The earliest industrialization in the US was in New England, and coal had nothing to do with it. it was all about water power. Ireland has lot of streams and rivers..
Among coal dependent industries, Philly was about 2 hours by rail from the anthractice fields. Pittsburgh the same. Detroit was not near coal. Cincinnati was not especially close to coal. New York had lots of industry and no nearby coal. It was certainly an advantage to be near coal, but Chicago was
massively industrialized and though they mined coal in illinois, it was shipped to Chicago by rail from farther east.
Look at ireland and it's completely obvious what's going on. The places where the Island is most heavily industrialized are near Belfast, the most heavily protestant-settled as part of deliberate strategy of settler colonialism. Capital goes to those areas, an they develop a very successful textile industry and shipbuilding. Lack of coal mines is not a problem. The rest of the island is dominated by people who own landed estates, and by dominated I mean "entirely politically controlled," with a legal and judicial system geared to the interests of people in landed estates. Capital does not flow into Ireland--except in the areas around Belfast--it flows out, in the form of rents, which amount to
millions of pounds annually. the landord class for the most part bitterly resists any changes to that system. As everyone points out, as people starve during the famine, food was still being shipped to England. Is this related in some way to lack of coal? No, it indicates Ireland's role in the United Kingdom was mostly to grow food. They could ship food out, but not ship coal in? They could ship human beings out, but not sail coal in? It's not exclusive to ireland--Why is Sicily not industrialized? Because its role vis a vis Italy was to supply food under the rule of large landlords. And as with ireland it ships tens of thousands of people to the US and elsewhere, to feed the demand for industrial labor which does not exist at home, because of political policy.
By 1870 there are ships leaving every single day between liverpool and New York, carrying Irish emigrants. It's an entirely regularized and routinzed trade. So I'm sure they could have managed shipping coal from Holyhead to dublin: there was abundant cheap labor to offset the relatively modest cost of shipping coal..
The primary interest of the Anglo irish ruling class is finding more profitable uses for rural land, so they encourage cattle rearing--to feed the industrial revolution in England--and they do their best to get the native Irish to leave, rather than foster the kind of industrialization you see in nearly every other country in Europe. This class of people is highly committed to a specific lifestyle; so much so that by the twentieth century they are going bankrupt and selling off land to pay debts. It's ultimately economically irrational behavior, like, say, buying Twitter for more than it's worth, or investing heavily in crypto.
When the Anglo Irish make attempts to "industrialize" Ireland they do so in every specific ways--look for example at the two "irish Villages" at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. They were both run by women interested in fostering
cottage industry in Ireland--weaving, home crafts industries, things that remained charming and rural. The chairperson of the Association of Irish Industries is Lady Aberdeen. She imagines the future of Irish industry as people making lace napkins for Chicago department stores. I am not making this up: Both "Irish village"s were an attempt to imagine "irish industry." This at a time when hundreds of thousands of Irish born people were working in Chicago, one of the most heavily industrialized cities n the world. Lady Aberdeen is the class of people and the mindset I'm talking about. This article is another example--
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/perio ... 40629.2.25. Mrs Alice Hart's entire Donegal Village including the workers was shipped to Wanamaker's department store in Philly. Philly was at that time the most industrialized city in the US, possibly the world, with the second largest population of Irish people laboring in its many industries.
You could certainly find industry in the counties in the south, but it's undercapitalized, and the mindset of the Anglo irish ruling class, as in the example of Mrs. Hart and Lady Aberdeen above, is focused controlling the process of industrialization in ways that preserve the charm of the peasantry.
To return to the subject at hand, this is the context in which O'Neill is collecting music--a context where he could walk four blocks and go see lady Aberdeen's vision of irish "industry."