “Yes!”. However, we believe in what we are doing, and that is our inspiration. So, to stress: we are a volunteer organisation, learning as we go.

We started to receive some kickback and abuse online, as happens to many groups who try and effect social change. This became exhausting as we found a lot of our time being consumed with defending or explaining why women need equality. But we kept pushing the point home that in the end everyone benefits from a more enlightened society. We began really organising ourselves and it began to dawn on us that this was going to take time.

FairPlé Day: A day of Action: 9th of June

Overwhelmingly though, and not to forget the important part, people were ringing us and each other, engaging and talking, all over the country. We definitely had ignited a much-needed conversation. These conversations led us to see that although imbalanced line-ups was the most obvious issue, there are a myriad of issues within the world of folk and trad at professional and non-professional levels (and everything in-between) which need to be teased out and addressed.

We decided to have an event on the 9th of June to celebrate the creativity of Irish women in sessions especially. 28 events took place worldwide on that day, in the Mansion House in Dublin - attended by the then Lord Mayor Mícheál Mac Donncha, Sabina Higgins - Ennis, Boston, New York - the Irish Arts centre - Belfast, Rostrevor, Vienna ... and more importantly Cork. It was a resounding bell of success, chiming out for the sisterhood and for change. Mairéad O’Donnell, Niamh Parsons and Niamh Ní Charra among others did so much work on this.

Turn of events resulting from the day of action: Stories

People started emailing in with stories and things took a turn away from the discussion on gender balance and quotas to sexual assault. People tagged one particular online discussion about this onto my Facebook page. It has to said it was a long few weeks. While I think Facebook can be a forum for social change, a large measure of me thinks it can be a toxic environment. We had been discussing privately at length how to deal with the issue of sexual harassment and assault, and now we really just had to tackle it head on. It was an extremely difficult time for us all, as sexual harassment is a reality for many female performers.

To be very clear: there is a problem. Behind the clearly visible bias in the line-ups and work opportunities for women lies demoralisation, demeaning attitudes, sexual innuendo and indeed the harsh brutal merciless reality of sexual assault. This needs to rooted out, and we need to change this. We took advice from the Musicians Union of Ireland about how we might approach this.

There is also an issue with the endless dampening down of female creativity and strength, with constantly having to reassert ourselves. It’s actually the small things that mount up in your head, wear you down. They pile up in your head and it can feel as if you are going mad. They gnaw at your gut. And to be creative, you need to feel safe. Compassion is the gateway to the imagination, so if you can’t walk into your head in peace, it makes things more difficult.

Women need access to the vehicles in our society that allow us to fulfil our potential as music-makers. We need to be treated with respect and dignity at all times and to have more access, support and respect in the workplace. We hope that feedback from today will begin to provide us with that basis. Thank you to the many people who are helping us formulate a code of practice, especially Kate Barry.

Company/ Business

Alongside of this was of course the practical side of things. Kate Barry, Jessie Cawley, Stu Fletcher, Jane Cassidy and Maurice Leyden were beavering away at the Company papers, the bank account, (we actually got a gig from Rose in AIB Cork as she turned out to be a feminist herself!) and we were helped a lot during this process by Mikie Smyth who answered a lot of questions from myself. So we are set up as an Incorporated Company with our own constitution and are protected that way.

Testimonies

In trying to find a way to talk about the stories Úna Monaghan has asked for people to share stories in a safe environment anonymously. The FairPlé website has a link to it. It would be really great if people could share their stories. FairPlé would like to thank Úna profoundly for her hard work, steering it through the ethics committee at The University of Cambridge, and the academic world and indeed the traditional music community. Úna will present a research paper on her findings at a symposium in February which I will tell you about in a minute.

Directory

FairPlé would also like to thank Rusty Weise, Niamh Ní Charra, Úna Ní Fhlannagáin and Stu Fletcher for all their hard work on this. This will be a great resource for concert and festival programmers.

Filming

Thank you to Alan Doherty who has been filming for months now and taking it all in and commenting in his own inimitable style on events.

Communications

We thank profusely Aibhlín McCrann for all her help with our communications and for her enormous emotional support.

FairPlé would like to sincerely thank Niamh Dunne and Pauline Scanlon for being the primary organisers for this weekend and for doing an extraordinary amount of work.

Symposium (9th of February)

A great day of talks and music is being held on the 9th of February in NUIG, where academics and performers will be teasing out the issue of gender. We welcome any papers, which need to be received by the 15th of Sept. And we thank Síle Denvir, Méabh Ní Fhuartháin, Verena Commins, Úna Monaghan and Lillis Ó Laoire so much for their work and effort in providing a venue and sourcing funding for this endeavour. This symposium will not just be for academics and we encourage performers and anyone interested in trad/folk music to attend this event.

Finally thank you to all our supporters for their great commitment. Most importantly, we are looking at this weekend as a consultation process with the people within the traditional and folk music world in Ireland. We chose our name very carefully and the word ‘plé’ (meaning discussion) was no accident. We are hopeful that the conversations with the listeners and lovers of music, teachers, academics, performers, industry people, session players, singing clubs, dancers, musicians, agents, advertisers, press people, radio heads, TV personalities, liars, schemers, dreamers, advocates, socialists, sound engineers, roadies, republican socialists, feminists, people who want to hear and to listen to women, union organisers - the whole gamut, will help us all to find a way to move forward together that is creative and indeed adding to our society as a whole. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it, and we want all people to be able to see themselves up on that stage, for our children to know in their bones that women are equal. So women, men, minorities, diverse groups, immigrants, the whole lot that makes up a new and inclusive Ireland can be cherished and loved for all that we are.

I even want to thank our detractors, as in so many ways you have challenged us and made us think. The resistors have also made us more determined to keep going. With the trolling and emojis and angry faces and cruelty it shows just how much we are needed.

Indeed it adds to our hurt by discrediting our truths. But we know that we are doing the right thing.

Ireland is filled with an extraordinarily talented band of women who are vibrant, brimming with creativity; there is a really well-educated group of female performers pushing at the glass ceiling. Even to the detractors who say we should be working on the broader social issues, we are! Most of us are involved in various left-wing and feminist social movements. And this movement is crucial to female performers, of course who need - and deserve - to earn a living wage. To effect wider societal change each community has to have an honest look at their own small patch and constantly aim for a better way of doing things. As artists, we have a particular responsibility to do this.

Finally, and really finally I would also like to thank ourselves, FairPlé. Women are often under-appreciated, certainly not thanked enough for all that we do. So I am thanking us all for allowing ourselves to grow and be nurtured together, for giving ourselves permission to be stronger, for making mistakes and letting each other do that, for having the courage at this important historical juncture, in a time when Ireland is relearning how to love its womenfolk, to speak up. Thanking us all that we stood up, stood up together, stood our ground, playing and singing together and are being counted.

Enjoy the weekend and thank you for being here to support and adding your voices to our deliberations. Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid.

Beir bua.