IT is a source of pride that Irish traditional music - which 60 years ago was almost lying with O'Leary in the grave - is now pulsing through our big city centres and isolated country pubs, and is to be found on the internet, the concert stage, live on TG4 and even high up in the French Alps.
I heard about the latter when chatting to French-born uilleann piper Tom Delany who made some life-long friends at a Tionóil when he was a teenager and immersed in traditional music.
Tom's father Rory had gone to France in the 1980s to work as a carpenter and play music when he got the chance, sometimes at the famous Festival InterCeltique de Lorient in Brittany.
He later met and married a French girl, settled down and when the time came in time-honoured tradition, he was teaching his son Tom the tin whistle at their home in Treffort-Cuisiat, 80km north-east of Lyon.
However, when he turned 13, Tom got a set of uilleann pipes and his musical life changed.
"Yeah, I got my first set of pipes for my 13th birthday," he recalls.
"I think they were made by an Englishman called Addison who usually made bagpipes, lowland pipes and Northumbrian pipes as well as uilleann pipes.
"That was the first set I got but it was quite unusual in that they they were quite small. Looking back, we think that that set was actually made either for a child or for a young lady and it was maybe pitched a little bit sharper, just to allow everything to be a tiny bit smaller.
"Actually, it turned out to be perfect for a 13-year-old, you know, to have an instrument that was a little bit smaller,
"However, when I was about 14 or 15, I met a guy called Didier Heuline who was getting into pipe-making himself.
"I was the only kid at that Tionóil and I must have made some kind of an impression because Didier decided to make me a chanter as a Christmas present and we became great friends."
Later, Tom ordered a full set of pipes from Didier.
Because they lived in the country, Tom would play in his father's band, doing a lot of gigs on the weekends, in pubs and town halls and so on but it was when he went to university in Lyon, he realised that there were some great sessions in a lot of French cities and in Lyon in particular and the scene is growing.
"I had a fantastic time in Lyon but nowadays there are dozens of Irish music festivals all over the country, not just concerts and concert venues - we're talking about workshops, pub sessions, session trails, the same thing as you get over in Ireland.
"There was a great one just a week ago in Arzon, called the Brittany winter school. It's been a favourite of ours for years.
"And then there's Tocaine, which has been going on for nearly 20 years, I think.
"Irish music in France is definitely getting stronger and stronger."
As for his own playing, when Tom was 16, he came to Ireland on his own and went to Co Clare and, of course, it blew him away to be in the home county of one of his heroes, Willie Clancy.
Every summer, he would return and, like a teenager wanting to be a rock star, he just played and played, learning from the masters in their natural environment rather than from CDs sent to France.
"But while doing my third year studying English at university in Lyon, I applied for Erasmus and ended up in UCD. That was a great time as well," he recalls.
"Then I went travelling around the world for a bit and came back to do a Master's in traditional music performance in Limerick. And that was me so I've been living in Ireland full time for the 12 years ago or so."
Although he is now living in another musical Mecca, the Dingle Peninsula in west Kerry, Tom still has many fond memories of Doolin in Clare, one of his favourite places in the world and he is just back from there after launching his first solo album, The Lark's Call.
On it you can hear the quality that Tom most sets out to achieve - musicality as practised by the likes of Paddy Moloney, Liam O'Flynn and Paddy Keenan, pipers who had "a massive, massive influence" on his playing.
"I think it's the sheer musicality in their playing and the fact that they play in a band context," says Tom.
"I was never a big fan of solo piping as such. In France, Dad was trying to feed me as much as he could so I was listening to pure piping, the likes of Seamus Ennis and Willie Clancy, two men who would never put technique over musicality.
"They'd try to get the tunes to sing rather than trying to show off all the skills which they had in abundance.
"However, I love playing in a band and with other people. On The Lark's Call, it's me that put the arrangements together but really in 70s band context, the likes of Planxty or the Bothy Band so when you hear us as a band, you'll hear the sound that is very close to the bands of that era."
And you do get that from the opening track to the last, the sheer musicality (a noun that is hard to describe in words, I admit) but there is something else that binds the album together.
There are a lot of old favourites of mine and tunes I can connect and relate to certain people and that's another thing I love about Irish music.
"If I play a tune, I know who I learned it from. And I know where I heard at first and all that kind of stuff," he says.
"So there's a lot of memories that come with all these all these tunes, the ones I played with my dad, tunes I learned from my friends, Conor Lamb and Deirdre Galway when we were doing some cruise ships together or just tunes I heard growing up.
"But every tune has a little story, I didn't pick anything on the album that's there just because it's technically difficult or for no reason at all."
Joining Tom on the album are some of Ireland's finest Caroline Keane on concertina, Alan Murray on guitar and bouzouki, Brian O'Loughlin on flute, Laura Kerr on fiddle, Conor Lyons on bodhrán and Camille Philippe on mandolin, all hewn together beautifully in studio by former Lúnasa guitarist Donogh Hennessy.
Vive la France et l'Irlande.
