The recent Irish Cultural Festival in China was a success if you count the number of tickets handed out to government officials and somebodies of Beijing society which were actually used by those for whom they were intended – ticket-gifting is essential for a big show’s smooth passage in Beijing but the tickets are often passed on to aides and underlings who scalp them.

Yet European and American expats easily outnumbered locals at the David Holmes and Frames gigs at the arty Yan Club, questioning the need for the gig at all, although the show did produce one of the best collaborations of the festival, a folk rock tune from China’s gravel-voiced godfather of rock, Cui Jian (pictured with Glen Hansard), backed by The Frames.
A few weeks of morning food market chats with locals on Tuanjiehu Lu, the street on which this writer lives, found only a few who knew an Irish Festival was in town. This civil servant’s neighbourhood is a kilometer down the road from the luxurious Ploy Theatre where the high-profile events of the Festival happened yet nobody I spoke to had been to an Irish show there. On the other hand, several people had bought pirated copies of the Riverdance DVD and many made the connection between Ireland and Enya, an icon on Chinese mall radio.
Students from the Central Conservatory of Music were invited en masse to the Spirit Of Ireland and China, a hugely ambitious and electrifying meeting of Irish traditional musicians and their Chinese counterparts in an orchestra backed by the Irish Chamber Choir. The only ticket buyers seemed to be sets of ambitious parents taking their single children to be inspired towards the classical career and with it the fame dreamed of by so many Chinese mothers and fathers.
The extent to which exchanges actually happened is questionable. Certainly Irish artists brought over to collaborate and teach didn’t seem over-exerted.
Lavish dinners, chauffeured tours of the Great Wall and a few engagements do not for an Artist In Residence make. A group of Irish writers were flown to four different cities around China for brief engagements with fellow writers and students, too brief perhaps for serious exchanges. Media coverage of the literary side of the event was thinner than for others, apart from the paragraphs given to poet Paul Muldoon, the latter’s Pulitzer prize marking him out in a country obsessed with baubles of approval from the western cultural establishment.
The Chinese who did go to the festival events seemed unanimously impressed.
“Irish people should be very proud of their country,” said secondary school teacher Chen Yuan Yuan, who took a particular liking to Mary Black’s voice and Donal Lunny’s playing. “China could learn a lot from this, we’ve lost a lot of our culture lately.”
Ticket prices were too prohibitive for more of her colleagues to come said Chen, who spent 100 yuan (E10) out of a 2,000 yuan (E200) monthly salary to see Mary Black play.
Chinese hospitality is legendary but its givers expect to be reciprocated. Just as Ireland’s culture minister John O’Donoghue was toasted by dozens of Communist Party windbags and their entourages present at the Riverdance/Altan show, so those Party suits will expect to be received in like manner when they fly to Ireland later this year.
The turgidly boring speeches and CPC pledges of “strengthening ties” aside, the Irish Cultural Festival has served its purpose: to kowtow and make an offering to the powers that command the insatiably product-hungry Chinese marketplace. Several of Beijing’s bars did well from the passing trade and a sizeable stack of pirate DVDs went home in most Irish performers’ and journalists’ suitcases.
“We bought all of the seasons of the Sopranos today for like a tenner,” Glen Hansard told his audience, before reminding them to protect local culture and boot Starbucks out of the Forbidden City. This writer meanwhile will long treasure the memory of veteran actor Johnny Murphy and a group of similarly aged Dublin cultural hacks happily shaking and shuffling in front of David Holmes’ turntables at the Yan Club.