ABSTRACT
This chapter charts a seminal point of change in the relationship between Irish traditional music and higher education in Ireland. It does so in the form of an autoethnographic account by performer, composer and academic, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin. It charts his early years as a young academic in the Music Department of University College Cork and later as a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast, culminating in the creation of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limeric in 1994. It narrates a period of cultural subversion: A direct and successful confrontation with an established view of what constitutes valid human culture. It draws on the formative influences of mentors including Aloys Fleischmann and Seán Ó Riada in Cork, as well as John Blacking and John Bailey in Belfast. It concludes by developing Blacking's assertion that cultural redress is ultimately an opportunity for the growth of love in the context of human relationship.
