End of a tradition as Mac Mathúna says slán
Five decades of sharing his deep love of native culture, recorded all over the country, have made the affable Limerick man the ‘voice of Irish traditional music’.
Tomorrow - a day after his 80th birthday - Ciarán presents his final Mo Cheol Thú programme (RTÉ Radio 1 8.10am-8.55am).
“I’ve never changed my style - which is slow and lazy, and in some cases I help people to go back to sleep; mind you, they don’t all go back to sleep,” he said yesterday.
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney described listening to Ciarán’s voice over the decades. “Every time you hear that voice you feel that something is safe. There’s the huge comfort and huge kindness in the presence and the voice.”
As he announced a couple of programmes back, Ciarán is now taking his rest. “Because of age, I want to leave,” he said. “I wasn’t asked to leave. Tomorrow is my birthday: I’ll be 80, so I quit.
“When I retired at the age of retiring, back in 1990, I was called back two days later and I’ve been there since. Ah, but this is the end.”
Among the places he most liked to visit and record local music were Kerry and Clare. “Kerry was very special - and Clare. I started in Clare, Mrs Crotty - they had a pub in Kilrush. She was a great old lady and she played a concertina. We recorded her.
“All the places I went to were very worth going there; there was no place I had to run out of quickly.
“From the beginning it was very exciting because we were finding out musicians in the country that had never been heard publicly - they’d been playing for their own area, their own house. In that sense we did build up a big archive of music which most people hadn’t heard before” he added.
RTÉ has asked Ciarán to do occasional programmes to mark festivals, such as St Patrick’s Day, Easter and Christmas Day.
