Ciarán Mac Mathúna: CIARÁN Mac MATHÚNA, who has died aged 84, was a broadcaster, collector and leading figure in the Irish traditional music revival.
In a broadcasting career that spanned 60 years, he was associated with many radio and television programmes. Most recently he presented the long-running radio programme, Mo Cheol Thú, a nostalgic mix of poetry, instrumental music and song.
The programme was regarded by many as the perfect start to a Sunday, its mood relaxed and peaceful. “We like to try and keep it quiet; we wouldn’t start out with a brass band. You have to ease people in,” its presenter explained.
Mo Cheol Thúwas first broadcast in 1970. "I've been here too long," he joked in 2005. "But still, nobody told me to stop."
He was born in Limerick city in November 1925. His father was immersed in Irish culture. “He used to teach Irish at national school, but he was also very interested in Conradh na Gaeilge, in music and dancing, and I think I was influenced by that.”
At Sexton Street CBS Ciarán maintained his interest in music, singing in school operettas. He secured a degree in Irish at University College Dublin in 1947, and wrote his MA thesis on the themes of Gaelic folk songs.
Following a short stint as a temporary teacher he was attached to the Ordnance Survey, working for several years with the Placenames Commission, the body responsible for providing authoritative forms of Irish placenames for official and public use. The work involved consulting with the oldest surviving Irish speakers in all parts of the country.
In 1954 he joined Radio Éireann as a scriptwriter, with special responsibility for collecting music and song for broadcast. Following in the footsteps of Séamus Ennis and Seán Mac Réamoinn, he travelled the country with the outside broadcast unit. “What I mostly did was go to festivals – fleadhanna cheoil – and record local musicians. We did that for something like 30 years,” he recalled.
When he began collecting, traditional music was not universally popular and was mainly associated with older people. He remembered a time when people going to a session at a country house at night with a fiddle would hide it under their coat. “They were kind of half-ashamed or afraid of being laughed at.”
He and his colleagues made recordings at house sessions and in public houses where musicians gathered. Sessions sometimes continued into the early hours of the morning, and one establishment in Co Clare was known as “the house of the rising sun”. Visits abroad took in centres of Irish music in the United States – New York, Boston and Chicago – and emigrant communities in Britain.
He had fond memories of those times, and he observed the impact of the revival at home and abroad. “Irish music made people look at their own music, not just in Ireland but in other countries, especially Scotland but also, to a lesser extent, in England and in Germany. The Scandinavians were very interested, too.”
The material gathered on field recordings provided the basis of programmes broadcast over many years. He took the helm on Ceolta Tíre, and from 1957 presented the bilingual A Job of Journeywork on Sunday afternoons.
His easygoing style, informed commentary and obvious love of the music attracted a large following at a key period in the revival of interest in Ireland’s musical heritage. Indeed the programmes he presented, including the studio-based Pléaracha na hAoine, became an integral part of the revival, linking all parts of the country as well as emigrants to Britain and the US, and providing a source of comparison and inspiration.
The programmes, which serviced and generated an audience, demonstrated – without any fuss or solemnity – that traditional music had an important place in the modern world.
Over the years he met many fine musicians. These included Elizabeth Crotty, the first concertina player he recorded, singer Áine Tuohy, fiddle player Paddy Glackin and piper Liam O’Flynn.
There were others who in his opinion were better suited to being listeners. “I won’t name names, I don’t play anything, which is an advantage. I can’t play, but I know what’s good and what’s not good; that’s all I need.”
With the advent of television, he presented The Humours of Donnybrook, a series that placed traditional musicians in "big house" settings such as Bunratty and Dunsany castles. He drew on the radio archives for Reels of Memory, which he co-presented with Padraigín Ní Uallacháin in the 1970s.
The Gay Byrne Showmarked his official retirement from RTÉ in 1990. Among the many tributes paid to him was one from the playwright, John B Keane, who said that he had "made the shamed people of Ireland unashamed [of their musical birthright]".
At his funeral this week, the poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney said Mac Mathúna had made a contribution to the nation’s sense of itself.
"But more particularly he belongs in our bodily homes, in the first circle of fond memory, in the seat of the affections where friends and family are linked together listening to Ceolta Tíreor A Job of Journeyworkor Mo Cheol Thú," Heaney told the congregation at Terenure College Chapel.
A former member of the Cultural Relations Committee, Mac Mathúna was a stalwart of Cumann Merriman from its inception. He was conferred with honorary doctorates by the National University of Ireland and the University of Limerick, and was made a freeman of Limerick. In 1955 he married singer Dolly MacMahon, who with their daughter, Deirdre, and sons, Pádraig and Ciarán, survive him.
Ciarán Mac Mathúna: born November 1925; died December 11th, 2009