Tag Archives: The Irish Herald

The Old Blog Node Creation Story and some Blog-trotting

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On a visit to Ireland earlier this year, I visited my old childhood summer home-away-from-home in Oughterard, Co. Galway. On an evening walk down the Pier Road, I came upon this sign. This was one of the inspirations for the title of this blog, although I had utterly forgotten the connection. This old road sign points towards Lemonfield, where I had a formative experience listening to two local fiddle players, Matt and Pete Conneely, with my friend John Clancy. You can find that story here, in one of the most widely read posts, “The Power of the Pattern” (in 2 parts), from 2010.

Many of the older posts from my original blog have not been referenced or reprised in the WordPress version, which I started in 2020. It’s about time I cross-posted some of those earlier pieces. All of my recent posts have been published on both sites. I maintain the original Blogger site because I want to keep track of my “readership,” which has now exceeded 120,000. Not bad for a part-time, unpromoted publishing effort focused on Irish music and arts, dating back to 2008, when blogs, depending on your perspective, were either still a big thing or already passé.

One goal was to create a space for informed and insightful writing about Irish culture and arts with a focus on traditional music from an immigrant perspective. The music served as a primary cultural lifeline back to Ireland after I emigrated to the United States in the 1980s. I wanted to share my passion and inspire others to acquire an interest in the country’s music and arts.

Initially, I wanted to have more than my voice on the site. I had hoped to persuade musicians to write about music-making, insights into the creative process, or aspects of performance or stage-craft. That dream remained unrealized. Musicians, I came to understand, place more value on playing and performing over sitting down to write, and who can blame them?  However, my posts contain links to other writers, many of whom are more polished than I, providing additional resources to contextualize my commentary and address the Node mandate in the title.

Writing about music is an odd preoccupation. Listening is always required to get into music, but sometimes the right words can change perceptions of new or old music. I’ve benefited from that exchange more than a few times myself, and I aspire to offer the same opportunity to my readers.

I was fortunate to have a bi-cultural, urban and rural upbringing in Ireland before the effects of television, telephones, and technology began to erode our traditional culture. Radio was the dominant technology, and thanks to Ciarán Mac Mathúna, Séamus Ennis, Seán Ó Riada, and others, I heard some of the best traditional players and singers on RTE Radio. I reveled in the trad and folk revival of the 1960s, tuning in to the Clancy Brothers, the Johnstons, the Dubliners, and the Chieftains. Then, my tastes were further expanded (maybe even exploded) by Planxty, featuring Donal Lunny, Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, and the late Liam O’Flynn—the Holy Trinity Plus One of Irish music.

In California, my writing practice was revived by the encouragement and persistence of Catherine Barry and Elgy Gillespie, who were editing the Irish Herald, a monthly newspaperin San Francisco, until the early 2000s. I had three very prolific years with the Herald, covering CD and concert reviews, as well as interviews with visiting musicians. For example, I was fortunate to talk with Maria and Simon O’Dwyer of Coirn na hÉireann (Horns of Ancient Ireland) on their first trip to San Francisco. Their revival work on early Irish instruments was featured in John Creedon’s excellent 2024 documentary, Creedon’s Musical Atlas of Ireland. I saw and wrote about Tony Mac Mahon playing two extraordinary concerts with the Kronos Quartet in 2002 and 2003.

I wrote regularly for Irish Music Magazine for over ten years, conducting interviews with musicians and writing reviews of performances and recordings. Some of these have been reproduced or referenced on the blog, but I plan to “digitize” a few more in a selective fashion. And, as if that was not enough, when I resumed my sidebar writing activities, it intersected with the stratospheric trajectory of Martin Hayes’ career. I was fortunate to see him play live in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sebastopol many times. My first piece on Hayes in the Irish Herald in September 2000 was titled Zen and the Art of Fiddle Playing. I heard him play at the San Francisco Celtic Music Festival each spring for ten years from 1991.

I have written about Hayes several times, and it has always been a rewarding experience. The first blog essay, titled “Hayes and Cahill: Recalibrating the Tradition,” was published in October 2008. I include it here since the post went up before the counter was initiated, and many readers may never have had the opportunity to read it. It is one of my favorites with extended quotes from an interview with the two masters conducted at the legendary Freight (formerly known as The Freight and Salvage) in Berkeley.

Hayes and Cahill graced the stage and enthralled audiences many times at the Freight, sometimes in their pluperfect partnership, other times with larger musical groupings. There was a riveting evening with The Gloaming in 2014.  Another unforgettable performance I titled Quadruple Delights in 2018, showcased the Blue Room CD and Hayes’ quartet.

One of their most unique duo performances was in 2012 at the Freight, where sound engineer Tesser Call created a magical, intimate evening. Hearing them play in smaller settings, such as churches, in the early days (2011) was always a special pleasure.

A good part of my continuing education in traditional music came from some of the well-known figures I have mentioned and a slew of lesser-known musicians who schooled me in the music. In fact, it is the countless hosts of musicians who play and perform for little or no reward that keep the music alive. Irish roots music is in fine shape, and each new generation of players seems to be more talented and innovative than their forebears.

These time-machine reposts will be continued in the future with other widely read posts on Susan McKeown, Paddy O’Brien, John Doyle, the Black Brothers, the late Mick Fitzgerald, Brendan Begley, Christy Moore, and others.

Another Honest Ulsterman Departs

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Michael Longley

The news of Michael Longley’s death today prompted me to search through the blog archives for my review of books by Longley and Ciaran Carson. Carson died in 2019, and Longley has now departed. Many tributes will be paid to Longley over the next few days and weeks. The Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, led the way in today’s Irish Times:

Michael worked to give space and actuality to the moral imperative that we must live together with forbearance, with understanding, with compassion and insight, and above all else, perhaps, with hope.

One of the first pieces I wrote for The Irish Herald in San Francisco in May 2000, at the instigation of Elgy Gillespie and Catherine Barry, was a review of two books of their poetry. This edited version appeared in the blog in August 2010, and I reproduce it here as a small tribute to Longley’s work and genius.

The Honest Ulstermen


A review of The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson; Wake Forest University Press, 1998, and The Weather in Japan by Michael Longley, Cape Poetry, Jonathan Cape, 2000.


I first came to Carson’s poetry through his prose. Last Night’s Fun (North Point Press, 1996) is a masterly piece of work, arguably the finest book ever written about the mysteries of the music-making process. His new book of poetry, The Twelfth of Never, continues in that vein. He uses tune titles –notoriously misleading in the Irish tradition- for many poems. He poetically plagiarizes many old ballads, twisting and turning familiar lines into a darker tapestry such as this from The Rising of the Moon:

The pale moon was rising above the green mountain,
The red sun declining beneath the blue sea,
When I saw her again by yon clear crystal fountain,
Where poppies, not potatoes, grew in contraband.


Carson writes like a man possessed. The Twelfth of Never reads like it was written in one passionate, pellucid night when the words flowed freely, and his magpie mind couldn’t be stopped. And, as if living in the North was not strange enough, Carson’s forays into Japanese culture bring him to locations where he finds,
The labyrinth to which I hadn’t got the key.

Poetry is, at its best, an intellectual and emotional con game. The poet hopes to trick us into thinking anew about things or rethinking familiar things by sleight-of-word. Carson riffs, raps, trips, traps, rocks, and rolls our perceptions in his poetry.  In The Display Case, Carson seems to express some regret that his oeuvre is nearly all in English, not his native Irish language. But this is English writing that could only emerge from an Irish consciousness,
Where everything is metaphor and simile (Tib’s Eve).

Carson’s poems are odes to complexity, a dissection of that hairball of historic proportions, that nest of co-dependent hostilities that is Northern Ireland. And discussion of Northern Irish poetry is no less fraught with difficulty, a minefield sown with words.

Both Carson and Longley are distinctly Northern Irish. Longley describes being there as living in three places at once: one partly Irish, one partly English and one that’s “…also its own awkward self.”  Each covers the touchstones of Northern identity and the struggle of people to lead normal lives in the mayhem, including their efforts to play an artist’s role in a society given more to ideology than to introspection.

Both are famous as the artists that stayed home, laboring in the bloody northern field. They served long stints with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland before retiring in recent years to focus on their writing. As John Hume has noted (Arguing at the Crossroads, 1998), Northern artists were mainly responsible for keeping the flame of diversity and multi-culturalism alive during the years of strife and political polarization.

In All of These People, Longley ruminates:

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister.


The North, despite George Mitchel’s valiant efforts to impose some American pragmatism, remains an immensely complex place where words can and do explode –just think of the recent haggling over “decommissioning.” As Fintan O’Toole noted in the New Yorker (The Meanings of Union, April 27, 1998), crafting agreements in the North will require a poet’s skill, not a pragmatist’s words.

The ancient words of the Persian poet Rumi seem particularly pertinent to the current impasse in the North of Ireland.

Out beyond ideas of
Right doing and wrong doing
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.


And if the Catholic and Protestant diehards ever make it out to that field, they’ll find Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson waiting to have words with them. High kudos to them for these collections. I can think of no two better Irish people to lead the charge of the write brigade across the field of new Irish dreams.