After the 'feis-fixing' scandal, has Irish dancing cleaned up its act?
About this episode
Ellen Coyne discusses the feis-fixing scandal in Irish dancing and its implications for the sport.
When Ellen Coyne heard her phone buzz in bed on a dark October night in 2022, she couldn’t have known that answering it would lead to the “biggest thing to happen to Irish dancing since Riverdance.” A dossier of messages and WhatsApp screen grabs claimed to uncover what had long been suspected about the sport and art-form; that competition-fixing between teachers and adjudicators was widespread, and that the practise hadn’t just been a problem in recent years but rather stretched back over decades. The feis-fixing scandal as it came to be known revealed a global culture of lobbying judges to promote or demote a given dancer with the implicit understanding the favour would be returned. “If a judge had marked up your students, let’s say a major competition six months previously, [and] it’s your turn to judge when it comes to the Al-Irelands, there’s an expectation that you have a debt that needs to be repaid.” Despite the spotlight suddenly being shone on the alleged practise, Coyne came up against a wall of silence. “A lot of people kept drawing parallels with the mafia, which I initially thought was a little bit over the top.” But the longer she spent researching the claims the…
People in this episode
Guest: Ellen Coyne
Topics covered
- Irish dancing
- feis-fixing scandal
- competition-fixing
- judging
- lobbying
- retribution
Keywords
- Irish dancing
- feis-fixing
- competition
- judges
- scandal
- lobbying
- retribution
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Irish dancing, Riverdance, Al-Irelands
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