A column of news and updates of the Boston Celtic Music Fest (BCMFest), which celebrates the Boston area's rich heritage of Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton music and dance with a grassroots, musician-run winter music festival and other events during the year.

During its two years of existence, BCMFest's Celtic Music Monday series at Club Passim in Harvard Square has featured fiddles, flutes, accordions, pipes, even the bones and bodhran. But the instrument in focus this month will be the human voice - and it won't just be sounding from the stage.

The so-called Celtic Tiger, a period of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland, seems now to have lost much of its bite. But its teeth marks - at least in the form of unprecedented social changes underwritten in large part by that prosperity - appear to be deeply permanent, and the title story of Roddy Doyle's collection The Deportees (2007) provides one gauge of the transformation that occurred in the country during the Tiger's two-decade flourishing.

Boston and Eastern Massachusetts residents whose summer plans include a sampling of Irish/Celtic music festivals may have to work a little harder to whet their appetites. Some Massachusetts area summer events that have become familiar stops for Irish/Celtic music enthusiasts have been cancelled, or are on  uncertain footing, for 2009 - and possibly beyond.