Sinead and her fiddle shine in the Arabian sun

A FINE fiddler from Augher, Sinead McKenna was one of a few dozen exceedingly-talented Irish musicians and dancers chosen to fly to Dubai to represent the Emerald Isle at the World Expo recently.

The World Expo, otherwise known as the World Fair, is an event which runs every five years, and gives nations the opportunity ‘to showcase their culture, plans and people to the rest of the world’ – imagine your average market, but swap the carpets for culture, and the wheeler-dealers for nation states. That’s the World Expo. This year the host nation was Dubai.

When we spoke with Sinead, still shining from her month under the Arabian sun, she chatted about, among other things, the unifying power of music; the extravagance of Dubai; and the difficulties which arise when an Augher woman tries to elicit directions from a ‘security robot’.

“It was great craic being in the middle of such a huge global event,” said Sinead. “You don’t realise how big of a deal it is until you are there.”

The Expo is a big deal… a wile big deal.

Over five years, Dubai, a city not famed for its frugality, spent somewhere in the region of 50 billion getting the place ready for the world’s arrival.

As you can imagine, 50 billion gets you quite a bit more than a lick of paint here, and a few shrubs there…

“They built a new city about the same size as Belfast from scratch,” said Sinead.

The multi-billion pound pop-up city was full of bars and restaurants, shops and malls, and grand hotels with glittering facades. As well as that, Sinead said there were 192 of something called ‘country pavilions’…

“Each nation elects one of their own architects to design their ‘pavilion’ – that is the building which is your hub while you are there. If you want to learn about a nation, experience their culture, meet their people or eat their food, you head to their pavilion,” said Sinead.

Think of it as their big fancy market stall.

“Our pavilion was modeled on Newgrange; the prehistoric pagan monument in Meath. So when the sun was its highest, the light burst through a particular hole in the ceiling. It was unreal!” noted Sinead.

“But I reckon the most impressive one was Russia’s – I think they are angling to host the next Expo, so they went all out!” she laughed.

Among the plurality of people she met, one of the incidents Sinead most fondly recalled was, when along with a group of fellow musicians, she found cultural common-ground with an audience of migrant workers.

“A lot of the people working the Expo are immigrants, and wouldn’t be getting paid much at all,” she said.

“We were playing tunes in the Irish pavilion one day, and a group came in and started listening. We started chatting with them, exchanging aspects of our culture and history.

“We were explaining the famine and Irish immigration through songs like the Fields of Athenry, and before long they were saying, ‘that’s the same as us’.

“We were from opposite sides of the world; they had never heard Irish music before we started playing it, but in that moment we were brought together by our music and history.”

And the borderlessness of music continued to assert itself.

“The word was put out that the Irish were inviting every willing nation to join them in their pavilion in an effort to break a world record; the most diverse world choir to ever perform,” said Sinead.

Sinead didn’t say whether the world record was broken, but instead evoked the image of ‘maybe a hundred nationalities singing in Irish’.

But such is life, it wasn’t all ‘kumbaya’ round the campfire.

“Lionel Messi, Alicia Keyes, and Robbie Keane were all there at a stage. Unfortunately, we did not manage to see of them,” Sinead said.

“But I ran into a few unhelpful robots. I only fell out with someone once the whole time I was there,” she laughed, “And that someone was a particularly bad-mannered bot who refused to tell me where the nearest shop was!”

But in typical Irish fashion, Sinead concluded that ‘as nice as it was to be away, it was great to get home’.

“There are many good things you can say about Dubai,” she said. “But, the food isn’t as good, and the pints aren’t as creamy… It was some experience, but I was happy to get home.”