Folk Singer Christy Moore Nabs Spotlight at Irish Gig

The night at Guinness Fleadh, Saturday’s Irish musical feast at Downing Stadium, could have belonged to Celtic visionary Van Morrison or to Sinead O’Connor, who was performing in New York for the first time since she was booed off the stage seven years ago for having torn up a photo of the pope.

Instead, blustery Dublin folk singer Christy Moore stole the show among main-stage headliners on the first day of the two-day outdoor festival of Irish music and culture.

“I’m just an ordinary man,” the barrel-chested, bushy-browed Moore sang over a forceful strum on his acoustic guitar, and that was part of his considerable charm. In his set, Moore touched on themes that ran the gamut of the Irish experience, from famine to political strife, always from an underdog’s perspective.

Most of his songs were heavy on pathos, but Moore made sure to occasionally lighten his load. Shortly after singing “Back Home in Derry,” a potent ballad about deportation that was written by the Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands, Moore got the crowd howling with a ditty about a colossal hangover.

Though Van Morrison performed brilliantly with a shimmering 11-piece soul band, the characteristically enigmatic performer failed to light a similar fire. Drawing mostly from the jazz, gospel and soul songs in his bottomless repertoire, Morrison delivered a set that was more spiritual than spirited, more holy water than brimstone.

The outdoor setting may have contributed to O’Connor’s lackluster performance. She sang so softly and looked down so often that her ethereal voice and confessional lyrics were lost in the wind before they reached mid-stadium.

O’Connor tried to showcase songs off her lovely new EP, “Gospel Oak.” But only in one of them, “He Moved Through the Fair,” could she match the intensity of the recorded version.

The Fleadh, which means festival in Gaelic and is pronounced “flah,” also featured Irish theater, literary readings, food and enough beer to fill the nearby Harlem River. But the focus was on 30 musical performances on three stages