The Irish folk revival is the movement that took the Gaelic- and English-language ballads and dance tunes surviving in rural kitchens and city pubs and rebuilt them as concert-hall and album-side music. The Chieftains set the template for the instrumental ensemble; The Dubliners translated pub singing to arena scale; Planxty introduced the Greek bouzouki to trad and rewrote its harmonic possibilities; The Bothy Band added a rock-band drive to dance tunes and closed the template. The instrumentation settled: fiddle, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, button accordion, bouzouki, guitar, and voice, with both unaccompanied ballads and instrumental sets appearing on the same record.

The precondition was the 1951 founding of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and the daily pub-session culture at O'Donoghue's on Merrion Row, Dublin, where The Dubliners came together. Planxty, uniting Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny, and Liam O'Flynn, debuted in 1972; The Bothy Band followed in 1975. The revival was a direct Irish reply to the parallel American folk revival (Dylan, Baez, The Weavers), and Christy Moore had in fact done his apprenticeship on the English folk-club circuit before returning home to lead the Irish version.

In The Dubliners, listen for the deliberate contrast between Ronnie Drew's gravelled speech-song and Luke Kelly's crystalline tenor — the two voices trade roles across an album, drinking song then political ballad. In Planxty, Dónal Lunny's bouzouki provides a droning harmonic pad that trad had never had before, and that becomes audible as its own instrument the moment you notice it. The Bothy Band live is a wall of speed: Paddy Keenan's pipes running at reel tempos that were physically new for the instrument, feeding the emerging rock generation directly.

The Dubliners' 'A Drop of the Hard Stuff' (1967), which contains 'Seven Drunken Nights,' is the monument to pub-ballad-going-mass-market. Planxty's 'Cold Blow and the Rainy Night' (1974) is the ideal one-record snapshot of the ensemble in its prime. Christy Moore's 'Ordinary Man' (1985) is his solo peak, alternating political ballads and love songs. For the current generation, Lankum's 'False Lankum' (2023) shows the tradition being rebuilt as experimental music.

The Dubliners' 'Seven Drunken Nights' (1967) was banned by BBC radio for its bawdy content, and that ban pushed it to number seven on the UK charts. Planxty's bouzouki came into Irish music by accident: Andy Irvine spent 1965–68 travelling in the Balkans and brought a Greek bouzouki home from Bulgaria. When The Bothy Band split in 1979 the members dispersed into Moving Hearts, Patrick Street, Kate Bush's touring band, and a dozen other projects, seeding almost every branch of contemporary Irish trad.