At 6:45 on a Thursday morning, the parking lot behind Celtic Spirit School of Irish Dance is already half full. Inside, the thunder of fiberglass hard shoes echoes through studios where beginners as young as four stumble through their first reels and teenage championship hopefuls fine-tune choreography for the upcoming Oireachtas. This is not a scene from Dublin or Boston. This is Millersburg, Ohio, where Irish dance has become one of the most crowded extracurricular arenas in town.
Over the past fifteen years, enrollment across Millersburg's three Irish dance schools has more than tripled, according to estimates from the schools themselves. What began with a handful of families commuting to Cleveland or Columbus for lessons now stays local—and draws students from neighboring Holmes and Knox counties. The reason is simple: three distinct schools, each with its own philosophy, its own competitive record, and its own answer to what Irish dance should look like in rural Ohio.
Celtic Spirit School of Irish Dance
Maeve O'Connell opened Celtic Spirit in 2008 after relocating from Chicago, where she had competed at the World Irish Dance Championships and taught for nearly a decade. She chose Millersburg, she says, because a parent she met at a feis in Indianapolis kept describing a community with interested families and no local CLRG-certified school within forty miles.
"I came out here to visit and thought, 'There's nothing,'" O'Connell recalled. "Now I have 170 students and a waitlist for the beginner program."
Celtic Spirit is affiliated with An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG), the largest global governing body for Irish dance, and follows a competitive track that has produced multiple Mid-America Oireachtas qualifiers and one World Championship competitor. But O'Connell emphasizes that roughly half her students never enter a feis. Adult ceili classes meet Tuesday evenings, and a recreational performance troupe dances at county fairs and nursing homes through the summer.
Classes run from $65 monthly for one weekly hour to $140 for the championship program. Ages range from four to adult, though O'Connell notes that most students who stick with it past middle school are the competitive ones.
Emerald Isle Academy
If Celtic Spirit is the competitive powerhouse, Emerald Isle Academy operates more like a community arts center with Irish dance at its core. Fiona McDonagh founded the school in 2012 inside the Millersburg Community Center, where she still hosts quarterly ceilis open to the public—no experience required, live music provided by a local trio that includes her brother on bodhrán.
McDonagh, who trained in Galway before moving to Ohio for her husband's job, structures her curriculum around narrative. A unit on the hornpipe includes lessons on 19th-century Irish sailors. Students learning the slip jig hear about the dance's disputed origins—whether it mimics the movements of Irish wolfhounds or was simply an English fashion absorbed into Irish tradition.
"The steps are the smallest part of what I want them to carry," McDonagh said. "I want them to understand that every dance came from somewhere—often from people who had very little else."
Emerald Isle maintains a softer competitive profile than Celtic Spirit. McDonagh's students attend two or three regional feiseanna per year, but the school's signature event remains its December Nollaig na mBan showcase, which combines student performances with historical commentary and sells out the community center's 300 seats. Monthly tuition is $55 for all ages, with scholarships available for families who qualify.
Larkin School of Irish Dance
Liam Larkin's school, launched in 2016, is the newest and smallest of the three, with about 80 students. It is also the most technologically deliberate. Larkin, a former All-Ireland champion from County Tipperary, films every class and uploads selected clips to a private student portal where dancers can compare their execution against slow-motion breakdowns of championship performances.
"The way I was taught, you stood at the back of the room and tried to copy what you saw," Larkin said. "Now I can send a student home with a video of exactly what their left heel needs to do on the third beat. It's changed how quickly kids advance."
Larkin School is CLRG-affiliated and competitive, though Larkin has carved out a niche with older beginners—students who start at twelve or thirteen and want a serious training environment without being placed in classes with eight-year-olds. The school produced its first World Championship qualifier in 2023.
Technology at Larkin extends beyond video review. The school uses motion-capture software borrowed from a partnership with a sports medicine clinic in Wooster to analyzejump height and landing mechanics, an approach Larkin says reduces injury rates among hard-shoe dancers. Tuition runs $75 to $165 monthly depending on class load.
