LIVE REPORT: Glastonbury's Irish contingent

You can get a real sense of the placing of Irish artists internationally by glancing at the annual Glastonbury line-up. Although Ireland has always enjoyed strong representation at the world's greatest music festival, Irish acts have tended to be found only on the festival's fringes.
Over the past decade, artists such as David Kitt, Damien Rice, Glen Hansard, Villagers and Lisa Hannigan have been restricted to plying their trade on the festival's Acoustic Stage, nestled away from the main hub of activity in Worthy Farm's North East corner.
This year was little different with singer-songwriters dominating the Irish contingent and Hozier acting as the nation's sole representative at the festival's focal point, the Pyramid Stage.
It was slim pickings too on the other key stages with a Sunday noon slot for Derry's SOAK and a last-minute lunchtime billing for The Strypes (in for Azealia Banks) the only other prime positions occupied by the Irish.
Despite this, Hozier can lay claim to drawing one of the weekend's largest crowds with his Sunday lunchtime slot. The Bray superstar's rising popularity shows no signs of abating and he had the masses singing along to 'Something New', 'Sedated' and 'Take Me To Church' on an unusually warm closing day. The Pyramid Stage can be unforgiving, however, and although the 25-year-old clearly has bags of talent, the live show might now need to evolve into a larger spectacle to cope with the size of the stages he's playing on. It's no knock on the man, more an acknowledgement of the company he's keeping.

The same could not be said for Belfast's Duke Special who, although performing to a considerably smaller audience at the Acoustic Stage, knows all to well how to wow a crowd. Dipping into a back catalogue of eclectic pop gems that included 'Freewheel' and 'Salvation Tambourine', the Northern Irishman ended his set by leaping into the stage for a bout of crowd surfing... only to run out of crowd.
The same stage also saw a triumphant headline slot from Glastonbury regular Christy Moore, who delivered all his favourites alongside covers of The Pogues' 'A Pair of Brown Eyes' and Ewan McColl's 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'.
Of the trio of Glastonbury debutants in SOAK, The Lost Brothers, and Rainy Boy Sleep, it was the latter who most impressed with a gorgeous set on the John Peel Stage of his acoustic-based songs of longing, all delivered with a subtle infusion of electronica.
2015 may not go down as a vintage year for the Irish at Glastonbury. No act threatened to steal the limelight from heavy-hitters such as Kanye or The Libertines, but there was enough love for those that did journey to Worthy Farm to suggest the flow of acts crossing the Irish Sea won't end anytime soon.