One of the more interesting Dancing Diatribes I have written was the one I wrote after the 2001 Midwest Oireachtas. That's the one where I got curious about why the Oireachtas always ran late and ended up running statistics on female solo competitors broken out by year group and school. Since then, I have been fascinated by the age curve which I inadvertantly generated in this process. I even used those statistics in a later diatribe to argue why the Five-Year Rule was silly.
There have also been one or two anecdotal reports on the Adult Irish Dance message boards about how attendance at feisanna is down because the "glow of Riverdance has faded." Naturally enough, I became curious -- curious enough to rerun the 2001 statistical analysis of the Midwest Oireachtas for 2002 to see what long-range trends I might be able to discern from registration patterns. I was also lucky enough to temporarily acquire a copy of the 2000 Midwest Oireachtas program so I could get more of a historical basis for any trends I might detect.