The Devil set to dance again at famous Mayo hall

THE Devil is set to dance again in Tooreen Hall when, this November, the doors of five iconic dance halls across Ireland will open for five nights only with a new interactive dance theatre experience.

Created by Edwina Guckian, recipient of the 2023 Markievicz Award, a new large-scale dance theatre event is bringing the legend - and the lost stories of Ireland’s banned dances - back to life.

From stories of fear and fire comes The Devil’s in the Dance Hall, a bold, mischievous and defiant celebration of the forbidden dance spirit.

Throughout summer 2025, Guckian has been secretly hosting illegal crossroads and house dances across Leitrim and beyond, echoing a time when people refused to apply for dance licences, where music spilled through doors and out across the hills and the odd rogue priest might appear at the gate.

This month, the doors of five iconic dance halls will open for five nights only. Inside, the floorboards will thunder to the Gralton Big Band, with a 43-strong cast and crew, dancers from Áirc Damhsa, and the spirits of all those who once risked condemnation for a night of joy.

Expect swing, sean nós, foxtrots, lindy hops, set dancing and scandal. Expect rebellion in rhythm, lipstick and laughter. Come dressed in your finest 1930s style, polish your brogues and get ready to spend the night dancing with the Devil in the Dance Hall, featuring The Gralton Big Band (and two of Mayo’s finest musicians) - Cathy Jordan, Ryan Molloy, Stephen Doherty, David Doocey, Matt Berrill, Jim Higgins, Conor Caldwell, Bronagh Graham, Ben Castle, and many more special guests.

The grand dance tour kicks off in the The Ballroom of Romance in Glenfarne, Leitrim, on November 14, and it comes to Tooreen Hall in Mayo on November 21.

Other venues include Mullagh Hall in Clare and Dunkineely Hall in Donegal, as well as The Temperance Hall in Loughrea.

Tickets are on sale now here.

In early 20th-century Ireland, dancing was never just dancing. It was rebellion. It was temptation. It was how the people of Ireland socialised.

By the 1930s, the Church and State had taken the floor. The Gaelic League had once championed “healthy native entertainments,” but as independence settled into respectability, traditional Irish dance was promoted as “pure and disciplined,” while modern foxtrots, waltzes and jazz were branded “degenerate”, “unclean,” and “un-Irish.”

Pastoral letters warned: “There is more sin committed in five minutes in a modern dance hall than on the battlefield in five months” - Bishop Thomas Naughton (Killala), 1931.

Even bishops joined the chorus. In 1934, the Bishop of Galway lamented: “Want of parental control, evil reading, senseless company keeping and, above all, degenerate dance halls, are the chief causes of corruption… There are impure men, but there are also giddy girls who by the levity of their words and actions are often more guilty than their partners in crime.”

This campaign of pulpit and protest soon bore fruit: the Dance Halls Act of 1935, passed 90 years ago this year, which made it illegal to host a dance unless you held a licence - ending the tradition of crossroads, barn and house dances that had once been the social heart of Ireland.

Co. Mayo was a hotspot for raids and prosecutions under the 1935 Dance Halls Act. But the most famous story to come from Mayo during the dance hall madness was in Tooreen.

A strange and beautiful, darkly-dressed stranger allegedly arrived at the hall, danced with local girl Brigid O’Flynn, and was later revealed to have cloven feet. Witnesses reported a smell of sulphur, a large black car, burned hoofprints on the grass, and the stranger’s sudden, frightening disappearance.

“Persons who came to these dances from outside towns in motor cars were scoundrels of the lowest type, and were devils incarnate” - Fr. Browne, Listowel 1938.

So when the people of Tooreen whispered that the Devil had come dancing, arriving in a black car, charming a local girl, and revealing his cloven feet beneath the flared trousers, they were giving form to the fears already preached from pulpits.

He wasn’t just a demon in Mayo; he was the personification of temptation, of syncopated rhythms and moving hips, of a generation daring to dance freely in defiance of restraint.

Across Ireland, similar stories spread. The devil was flat out dancing in halls across Limerick, Kerry, Donegal and Leitrim. He was a big fan of the slow set with the lights dimmed!

During the height of dance hall culture in 1930s - '50s Ireland, the halls became a stage not only for music and movement but for moral judgement, especially of women. Priests and local authorities viewed these new spaces of freedom with suspicion, seeing them as threats to traditional virtue and control.

Young women, in particular, came under intense scrutiny: their clothes deemed immodest, their dances too suggestive, their laughter and cigarettes signs of moral decline.

The dance hall offered women independence - socially, emotionally, even economically - but that very freedom provoked the Church’s anxiety. Who they danced with, how late they stayed out, and even the act of choosing their own partners became subjects of sermons and public shame.

The modern woman was a threat to society. And just 10 days after the dance hall act was introduced, the government banned contraception for all women.

Despite the moral panic, the people danced on. As one woman later remembered: “There was a whole uproar about waltzing… cried down by people in authority, that it would be the downfall of women and the Irish nation. But they had to get used to it, because the people waltzed in spite of them.”