The Belfast Harp Festival

The Belfast Harp Festival, called by contemporary writers The Belfast Harpers Assembly, 11–14 July 1792, was a three-day musical and patriotic event organized in Belfast, Ireland, by leading members of the local Society for Promoting Knowledge (the Linen Hall Library)

• Dr. James MacDonnell
• Robert Bradshaw
• Henry Joy
• Robert Simms.

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).

The Assembly Room

The venue of the contest was in The Assembly Room on Waring Street in Belfast which was opened as a market house in 1769.

It was staged for the benefit of the Belfast Charitable Society but coincided with the town’s Bastille Day celebrations with which it shared patrons and supporters.

These celebrations involved the trooping of local Volunteer corps carrying flags and banners hailing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, American liberties, and the new Polish Constitution and concluded with town-meeting resolutions, carried by the new-formed United Irishmen, in favor of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform.

The festival is said to have marked “the beginning of a long association between northern Protestants and the Gaelic revival”.

Irish Harp

In the 1790s, interest in the Irish harp, stemmed from a combination of cultural and political motives. 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 favor 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.