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In 2015 I wrote a suite of music for a Cross Border initiative, ‘Between the jigs and the marches’, celebrating the similarities between music in North Connacht and that of the Ulster Scots. To me, this 2-step tune has a happy, optimistic kind of feeling where people from whichever cultural or sectarian background can move or dance freely from one part of the island to the other.
Blacklion and Belcoo are two villages between Sligo and Enniskillen, on the Republic and Northern Ireland border, ‘two steps’ apart, separated only by a bridge over the Belcoo River. Today people can move without restrictions between the two places. That was not always the case.
