"It's like the Super Bowl in Europe," said Shane Mitchell, an accordionist and founding member of Dervish.

The Irish band, which will be performing on Friday, March 23, at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, is representing Ireland in this year's contest, performing the song "They Can't Stop the Spring." After Dervish was selected to represent Ireland, songwriters were asked to submit songs specifically for this Irish folk-music sextet.

The contest has made for a harried winter and spring for the band, as it was prepping a new album and had already scheduled an overseas tour. "We've learned an awful lot about ourselves in the last six weeks," Mitchell said in a phone interview last week.

Not that he's complaining. Even though the band has cut its concert schedule down from 200 shows a year to roughly 70, the group is busier than ever, Mitchell said. But Eurovision is an opportunity that couldn't be passed up.

"It's very good for Irish folk music, because it exposes it to a much bigger audience," Mitchell said. "Nearly every traditional musician that I ever played a session with in Ireland has called me and said, ‘That's great. We're delighted.' ... It's not everyday you get your music exposed to 700 million people, you know?"

Eurovision is obviously good for the band, and Dervish delayed the release of its next album to capitalize. "We were going to release it earlier on this year," Mitchell said, "and we're holding out to benefit - to be honest - from the publicity surrounding Eurovision in Ireland."

But the contest should also boost Irish traditional music. As you can gather from the names of some previous winners of Eurovision, the contest is open to contemporary forms, and traditional music rarely gets a stage as big as this contest.

"We feel that Irish music is Ireland's primary natural resource," Mitchell said. "Ireland doesn't have enough of natural resources."

And Dervish is serious about promoting that resource. Last year, the band went on an Irish trade mission to China. That might seem an odd thing, but for any Irish band not named U2, the decision to participate was a no-brainer. "If the prime minister asks you to come along with him to do something with him, you're not going to turn your back on him," Mitchell said. "There's only a few avenues you have, because what you do has a minority interest. It's a special market that we play to."

The band's last studio release, 2004's Spirit, ranges from jigs and reels to songs, including Bob Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather" and Ewan MacColl's impossibly mournful "The Lag's Song."

The new record, which should be released in the U.S. in the fall, will have more original songs than previous releases, Mitchell said, and is sometimes more modern. "The arrangements of our instrumental sets are getting bigger," he said, "and we're doing different things with our instruments now."

The band has been around since 1988 and has always done things its own way. It self-releases its CDs in its homeland and licenses them in the United States, and has maintained complete artistic control of what it does. "It has been difficult for us," Mitchell said. "There's quite a lot of politics involved in the industry side of the thing."

Mitchell told a story that shows that the music business is the music business, even in the quaint corner known as folk music. For almost a decade, Mitchell said, Dervish couldn't secure gigs in the United States because it refused to sign a contract with a label. Two record companies - whom Mitchell wouldn't name - "stood in our way of even playing in America, because they said to festivals that they wouldn't offer their artists to these festivals if Dervish were booked. ... We wouldn't sign to their label at the time. They were trying to have a monopoly on traditional music."

But the band pushed on, because restricting access to Irish traditional music is something that Dervish cannot abide.

Dervish will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, March 23, at St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Centers. Tickets are $10 for adults and can be reserved at (http://www.sau.edu/galvin) or by calling (563) 333-6251.