Not everybody was happy with the treatment given to the little band of gypsies who ventured to our shores recently.

Few people had anything good to say about them; indeed some of the things written and said could be deemed racist.

One letter in a national daily gave me second thoughts about the limits of free speech.

The writer told us that the gypsies were professional thieves and robbers and that some of them drove around in expensive cars.

We heard all this before in relation to Irish Travellers.

Hitler would have approved of that letter: there were several thousand gypsies in Germany when the Nazis came to power; he paid them the ultimate compliment -- he sent them to the gas chamber.

Who are the gypsies and who are the Celts? The origin of both can be traced to south-east Asia. We are told they travelled westwards. The Celts seemingly excelled in crafting precious metal. The gypsies excelled in music. All this may have a grain of truth.

The gypsies have kept their identity -- seemingly they didn't mix with other people; perhaps other people didn't mix with them.

You will find them all over mainland Europe, distrusted and marginalised. There are a few gypsy families here in Ireland. You will see them at the Puck Fair.

People distrust them because they suspect that they have occult powers. They fear that they can see into the future -- for good measure they are supposed to have a very potent curse.

What we know for sure is that the gypsies have made a great contribution to European culture, especially in Hungary and Spain.

You can hardly claim that the Irish Travellers have had such an influence, but they helped to preserve what is loosely called folk music over generations when it was dying out.

The popular music of my boyhood came mostly from the world outside. It was mostly concerned with hopeless love, set in such romantic places as the Isle of Capri or south of the border down Mexico way.

Then one day at the fair in Castle Island, I heard a man singing and accompanying himself on a button accordion that had seen better days. He was a Traveller called Batt Coffey; I followed him around until I had learned the words of the song.

I was enthralled and so I put more pennies than I could afford into his little daughter's hat.

The song was The Rose Of Mooncoin. It could hardly be called a great song, but it was about our kind of life. I realised then that I was tasting bread rather than confectionery. Batt Coffey was one of the many Travellers who had brightened fair days and sports meetings and football and hurling matches with their homespun songs and music.

Margaret Barry was the greatest of them all, even though she wasn't a Traveller.

She was born into a conventional family in the fair city of Cork but she chose a way of life that was anything but conventional.

What impulse drove her she may not have known herself, but she was still a very young girl when she took to the roads on her bike with her wild banjo swinging behind her.

I have heard that she had Spanish blood in her from her mother's side. This may only be a romantic myth, but later, in Spain and in Mexico, I was inclined to believe it.

With her marvellous voice and her magic banjo she could make a modest song seem good, and make a good song seem great.

I was smitten on our first encounter; it was love at first sound. Margaret didn't just sing a song, she lived it. With her wonderful innocence and her passion, she made me feel almost certain that she had Spanish blood in her.

I encountered the same innocence and passion in Spain and in Mexico and in Hungary and Romania.

Margaret eventually tired of the roads and went to London. It became her promised land. She quickly became famous there and sang in some of the leading theatres.

Her happiest stage, however, was in a pub called The Craven Arms, in Camden town. There she sang with a brilliant fiddle player from Sligo called Michael Gorman. She became the icon of painters and sculptors and actors and intellectuals of all kinds, not to mention musicians and singers.

Eventually she came back home. It wasn't a good move. Her kind of song and music wasn't popular in Ireland at that time. She didn't draw big audiences, even though managed by a good friend of mine, Neilus O'Connell. She couldn't have had a better manager.

A visit to the United States didn't turn out too well. The Irish there weren't interested in songs about factory girls or about farmers' boys who were tired of ploughing rocky fields or of handsome young men who died at Waterloo. She didn't fit the image of the Irish colleen. She sat up at the counter and drank pints with the men.

And one night when I met her in Joe McCarthy's pub in Castle Island with Neilus, a man came up to her and said:

"You are a fine looking woman, Miss Barry. How is it you never got married?"

Margaret said, "The answer is simple -- because I never met a man who could drink with me."

Margaret faded out of the mainstream here, and, as far as I know, spent her later years in a small house in rural Armagh.

She isn't mentioned in Modern Irish Life or in the massive Encyclopaedia of Ireland. I doubt if that bothers her very much.

Whenever I think of her, I am reminded of the last two lines in JJ Callanan's poem, The Outlaw Of Lough Lene.

I think as at eve the lakeside she wanders along, the birds go to sleep by the sweet wild twist of her song.

Patrick Keefe, like Margaret Barry, spent a lot of time on his bike, but in a different way -- she was a travelling minstrel; he was a travelling teacher.

He was born in Glounthane, a townland in the hills about five miles east of Castle Island.

One night on the radio, I heard Ciaran MacMathuna asking him where was Glounthane. Patrick said that, "Glounthane is where the bog is."

On that same programme, Ciaran asked him the name of the tune he had just played. "It's called The Rights Of Man, something I never got myself."

Patrick trained as a teacher in Drumcondra; while there he won the gold medal at the All-Ireland Feis. He didn't think much of awards or competitions.

Thus one day he half-slept through the fiddle contest at Ballyheigue Feis; when asked to give his verdict, he said, "They were all good." His career as a judge didn't last long.

Patrick began his working life in Glounthane National School where his parents had taught before him. He was a good teacher but he wasn't cut out for the job.

He didn't always turn up. His absences became more frequent and more prolonged. One morning when he came to school, he saw a young man sitting behind the table.

Patrick sat down in his seat at the back; a rather tense silence followed. High noon was approaching; it came at half-past-nine -- the time for marking the roll. The young man opened the ledger. Patrick got up and as he was going out, the young man pointed to the space above the door and said, "Take that thing with you."

"That thing" was his beloved fiddle.

Patrick was then in his 30s; he knew that he would never get a job as a teacher again. There was no social welfare in those days. He faced a daunting future.

He hoped to make a living as a music teacher, but in those bitter years after the Civil War the things of the spirit were in abeyance. His services were not in great demand.

There were, however, people who had kept the faith; they got him to teach their children. They were mostly poor people. There were days they couldn't pay him because they hadn't the money, but they always did. There was honour among the poor.

He was a great hardy man and cycling long distances was no bother to him, and there hangs a tale.

One night in Bill Costello's in Castle Island, there were three teachers talking about the performance of their cars. One sweet chariot did 50 miles to the gallon; another sweet chariot did 55; the third did 60. Patrick that day had cycled about 30 miles and collected only half-a-crown and he said,

half to himself and half aloud; "My old bike today did 10 miles to the pint."

He was a great teacher. Among his most famous pupils were Denis Murphy and Gerry McCarthy. Denis emigrated to New York. Gerry followed about two months later. Denis took him to a pub in the Bronx on his first night there. And Gerry said, "It will rain tomorrow. The wind is from Scartaglen."

Patrick was a great all- round player but he excelled most of all in slow airs. He believed that the human voice is the most musical instrument of all and thus he played an air as if a song -- he literally made the fiddle sing.

One morning as I read the Irish Times, my heart leaped up: Charles Acton, in reviewing an LP, said, "Patrick Keefe is the greatest living folk musician."

I sent the cutting to Glounthane with a girl on her way home from school that evening. That night Patrick and I met as surely as two streams in the same catchment. In Tom McCarthy's pub he took out the cutting and gave a great laugh and said, "That Charles Acton must be a very wise man." He pretended that the great honour meant nothing to him but that night he drank whiskey instead of stout.

Behind all the joking, he was a very serious man, especially where his craft was concerned. He would never play unless the company was right.

I was very friendly with Frederick May; we often had a drink upstairs in the Scotch House and he often lamented that no composer had woven Irish folk music into his work as Dvorak and Smetana did with the gypsy music of central Europe.

And he often spoke about how Grieg had travelled all over his native Norway taking down country songs and how he had been inspired by them.

John Synge loved west Kerry and believed that a life there couldn't be fully captured in words or in images. Like Frederick May, he felt that it was waiting for a great composer. Frederick might have been that man but he was stricken with deafness before he was 40.

Was Patrick Keefe fulfilled? He might have felt some fulfilment if his music had inspired some great work.

As it was he knew more than his share of poverty and loneliness and humiliation. I feel that he had interludes of satisfaction when he knew that he was playing consummately. He had the compensation too of knowing that some good judges appreciated him.

Of course, there was Charles Acton. Then there was Seamus Ennis and Ciaran MacMathuna, Sean MacRemoinn and Aindreas O Gallochoir. And Peter Brown said, "Patrick Keefe left an indelible stamp on Irish music"

One night when he was about 70, I was around with Patrick and he made a kind of confession -- "People thought I was mad, but whenever there was a fair day in Castle Island or maybe a race meeting in Locknagree, or maybe a neighbour getting married, the four walls of the school were like the confines of a prison."

I will go now to a great American book called The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar E Masters: it tells the real story of its characters' lives, as distinct from the pious obituaries. Here now is the end of Fiddler Jones telling his story from the grave:

And I never started to plow in my life.

That somebody did not stop in the road and take me way to a dance or picnic.

I ended up with forty acres:

I ended up with a broken fiddle

And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,

And not a single regret.

About the same time he had only a few more years to live, and thus a little group of neighbouring women came to him and one of them said: "Patrick, you haven't been to Mass or the Sacraments for a very long time. There is a mission below in Castle Island and it's a good time to make your peace with God."

Patrick smiled and said, "Listen here, girls. God is a very busy man and He is getting old."