If that’s another dig at me re. the Cathal McConnell ‘joke’ you won’t share, better just drop it!
You’ll have to tell the joke now 
The problem is that I have told the joke.
Misguided? I don’t know: it seems to follow a long and well established tradition.
The question is: How much of that doggerel’s innuendo?
In a way I just see the song as a lament to change and as you get older change is harder to accept. The words could only been written by somebody like Pat Sky that lived in a tradition that has suddenly gone through a lot of changes, I think its unfair to criticize him for that. It like all songs ,if you can relate to the sentiment in the song you will probably enjoy it.
RORY
How much of that doggerel’s innuendo?
The one with the waggle detail?
I do hope that doggerel’s not for sale. 
Pat can speak for himself, of course, but it seems to me that the lament isn’t so much about the very fact of change, but the particular type of change that the “Celtic entertainment” phenomenom represents.
Traditional Irish music is compelling to many of us precisely because so much change is built into it: variation, swing feel or not, regional and personal styles, improvisation, and even the continued introduction of new tunes (some with actual, known composers!) into the repertoire. To most of us, that kind of change is just peachy.
But reactions vary widely to changes that appear to “dilute” the culture, e.g., from something specifically Irish or Scottish in origin or idiom, to something more generic (i.e., “Celtic” meaning “Celtic-themed” rather than specifically Irish or Scottish, Galician, Welsh, etc.). Or to changes that seem to “change the tradition” in wildy anachronistic ways that, thirty years down the road, might sound cheesy and dated (e.g., funky bass lines or washes of synthesizer chords).
Nowadays I don’t find pan-Celtic-ism or New Age-iness to be terribly compelling (though the first CD I ever owned with Gaelic on it was an Enya CD I bought in college and enjoyed, and I’m man enough to admit it). I grudgingly admit that it probably even leads a certain percentage of listeners to the “pure(r) stuff.” (Would I have discovered Sonny Rollins had I not first heard Maynard Ferguson playing his music two octaves too high and 100 BPM too fast? Maybe, but not as early as I did. 
Same deal.)
But even if it doesn’t, so what? Nothing Enya does prevents traditionalists from sticking to the straight bog music. And nothing that Mr. Sky puts into a teasing song should prevent anyone from enjoying Enya (or whomever).
Regards to all regardless of musical taste/impulses/income,
Mick
Very well put Mick.
I heard it said the “Irish music was ruined by the that dammed Sligo reel”
Horses for courses. Or dogs.
Tommy
Thanks, Tommy! Well put, back at you (memo to self: learn to play “The Sligo” 
).
Let me add that my respect for Mr. Sky remains perfectly intact. Seems to me that co-founding Green Linnet Records, producing both “Forty Years of Irish Piping” and “The Stone in the Field” (after re-reeding Tommy Reck’s pipes, no less), and putting decent starter sets into the hands of a couple generations of aspiring pipers, earn a guy the right to a little sarcasm and mischief on the Interwebs.
Which is a prerogative that many here claim without anything approaching that kind of credibility, speaking for myself at least.
Cheers,
Mick