Irish Riverdance Riverdance displays modern Irish culture while it is based on an old, influential culture with a love of co

Good morning, everyone. Today, we are going to talk about Irish Riverdance. Riverdance is an expression of modern Irish culture, but it is based on a culture, which had its golden era from the 6th to the 9th century. Before that period, Irish culture was oral and based on a love of complicated stories and poetic styles. But in the 6a century something wonderful happened--writing was introduced by missionaries. From then on, the culture of Ireland began to develop in ways impossible before and had considerable influence in northern Europe in the period up till the 9th century.
   With the invasions which began in the 9th century this golden age collapsed and there never was any real recovery. There were no wealthy kings to sponsor the poets and scholars so the traditions survived only in a form which the peasants liked. The love of story and song did not die but no real attempt was made to find a distinctive Irish style until the end of the 19th century when Irish Nationalism began to influence writers, in English called Anglo-Irish literature.
There are many famous writers from that period.
   There is also William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett, all of whom have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In all, Ireland has received the Nobel Literature Prize four time. When you consider we have only a population half the size of Beijing you see how unusual that is.
   Now, let me talk about the music.
   The Irish love of music has succeeded in surviving the change from Irish, the native language, to the language of the invader and bas once more begun to blossom and become influential outside the country.
   Irish music was reduced to being the language of the country people and was dying out as people moved to the cities, Young city people did not want to listen to "peasant music" although we were all told it was important. Some efforts were made to make it attractive to city people, but largely without success. More recently, this has begun to change and since the 1980’ s has taken off. But modem Ireland has been looking for more than just a revival of traditional music. Many of the most famous popular singers in the world are Ifish--U2, Enya, the Cranberries, and many others. There are 10,000 people employed in Ireland in the music industry. Riverdance is an expression of that new interest in the old and that ability to understand the new.
   Riverdance is not just an expression of self-confidence, a kind of culturally interesting pop song. It tells the story of a people through song and dance. It tells the story of the people whose spirit was broken by an event which occurred in the middle of the last century but continued to affect the society until 1961, the Great Famine.
   What is a famine?
   In 1840 the official population of Ireland was 8,000,000. They were largely poor, and living in the countryside. They were beginning to have an interest in independence and perhaps had things been different Ireland might have been independent much earlier, but there was a serious problem in the agricultural system. All crops were grown to pay the rent of the land, and all that was grown to eat was the potato. This was fine until the potato crop failed as it did from 1845 to 1848. The stories of what happened in those times live on in the popular culture of Ireland and I won’ t tell them here but the result was that 2 million people died or left the country by 1851. When you realize that the population continued to go down until 1961 you can realize what a disastrous effect this famine had on the people.
   Compared with China, imagine of the famine of 1960 reduced the population by 1/4 and it kept falling to less than half of its pre-famine figure.
   Anybody with ideas left and went to England, America or Australia. The people left behind were broken by their experiences and, in effect, the famine and its consequences put an end to all serious development in the country until well into this century. The Irish in Ireland lost all hope and self-confidence and much of our modern culture is about the sadness of that time and the sorrow of saying goodbye to those who left and left well into this century. Ireland has the highest emigration rate of any country in Europe for the last two centuries. We even have an expression for this saying goodbye. It is called the "American Wake". It means the ceremony, like that of a funeral for someone going to America, because you will never see him or her again.
   Do you know why there is Irish music on the film Titanic? It is because most of the people killed were Irish.
   The leaving continued until the 1970’ s because Independence in 1921 was followed by a civil war and an economic depression. Almost every family in Ireland has relatives abroad, and up to the 60’ s in some places, of a class of 30 graduating from high school all left. Along the west coast, closed-up houses from that time falling into ruin are still common.