A more traditional Temple Bar

Donald Mahoney previews the inaugural Temple Bar Trad Festival, and wonders if it will help to improve the area's 'identity crisis', moving it one step closer to the cultural quarter it wants to be No tidy narrative can explain Temple Bar. How so many disparate cultural elements – the ballad-singers serenading tourists, the assault of Italian café culture, the super-pubs tending to packs of stags and hens, the galleries, theatres, and music venues – can peacefully coexist alongside each other will be stumping anthropologists for centuries to come.
Temple Bar has had an identity problem for about as long as Irish people have had disposable income, but an effort is well underway to reclaim it as the kind of benign, enlightened place that a cultural quarter is supposed to be.  
Finbar Doyle lives around Temple Bar, and has witnessed it change, and change again. In programming Temple Bar Trad, which begins tonight, he is trying to move Temple Bar's evolution one step further along.
The place which has witnessed some of the worst versions of ‘Fields of Athenry' will play host to the first Dublin trad fest of this scale since the 1980s, while featuring some of the finest in traditional Irish music over the next four nights.
Mindful of attention in its inaugural year, the organisers of Temple Bar Trad have culled musicians from either side of the Pale to create a line-up that's a veritable who's who of trad. A reunited Skara Brae, Noel Hill, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Mick O'Brien – and that's the opening night. Big gigs will alternate nightly between the Temple Bar Music Centre and the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre – Sean Tyrell, Tommy Peoples and the Kane sisters are some of the more well-known players making rare Dublin appearances this weekend.
As far as trad festivals go, Temple Bar Trad aims to be all things to all people. Tamer trad revellers can enjoy seated, nightly concerts set in a darkened, stone-silent theatre. For those who prefer their sessions raucous and stretching deep into the night, there's a Temple Bar session trail and the post-gig Festival Club in the Bloom's Hotel VAThouse Bar that will offer a post-show venue for the night's performers and the audience to mix, and where hopefully a session or two might occur. There's also trad workshops, children's activities, and storytelling. If you could only pitch a tent along the Liffey, you might call it a Willie Clancy Weekend East.
Boyle imagines the festival “will come together organically”, but the ability of Temple Bar Trad to cement a place on the traditional music calendar depends largely on the music's ability to supplant the traditional image of its host. Which is not to slight Dublin's trad scene – it's historically vibrant, if “dislocated”, to use Boyle's word. And you can still find a blinding session at the Palace bar on Fleet Street.
It's just that trad festivals are, by nature, anarchic events where laws and inhibitions are generally disregarded in the sway of drink and spontaneous, often joyous, music. Trad music is intrinsically non-commercial, and one wonders how much will be lost in translation amid the backdrop of Dublin bling culture. Boyle describes the affair as “organised mayhem”, and the dialogue between the two – the organisation and the mayhem – could make for fascinating listening.
∏More Temple Bar Trad Festival runs from 26-29 January. www.templebartrad.com