My letter in today's @BelTel on the success of the Fleadh 👇 Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann has packed up and gone home, and Belfast is entitled to feel pleased with itself. A city that anticipated 800,000 visitors welcomed 1.65 million across eight days, with 5,000 musicians and dancers from 22 countries taking part. The world's largest celebration of Irish music and culture came to Northern Ireland for the second time and, by common consent, had its finest year yet. What made it remarkable was not the numbers, but who turned up. Loyalist marching bands performed on the Gig Rig at the City Hall. Lambeg drums and flutes filled the Ulster Bands Showcase at the Titanic Slipways, alongside a Carrickfergus fife and drum band and highland dance schools from Tyrone. Ulster Scots culture was not politely tolerated at the margins of an Irish festival. It was written into the heart of it, and audiences of every background loved it. Not everyone was delighted. A few complained about banners and drum emblems appearing at all, which tells you more about them than about the bands. Rather more telling was the note of disappointment detectable in some nationalist commentary once it became clear that unionism had turned up, played, embraced it and enjoyed itself. One suspects a refusal to get involved would have been more convenient. The stereotype was ready and waiting, and nobody came to collect it. Then came the strangest response of all: that the week offered a glimpse of what a new Ireland might look like, a place where the British unionist tradition would be at home and would flourish. Forgive me, but how detached from reality can some nationalists be? The place being described is not some future misty-eyed vision. It is Belfast, in August 2026, in the United Kingdom. Every last thing being held up as proof of what we might one day build happened here, in front of us all, under the constitutional arrangements we already have, without the border going anywhere. We are being invited to imagine and aspire to something that we have just spent a week doing in front of 1.65 million witnesses. The New Ireland already exists, and it is Northern Ireland. Whether that has genuinely gone unnoticed, or whether it is simply awkward to concede that the greatest Irish cultural event ever held took place in a corner of the United Kingdom, I leave to others. Credit really belongs to Comhaltas and Ards CCÉ, to the Belfast Bands Forum, to Belfast City Council, and above all to the people - of all backgrounds - who came out and enjoyed themselves. The Fleadh returns to Belfast next August, which is its own kind of verdict.