Blanaid O’Neill: “Now More Than Ever, I Feel Like I’m Performing Because I Love It”

For any Irish dancer who has competed on the feis circuit over the past 16 years, Blanaid O’Neill is a name that’s impossible not to know. From some of the earliest moments that Irish dancing emerged from behind the closed doors of humble community halls and leapt on to social media for all to see, the Doherty Petri star’s countless successes, signature costume colours — which made a dramatic switch from her trusted reds and green to bright coral this year — and thrilling choreography snippets have been a recurring feature on our feeds.

2025 has been no different, and with the year winding down to a close, the Belfast native is looking back on her latest victory-filled season of competing, featuring some of her favourite dance memories yet. Her World Championship count currently stands at an incredible eight consecutive wins, in addition to a Major championship tally that’s too high to possibly keep track of. At the recent Ulster qualifiers, she broke the record for most wins in the region by a female solo dancer with her 12th title. “I don’t really know how to put into words how incredible it was,” she says with a grateful smile.

These are just some of the highlights among hundreds of competitions that have led to an astonishing 12-year unbeaten streak across 16 years of competing. In other words, for the majority of the 20-year-old’s life as an Irish dancer, she has only known the sport as a winner. It’s an achievement that Blanaid blushes at the mere mention of. “I only ever think about it if it’s mentioned or someone asks me about it,” she says modestly. “I try to just put it in the back of my head.” 

She knows it’s a special achievement, one that feels almost unreal to talk about. “It’s not something that happens very often. It makes me really proud of myself. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to stay at the top, but once you get to the top, it takes even more hard work,” she says. “To think about it makes me a wee bit emotional, but definitely proud.”

Her recent win at the Ulsters was a particularly special one, because it offered a chance for perspective when she rarely has time to come up for air in her demanding competition and training regime. “When you win the World Championships, that year you don’t have to dance your qualifying [competition],” she explains, “which is something that I’ll never do. It holds a special place with me.” But winning once again wasn’t just another title to add to her long list of achievements; it was a reminder of all the reasons why she dances in the first place. “I was very emotional at it, because I couldn’t really believe it. [I was] grateful to have something that I love so much.”

When you think about the qualities that make a dancer not just a champion, but an unbeatable one, it’s not hard to see why Blanaid’s talents have carried her so far over the years. She represents something in Irish dancing that feels all too rare — the ability to blend old school, impeccably polished technique with flashes of firecracker choreography that command your attention. Even more impressive is the humble flair that she executes it with, presenting herself with the graceful stoicism of a traditional Irish dancer while interspersing each round with blink-and-you-miss-it moments of pure innovation. 

When Irish dancers achieve such remarkable heights, it doesn’t come as a surprise that it’s often the result of being born into it. For as long as she has danced, Blanaid has trained with her uncle, the dress designer Gavin Doherty, her mum Seaneen, and her aunt Caoime, along with an ever-growing team of teaching staff which now spans Donegal, Tipperary, and Glasgow, and that’s before you even cross the pond to their branches in America. 

Irish dancing has been a core part of her life for so long that Blanaid’s very first feis memory wasn’t a local competition down the road or a dusty school hall in a nearby town — it was dancing the Championship at a feis in Boston, USA, at just four years old. Since then, Blanaid’s life has been a flipbook of memories growing up in dance class alongside her family and closest friends. “It was never me going to ‘start’ classes, I was just always there,” she remembers. “I was there before I could even walk. It kind of just became part of the routine, part of life.”

As a youngster, she was thrown into just about every activity on offer for a kid growing up in Belfast — gymnastics, swimming, theatre school, Gaelic football, camogie. But when she was around seven years old, Blanaid’s brain naturally started to prioritise Irish dancing. As each club began to demand more of her — whether that was the risk of injury or more hours of training — one by one they dropped off as she redirected that focus and energy into dancing. “I enjoyed going to the competitions and being able to have fun with friends,” she says of her pull towards Irish dancing. “I think it was more the community side of it at the start.”

As she grew up winning competition after competition, it became ever more apparent just how much of a star-making talent Blanaid possessed for Irish dancing. Even from a young age, her grace, control and precision made her a standout competitor with nerves-of-steel composure. But while there are hundreds of hours of training and fitness behind those qualities, it’s her sheer passion that she credits for keeping her self-discipline up and standards so high over the years. “To be honest, I just love dancing,” she says matter-of-factly. 

She credits a significant portion of her positive outlook to dancing with the show Celtic Steps in Killarney, which “re-lit” a fire in her after she finished her A-Level exams. She also made her debut with Lord Of The Dance’s Feet Of Flames in Taiwan back in 2023. “You learn to just love what you’re doing,” she explains. “Now more than ever, when I get up on the stage, I feel like I’m performing just because I love it, rather than with pressure or stress.”

Her mindset mirrors that of many world champions in her ability to drown out the noise and focus on the only real competition: herself. “[It’s] always [about] wanting to be better than myself,” she explains. “Once I do a dance once, I always video myself to watch it back. And it’s like, ‘OK, my next goal is to be better than that,’ and just keep improving on my own standards rather than anyone else around me.” It’s also how she’s able to stay grounded in the lead-up to big competitions, by “constantly reminding myself of how much work I have put in and how hard I am working”.

If winning multiple World titles with an unbeaten streak as long as Blanaid’s sounds like a full-time job, it’s actually, perhaps surprisingly, not. Rather, the multi-time champ balances the responsibilities of any normal young person. When we speak over Zoom, it’s at the end of a day of classes at Ulster University for Blanaid, where she studies sports science. Along with her packed schedule of dance practice, fitness, and uni, she also works at Gavin’s Eire Designs, where she can be assigned to any station from designing, to crystalling, to sewing. When it comes to hanging out with friends, though, she laughs that her nearest and dearest know she needs at least two weeks’ notice to pencil time in her finally balanced schedule.

Along with her work and study commitments, Blanaid has also come up against the same challenges that many girls in her age group do, namely, injuries that have threatened to take her out of the competition altogether.

Just as the 2022 World Championships was finally on the horizon again after a two-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was uncertain if Blanaid was going to be able to go for a hometown win in Belfast after she fractured a sesamoid bone in her foot. “I went a very long time being very lucky in not really having any injuries,” she remembers. “It was a long, long road to recovery.”

Stubborn as we Irish dancers are, Blanaid had kept dancing on the injury because she didn’t want to miss the first competitions back after Lockdown, which she admits now “maybe wasn’t the best idea”. Only in February did she find out that she’d be in a boot for 10 weeks, when the Worlds was just 12 weeks away. In the meantime, she switched to non-weight bearing in the gym and kept her fitness up the best she could, while learning steps on her hands. “It was tough. I’m kind of crazy; not many people would do it, but I just love it so much that I couldn’t not do it.” 

Eight weeks later, she was given the go-ahead by her podiatrist and trained for four weeks straight for the big day. When the competition came around after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, she made it through two long days and five rounds of dancing, feeling “ecstatic” to even get through the competition in one piece. In the end, all the extra challenges in the lead-up proved to be worth it, as she was triumphantly announced as a world champion for the fifth time. “Oh…” she wistfully at the memory, “hearing my name called out in first, it was just unbelievable.”

Blanaid’s story is a reminder not to fall for the common misconception that people tend to hold about the seemingly infallible nature of world champions. “A lot of people seem to think that if you win the Worlds, you’re not human, you’re not real, you don’t have the same things going on in your life that everyone else does,” she says pensively. 
“We all do the same work. We all have the same dream, and it’s just amazing that it actually does come true.”

As Blanaid enters 2026, that dream is still very much alive and kicking, and looks set to push her dancing career long into the future. “Especially with dancing in shows, I’ve learnt to love it so much,” she says. “When I know I’m ready to finish dancing, I’ll know when the time is right. But definitely not any time soon.”

“As long as I still love it,” she smiles with a playful head swish, “you’ll still see me.”

Follow Blanaid on Instagram.

Photography: Courtesy of Blanaid O’Neill
Design: Colleen Falco
Words/ Editor-In-Chief: Hollie Geraghty
Editorial Assistant: Caitlin Clarke