Millionaire rock stars favour Killiney, traditional musicians go to Clare, ageing hippies hang out in west Cork, but classical performers, it seems, only want to live in the south-east.
It's appropriate, indeed, that one of Barry Guy's recent CDs is called Cascades because the region is coming down with internationally renowned musicians like himself. Barry moved to Inistioge in Kilkenny from England with his partner, baroque violinist Maya Homburger, two years ago.
By that time, tenor John Elwes was already spending summers "pottering around" the cottage he bought near Carrick-on-Suir in the 1970s. He now lives there full-time with his wife, historical harpist Siobhan Armstrong, and their new-born son, Oisin.
Leading harpsichordist and organist Malcolm Proud lives in Kilkenny. David Milne, conductor of the Guinness Choir and Orchestra, is based in Carlow. The composer Eric Sweeney is a resident of Waterford.
Is it something in the air? More like a happy coincidence, really, but whatever the reasons for this improbable cluster of talent, music fans in the region are likely to be an envied lot in the years ahead.
While much of their time is spent performing abroad, the artists talk passionately about their desire to perform as much as possible at home. There are even plans for an "early and improvisational" music festival at venues throughout Kilkenny in 2000.
"We're talking about starting an early music association in the south-east," says Armstrong, one of a very small group who play the medieval brass wire Irish harp. "Most international professionals mainly work abroad, but we're all living in the south-east and it's daft we don't get together more."
They're clearly a sociable bunch, however, and they do get together quite a bit. They meet in each other's homes for dinner parties which can end with impromptu performances, and on a professional level Elwes has sung with several of the others. Proud also plays and records with Homburger.
English-born Guy and his Swiss partner, Homburger, began their love affair with Kilkenny in 1992 after Guy, who defies easy labelling - he's an improvisational jazz bassist who has worked in chamber orchestras and early music bands - was invited to give a solo bass recital at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
The audience reaction was so enthusiastic and so many friends were made that the couple decided to return the following year to rehearse with the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, an ensemble founded by Guy 26 years ago and managed by Homburger.
The group played one concert at the Hotel Kilkenny, but most of the time was spent recording, eating and sleeping at Butler House. Not all of their time, though. They also found a favourite pub. "At least I always knew where they were," Maya adds. "In London, if you manage a big band of 17 men, they just disperse."
With Maya also giving occasional baroque performances at St Canice's Cathedral, the bond with the area grew. "Every time we came over, we seemed to make more friends. Around this area, it was instant friendships with the sort of people we met," she recalls.
While recording a double CD of six Bach sonatas with Malcolm Proud in the Church of Ireland church in Kells, Co Kilkenny, Homburger stayed in the home of George Vaughan, who runs the Grennan Mill craft centre in Thomastown. A local sculptor, Marie Foley, was another new friend. It was now a case of "one more step and we would move here".
At the time, says Guy, they were disenchanted with the political scene in England - both generally and in terms of its impact on the arts - and were looking to move from their base near Cambridge. They decided Switzerland was too expensive, and the political situation in the south of France was no more attractive than England, so they opted for Kilkenny.
They are building a house on a hill called Skeough Vosteen in Griffinstown, near Borris. The building will include concert space and next year will be the venue for the first of a series of chamber music concerts which the couple plan to hold in preparation for the 2000 festival, which they hope will be an annual spring event.
The festival itself, Maya envisages, will be held at venues like the church in Kells where she recorded with Malcolm Proud, and Duiske Abbey in Graiguenamanagh, a "wonderful venue" she played in during this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival. The couple have also played in other churches throughout the region, including Wexford.
If politics and circumstance brought Guy and Homburger to the south-east, somewhat different forces were at work in John Elwes's case. By settling in Kilballyquilty, a townland near Rathgormack just south of Carrick-on-Suir, Elwes has more or less come home. His father, John Hahessy, left a neighbouring townland to work on the buildings in London in the 1940s.
Elwes himself had the name Hahessy until he was 21, when he was formally adopted by the English family with whom he had lived from his early teens. "It took me until I was 28 to find my family here," he recalls.
His mother, he explains, was married with six children when she met his father, who was at least 15 years her junior. He was put into care and raised in a children's home, finally meeting his adoptive mother in his early teens when he was sent to the choir school at Westminster Cathedral, where she taught.
It was only when in Dublin to perform, 24 years ago, that Elwes, now 51, decided to track down the Hahessys. "I looked up the phone book to see if I could find anyone called Hahessy, saw there was a name `John Hahessy', exactly the same as mine. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen the name, it doesn't exist in England."
John Hahessy, a family relation living in the Carrick-on-Suir area, showed Elwes around "and we pieced together who I was . . . I then met people who knew who my father was, who knew my grandfather." A couple of years later he bought the 100-year-old farm labourer's cottage in which he now lives, down the road from another Tom Hahessy, another relation. "I'm back, if you like. Curiously, after all these years I'm back to my origins."
With only a roaring stream outside for company, moving to such an isolated rural outpost is a dramatic change in lifestyle for Elwes and Armstrong, who last lived in London, but neither sees any difficulty in continuing international careers from such a base. John previously lived in Montpellier in the south of France, which invariably meant two flights - one to Paris and another from there - for international performances. "It is some distance to get up to the airport in Dublin, that's true, but I used to do that when I lived in France."
For Siobhan, who insists she enjoyed driving up to 600 miles from her former base in Stuttgart to perform around Europe, Kilballyquilty does bring extra logistical problems. It's no longer possible to pack her huge 17th century Italian harp into the car and take off but, as a specialist in a small field, she expects demand for her to perform abroad to be unaffected.
Barry Guy admits that when he moved to Kilkenny he was concerned there might be an "out of sight, out of mind" factor where continental promoters were concerned. In fact the opposite has been the case. "There seems to have been almost an interest in the fact that we've moved slightly closer to the periphery of Europe," he says. Or, as Maya puts it, some Europeans see living in Ireland as something "exotic".
"We have done several interviews, and whenever you mention you live in Ireland it creates amazing interest. People are very envious. It's considered very romantic. There's envy that you live in `holiday country' almost, which of course it isn't," she says.
"We can travel easily. On one or two occasions there was a storm and the ferry couldn't go, but otherwise Dublin Airport is easier to get to than Heathrow is from Cambridge." Even getting to the US is easier from Ireland, according to Barry. "We just wander through the country lanes to Shannon and then we're there in no time at all."
But is there an audience in the south-east, and Ireland generally, for such highly specialised musicians? Guy and Homburger have no doubts. "People here are very open to new musical experiences.
"In some other countries people like to put things into boxes and use labels like `early music played on an authentic instrument' and so on, but here it seems to go to the heart. . . They take it for what it is, the energy of it, the beauty of it," says Maya.
"There is a generosity of spirit," according to Barry. "It doesn't mean that everybody will like everything we do, but they will give their time."
There are, however, some disadvantages to living in rural south-east Ireland. Guy and Homburger, who came to Ireland thinking it was "much more ecologically informed than it is", have found building an environmentally friendly house to be much more difficult than they had imagined.
"The Government seems way behind. You don't get any grants for using solar power or putting in an efficient boiler. There's no encouragement," says Maya.
Being the EU's most dynamic economy doesn't mean we've become any more efficient, it would appear. "People might be very friendly, but nothing gets done," she adds. Siobhan Armstrong, who confesses to being the "original suburban kid" from Terenure, has problems of her own. "I'd murder a Chinese takeaway, but no chance!"
