'My family are my all': Peadar Ó Riada reflects on life, music, and his recent cancer diagnosis
Musician and composer Peadar Ó Riada at his home near Cúil Aodha, Co Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson
Tiredness is something musician, composer, choir director, broadcaster, father, and grandfather Peadar Ó Riada always accepted as an occupational hazard.
“I never listened in my life to tiredness – you just curse it and get on with it,” he says. “Because of the forward motion in life, you keep going.” However, in the months prior to last August’s Féile na Laoch festival, which he initiated in 2011 to honour his father Seán Ó Riada and other “cultural heroes”, Peadar realised he was experiencing a different fatigue.
By July, he had already asked his daughter Ruth to take the helm of the septennial festival, where artists including Phil Coulter, Christy Moore, and Glen Hansard previously performed in a riverside field at an all-night Aeríocht in the Cork Gaeltacht village of Cúil Aodha.
“I didn’t know, but I had a feeling. For the last year there have been things that haven’t been right,” says Ó Riada, 71. “We have a very good doctor, Colette Neville, and she was wondering what it was and doing tests, and suddenly we found out, the week of Féile na Laoch, that I had multiple myeloma.
“I went on stage three days later, wondering how I’d get through the night.”
Ó Riada persevered in presenting the marathon concert, culminating in an open-air orchestral performance of his father’s as dawn broke on Seán’s birthday.
Despite hospitalisation requiring him to miss Féile na Laoch’s second weekend in October, Peadar has remained as positive as possible around the diagnosis of cancer of the plasma; the white blood cells in his bone marrow. “The thing about multiple myeloma is there’s no cure for it but it’s treatable,” he says. “Myeloma treatment is getting better every day. Some people can live very long with it.
“I’m not alarmed by it and I genuinely feel I have the most wonderful team in CUH under [haematologist Dr] Rachel Brodie. They’re like detectives constantly on the prowl, watching everything, and you have great confidence that they will find anything going astray.
“I’ve discovered the wonderful secret society of cancer sufferers, where in the Dunmanway [unit] you see everyone coming in, in various stages of different cancers. We no longer have autonomy over our bodies and it allows for very honest dialogue. It’s very nice company. It’s a six-month course of treatment and I’ll be finished just the week when my son Séamus is getting married.”
Ó Riada says he has experienced few chemotherapy side-effects and has been very lucky with how the treatment has been going. Though he admits: “The bloody steroids drive you round the twist – you can’t sleep at night.”
“There’s only three stages in multiple myeloma,” he explains. “They try to kick it back to the first stage from the second stage, to put it into to a ‘smouldering’ stage which means it’s dormant in your body.”
Of course, multiple myeloma has been in the headlines recently following the legal case in which ex-hurler DJ Carey was jailed in November 2025 for fraud after falsely claiming to have that form of cancer. Ó Riada says he was shocked by the unfolding scandal.
“It was inescapable on radio and television and for people who have myeloma it wasn’t a very nice experience,” says Ó Riada. “But it was his mistake and he’s paying for it. He has that karma to take with him.”
While stressing he has “no notion of kicking the bucket for a long, long, long time”, his diagnosis has sparked a stock-take of what is important in his life.
“My wife and family are my all,” he says. “I always live in the now. If you look too far forward you might not like what you’d see. I’m always interested in the past because it gives me my direction, and I look to the future instinctively, but I don’t plan the future, and there could be many reasons for that.”
Shortly before the death of his father Seán, founder of Ceoltóirí Chualann and composer of Ceol an Aifrinn, including well-known offertory Ag Críost an Síol, Peadar found himself, aged 16, playing harmonium in his father’s stead for Cór Chúil Aodha. He has directed the choir ever since, composing liturgical and secular music and extensive works for the women’s Cór Ban Cúil Aodha he founded in 1986.
He recalls the seminal moment when the celebrated composer passed on the baton in 1971. “My father said to me ‘you’re playing next Sunday’ and then he was dead four weeks later, and I’ve been running since and didn’t have time to stop and take stock of what was going on.”
Another turning point was his decision, having completed a UCC music degree, to decline an offer to join a new third-level ethnomusicology department in the Netherlands. “I made the decision that time that I would never leave the mountains and it has stood to me ever since,” he says.
“No regrets.”
The loss of his father, aged 40, was followed in 1977 by the death from cancer of his mother Ruth. Peadar, eldest of seven siblings, says he had premonitions about both.
“I’ve had time to reflect at the important moments in my life. Obviously there were moments like when my father died, and I knew before both he and my mother died that they would die, because there’s a gift in our family that comes from his mother, a Cill na Martra woman, which lets you know things.” He reflects too on what he and wife Geraldine have learned from their twin son Seán, whose rare health condition means “his life is always on a precarious edge”.
“We are always surprised that he survives and you never think about tomorrow, you’re constantly living in the now,” he says. “We come into [life] to learn. We experience all kinds of things; you’d say for example my son has such a horrific life because he’s completely locked up inside in his body and he can’t communicate very easily and suffers a lot, but he has taught us so much.
“Anyone that has met him and touched him has learnt so much by his life and his existence, particularly in the area of love, so that’s his role in life; he has provided that space for so many people to learn that.
“He’s drawn a lot of love out of everyone around him. To learn how to be patient, learn how to pray, learn how to be willing to give up something you love dearly; allowing him to die if he wanted to. Make those decisions, come to those bridges and cross them. He’s added great depth to our lives.
“No male child has survived beyond the age of 13 with what he has, and he’s now 36 so he’s extraordinary. I’ve learnt a lot about medicine, genetics, chemistry, because of trying to find a way to help him.
“My understanding is that when we come into this life it’s to learn, and we can only do that through emotions. It’s like a piece of string and I believe it starts when the heart starts beating and finishes when the heart stops beating. Because of the way I see what happens at the end of the piece of string, it [diagnosis] doesn’t affect me.
“Obviously there’s a small element of fear there in case there’ll be pain involved but I haven’t got to that and that’ll be a long time away. I’m happy with everything and I’m not afraid – I know my path towards the end of my piece of string.
“If you think of life in the sense of being a wonderful experience, it’s full of potential. While you’re alive there’s always the potential for a miraculous cure, even if you’re very sick. Life is an extraordinary privilege and a wonderful thing. One should always be aware of being alive, smelling the air, and seeing everything.”
“I’m in a period now of tidying up,” says Peadar Ó Riada. “All these things that I’ve started in my life. I’ve been doing it for a while, not just when I found out I had cancer.”
He has handed over some duties of the Cór Chúil Aodha choir to others, and the running of the Féile na Laoch event to his daughter Ruth.
Ó Riada, whose recording collaborators include Martin Hayes, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, John Kelly, and Eamon McGivney, has a longstanding musical partnership with Seán Ó Sé, the singer with his father’s Ceoltóirí Chualann in the 1960s who passed away on Tuesday, January 13. “Myself and Seán Ó Sé have been recording for a long time. We have 57 songs recorded and I’d like to finish them and put them out,” he says.
Presenter of Cuireadh Chun Ceoil on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta since the 1970s, Ó Riada also established benevolent trust Iontaoibheas Fódhla, and the annual Bonn Óir Seán Ó Riada competition, to be broadcast live on January 23.
“And I have to write an autobiography,” he adds. “I was told in 1987 to write an autobiography. I started it and I got up nearly as far as my father’s death but I stopped and I have to go back and finish that.”
The Gaeltacht academy Acadamh Fódhla he founded as “a well of knowledge” in the community researches sean-nós song, land-lore, and with an eye to future survival, now studies climate-change.
“I’ve a lot to do. I have seven or eight albums that I need to finish. I’ll probably eventually die saying ‘wait, give me another day or two, I just need to finish…’
“One of the big projects in my life has been setting all the psalms to music. There’s 150 altogether and I’ve close to 100 done. Some of them might be remembered when I’m gone, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter – they’re there anyway if needed. If I have done some stuff well it will be remembered; if I haven’t, it won’t, and that’s OK.”
A decade ago, Peadar Ó Riada was in talks with the papal nuncio regarding plans to establish a monastery in Cúil Aodha. The monastery, with intended international religious community, has not materialised, but Ó Riada’s concerns surrounding the decline in vocations remain.
He is now involved, with members of the clergy, in gathering material equipping communities to continue church services.
“When people get into trouble, very often they can’t find solace in the television or YouTube. They need a genuine space, a place of help.
“We’ve spent a lot of time working with people in Maynooth and elsewhere on how we will deal with not having enough priests – male, female, whatever, is irrelevant. The next five years will have huge changes. It’s going to happen extremely fast,” he warns. “We’re working on a major project to put a book together to put all the material that people will need in one place, as Gaeilge.”
Ó Riada, whose compositions include a large body of liturgical work, has a strong faith and believes a reckoning takes place upon death. “God is everything and nothing all at the same time,” he says. “Our human condition is too limited for us to understand the concept of God. We come from God. It’s not a he or she. It’s so big that we can’t describe it in language.
“When people go astray and do awful things - there are so many in the world at the moment - what they don’t realise is that when you die, you live all the lives that you touched, on the other side. If you’re Hitler and you murdered six million Jews, well you’ll be murdered six million times. That’s Hell. The Pearly Gates thing is only a simile, but when you open the ledger and look back, you’ll be your own harshest critic.
“I’ve seen quite a lot of death and I’ve often wondered at the change going through that gap. [Cúil Aodha poet] Dónal Ó Liatháin had a lovely line that describes it, and I believe it firmly: ‘Níl sa bhás ach múchadh an choinnil roimh gile na gréine ag éirí’.” (Death is only the quenching of the candle in the brightness of the rising sun)*
* from the poem
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