Belfast Harp Festival

Edward Bunting, a young classically trained organist, was commissioned to notate the forty tunes performed by ten harpists attending, work that was to form the major part of his General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1796).

Emboldened by the revolution in France, Presbyterians in the north-east of Ireland were seeking to ally with the kingdom's Catholic majority against the Anglican ("Protestant") Ascendancy and in favour of a representative national government.

Recognition of the Gaelic past as a common inheritance was seen to bridge the sectarian divide and, as a badge of separate and distinctive Irish culture, bolstered demands for greater autonomy from England.

The patron was John Dungan, a wealthy Catholic merchant living in Copenhagen, Denmark, who had decided "to retain and support the original instrument" of his own country.

The impetus behind the festival survived the 1798 insurrection the United Irishmen (under the banner of the harp without the crown) and the 1800 Acts of Union which abolished the Kingdom of Ireland with its parliament in Dublin.

Employing Arthur O’Neill as the principal tutor, they sought to train a new generation of Irish harpists from among poor children, chosen, in the patriotic tradition of 1792, without reference to religious distinction.

The first Ulster branch of the Gaelic League had been formed in 1895 in east Belfast under the active patronage (until he left to become Church of Ireland Lord Bishop of Ossory) of the Rev.