A piece of the action

After winning standing ovations from here to the US and beyond, the Cross-Border Orchestra of Ireland is now under serious financial pressure, writes Arminta Wallace

ON A SUNDAY afternoon the campus of the Dundalk Institute of Technology is a tranquil place. In the background are the Cooley Mountains and, beyond, the Mournes. The horizon of the campus itself is dominated by a wind turbine which generates some 60 per cent of the college’s electricity needs as it turns in a slow, majestic circle. Inside the college’s theatre building, however, all is hustle and bustle and excited chatter. In a corridor, young people are lined up clutching passports plus blue forms and green forms. A young man wearing a Hendrix T-shirt hurries past, a trombone tucked under his elbow. Around the corner, a girl is doing twirly cheerleader-type things with a set of drumsticks.

These are the members of the Cross-Border Orchestra of Ireland. They’re from both sides of the Border, they’re aged between 12 and 24, and they’re rehearsing for their forthcoming concerts in the Helix in Dublin and the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.

After that, they’re off to the Big Apple to play at the home of the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center. In the meantime, they’re clearly having a ball. But that doesn’t mean they’re getting off lightly on the musical front. Inside the theatre itself, the orchestra’s chief conductor Gearoid Grant is on the warpath. “Never mind laughing when you should have been practising,” he tells his second violins. “Next week I’m DEFINITELY gonna ask you individually. Right. Riverdance, section D. Let’s go.”

Outside in the autumn sunshine the orchestra’s director, Sharon Treacy-Dunne, explains how the band got going in the first place. “I was born in Hackballscross, which is about 10 miles from here just south of the Border,” she says. “I grew up at a time when an awful lot of young people were drawn into paramilitary organisations. Hackballscross was a no-man’s-land because it was in between; it was also a cultural wasteland, with absolutely nothing for young people whatsoever.” Her mother was determined that nobody in her family would get involved in violence – and she succeeded. Treacy-Dunne’s two brothers studied engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, while she did a degree in music at UCD.

“When I finished it was the 1980s, and everybody was leaving and there were no jobs,” she says. “I got a call from the St Louis convent in Dundalk, where I’d gone to school, asking would I come in and teach some hours. So I did. I ended up getting a permanent job there.” At the school she happened upon a bank of musical instruments which the nuns had bought in the 1950s but which had, thanks to the atmosphere of the times, hardly been used. “When the peace process started it was just monumental in my life. I felt I had to do something to help. And the first thing that I thought was, ‘Well, here’s this bank of instruments. If we could get them done up it would be fantastic for the school; it would be fantastic for the kids; and it would be fantastic for the town of Dundalk’.”

She realised that putting her idea into practice wasn’t going to be easy. “At the time I was on a budget of £25 per year – and it was going to cost £3,000 to get the instruments done up. You could have put a wing on the school for that sort of money. But we fund-raised. We actually started a Search for a Star competition which, 15 years later, is still running in the school. And we got started.”

The first cross-Border link was with the Abbey Grammar School in Newry. But for a while, it seemed as if that might be the end of the road. “We wrote to 219 Protestant schools in Northern Ireland to get them to join up,” Treacy-Dunne recalls. “And eventually two schools did join up; Banbridge Academy, and Wellington College in Belfast. It was a real struggle. There was a phenomenal amount of opposition to the whole thing, even in those schools which did reply. I remember going to a meeting in Belfast at one stage, and a lot of parents were opposed to it. We were accused of brain-washing children – of trying to destroy their culture. But we kept going, thanks to the goodwill of the music teachers and the goodwill of the principals.”

That was in September 1995. The following March they entered the Feis Ceoil in Dublin – and won. This was followed by wins at festivals in Portadown and Belfast, and an invitation to represent Northern Ireland at the 75th anniversary of the British Federation of Music Festivals in Warwick. They came second. “So we went from having nothing – I was literally handing out instruments to kids who volunteered to be in the orchestra, some of whom couldn’t play a note – to thinking, ‘Okay, we can do anything’. It gave us great confidence. Looking back on it now, it was false confidence, really, because we thought we were much better than we were.”

At this point she began to get calls from parents all over Ulster and beyond, asking if their children could get involved. In 2002, she approached the then director of the Dundalk Institute of Technology, Tom Collins, to ask if it would be possible to move the orchestra to the college campus and open it up to everybody. “He said, ‘Whatever you need – you have it’.” Since then DKIT has provided rehearsal space, storage space and office space, allowing the orchestra to concentrate on simply getting better and better. “We’ve really worked on the standard. We got Gearoid Grant involved and he has just been inspirational for the kids.”

Treacy-Dunne has always been determined that the orchestra would never be elitist in any way. “There’s no audition procedure,” she says. “They just apply, and as soon as a place becomes available we take the next one in line. There’s absolutely no discrimination of any kind. They might come in at the back of third violins but at the end of a few years they start working their way up. Almost all of the music is specially written so it caters for everyone from beginners up. We have a huge mix of kids – from north Antrim, from Dublin, from Kildare. We’ve had kids who come up from Cork and from Donegal. But it’s a monumental commitment. I always say to parents, ‘This is the schedule. If you can commit to that, then you’re very, very welcome’.”

The commitment stretches way beyond weekly rehearsal sessions in Dundalk. Every second year the orchestra tours abroad. They’ve been to Finland and the Czech Republic; last year, they went to Italy to play at the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the Flight of the Earls. And in 2005, they did what every professional musician wants to do. They played at Carnegie Hall. “That had been the big dream for years beforehand,” says Treacy-Dunne. “We got six standing ovations,” she adds with a grin.

After their concerts in Dublin and Belfast this month they’re off to the Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, where they’ll be joined by a choir of 500 children. “We’re also doing a cross-cultural festival with nine youth groups from all over New York State doing their thing – hip-hop, salsa, everything you can imagine. We’re working with the Board of Education in New York on that one. They’re bussing 4,000 kids into an indoor track and field centre for this, so it’s a pretty big deal.” Nothing, however, could be a bigger deal than the work they do at home.

“For the concerts in the Helix there are up to 15 schools involved. We’ve given out packs to all of those – we send them a CD and they learn the music and they come along and sing with the orchestra.” In the North, peace-building modules are also built into the process. “They’re fabulous packages where they come into a school and talk to young people about their perceptions of other people,” says Treacy-Dunne. “Every school in Ireland should be doing them, never mind Catholic and Protestant schools in the North.”

Work such as this is a process which has already borne visible fruit within the ranks of the orchestra. The names alone reflect the cross-cultural mix: Kimberly Robertson from Belfast has been playing oboe for a year; Oisin Drumm from Dundalk has been a violinist for six years. There have been firm friendships – and intermittent romances. Now, sadly, Treacy-Dunne has real concerns about the future. “We’ve been funded for 10 years by Co-Operation Ireland, but that peace money has dried up,” she says. “We also get funding from the EU and from Louth County Council. We were unbelievably lucky to get €80,000 from the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism this summer. It’s fantastic to have it. But it’s literally a quarter of the budget that we would normally be working on and I don’t know how long it will last. So after 13 years, we’re going to have to think about folding.”

In the meantime, they’ll just keep on playing. Back at the rehearsal, a group of pipers and a Lambeg drummer have joined the orchestra. Among them are the Walker brothers from Portaferry, Jamie and eight-year-old Jake, who is attending his first rehearsal today. “Jamie, can you play Amazing Grace?” the conductor demands. The tiny head moves uncertainly, somewhere between a nod yes and a shake no. “I’ll help him,” his brother offers. They play it together – but Grant persists. “Try the first bit by yourself,” he urges the little piper. Jake does so – and gets a round of spontaneous applause from the whole orchestra. It sums up, instantly and more articulately than a thousand words of explanation, what the Cross-Border Orchestra of Ireland is all about.

The Cross-Border Orchestra of Ireland, conducted by Gearoid Grant, will perform The Crossing: Celebrating Culture and Connections at The Helix, DCU, Dublin, on October 17th at 3pm and 8pm, and at The Waterfront Hall, Belfast on October 18th at 3pm