Artist and piper John B Vallely takes an alternative approach to the evolution of the uilleann pipes by going to a source not usually looked at by historians researching the development of the pipes through a crucial but largely uncharted period.
The various sometimes strange looking pipes depicted in a number of mid to late 18th and even early 19th Century paintings have often been dismissed as simply the product of unobservant if not ignorant painters. He challenges this view pointing out the rigorous discipline of the Art school and studio system then prevailing and which he too experienced in Art Colleges in Belfast & Edinburgh well into the second half of the 20th Century.
The numerous paintings of pipers by Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish artists testifies to the enduring popularity of the pipes right through the period and provides an interesting side step into 18/19th Century Society and how it was organised with piping providing a bridge across the strict class divisions of the day.

Dr Mike Paterson, who produces the National Piping Centre’s bi-monthly international magazine Piping Today, has made a point of exploring the myriad piping regenerations taking place across a wide swathe of Europe, as well as the changes and diversification affecting Highland piping worldwide.
In his illustrated presentation, Mike will raise questions about the driving forces behind the burgeoning interest in bagpipes and the possibility that, rather than being a facet of wider “folk music” or cultural revivals, what is happening may represent the reassertion of a “lost” drone-based musical aesthetic in the West.

This recent revival which originated in the early 1980's has been highly significant in Scotland's musical and social history. It has produced significant changes in the style of piping, a resurrection of many tunes which had fallen into disuse and changes in the social context of piping in Scotland more significant than any other since the introduction of piping competitions at the end of the 18th century.

Richard Lewis O’Mealy, a very colourful but intensely serious man, was born in Trisnernagh, County Westmeath during October 1873. His father and uncle were both pipers and there were fiddlers and a concertina player in the immediate family. It sounds rather peculiar but it was his uncle Ned who taught Richard his first tune - St. Patrick ’s Day, and at that time his father was unaware that the young man was playing at all.
Richard Mealy, as he was at the time, moved to Belfast in 1901. By 1902 he had changed his name to O’Mealy and become chief floor-walker in John Arnott’s department store. He played for anyone who would listen including the aristocracy and seems to have had a good part-time income from playing the pipes.
Exactly when he began to make pipes is unknown. His earlier instruments where much like the older Union pipes but he seems to have been impressed with the work of the Taylor Brothers of Philadelphia for his later work closely resembled their regulator designs.
Luckily the BBC in Belfast recorded him in 1943, shortly before his seventieth birthday and so there are ten recordings which enable us to hear him playing in a style which is all but gone today.
He died on March the fourteenth 1947 and was buried on St. Patrick’s Day.