I want to bring up what I believe to be an Issue with Feshies (I apologise if the word is not spelt correctly). Before I do does any one in this Forum room do Irish dancing or Feshies?

Let me know. Thank you.

Ok I will type the Issue no problem.

I went to my first competition a couple of weeks before the summer holiday started. I didn't wear something as extravagant as what I saw other children wearing but the prices of their dresses are shocking. A new Irish dress can cost up to a £1000 pounds. I then find out why people pay so much for an Irish dress.

Before you get judged for your dancing they give you a mark for your costume or deduct marks if your costume is not up to a curtain standard. This may be tradition but does no seem right. I saw to younger girls in the feshies. The first one was the most amazing dancer I had seen at that age and very advance but the other girl that went next was not as good but her costume was a lot more expensive. The one with the more expensive costume got through with a higher mark simply because of her costume.

This to me feels like their saying if you haven’t got a lot of money to spend then your quality of dancing doesn’t really mean much.

This may not seem like an issue but can mean a lot to some one who does Irish dancing as there is a lot of hard work involved and a large commitment also the passion to do Irish dancing, it’s amazing how far people would travel to do competitions, some people came from the Ireland just to do a competition in oxford.

So I feel it’s wrong to use this type of judgement.

But the same thing applies to competitions in many many different disciplines.

Tennis for instance. A cheap tennis raquet weighs loads more than an expensive one. A good raquet will improve your game. So, if you can't afford the best, you'll lose out on performance.

Any kind of motorsport really falls into this category. Look at Formula 1. The teams at the bottom of the championship are the ones with the smallest coffers. In that sport, it's not so much the skill of the team that's being judged as the amount of money funding the team.

Pretty much any competition that relies on equipment falls into this category. In fact, it's easier to list some of the competetive activites where the competitor's fortunes aren't at least partially decided by the amount of money they spend. Gymnastics and chess would be two, and they're both things that have common equipment that all the competitors use.

It's a good point saying that the expensive equipment is going to help you have a better game for exsample tennis.

However the price of the dress doesn’t affect some ones dancing skills. As long as the dress is practical enough to dance in it doesn’t affect your dancing at all.

I see your point - there's little impact on the dancer's performance from the cost of the dress.

Nonetheless, if that's the rules of the competition, that's the rules of the competition. Nowhere is it written that competitions will be judged solely on performance.

Talent shows, for instance, are rarely won by butt-ugly people with a great talent.