Tom Dunne: An era in Irish music when a 'British Invasion' was welcome

You could have studied the charts of 1966 in Ireland and not have any suspicion of what was happening in LA studios or in Abbey Road but you'd have known immediately that it was the 50th anniversary of 1916

Brendan Bowyer, left, and Elvis Presley, right, were familiar names in Ireland's music charts over the years.

I had always suspected that the minute Ireland heard the opening bars of She Loves You by the Beatles in 1962, skips the country over started to fill with records by crooners, lamenters and folkie naysayers.

I would have thought the crooners themselves would bin their records. “Our number is up,” they’d have said. I would have been wrong.