Born December 5th, 1946
Died April 24th, 2026
Eilish Moore was a singer and an activist to her core. She was a magnetic force who drew people together from all walks of life: fellow singers and musicians, dancers, poets, artists and many who found scant welcome in other quarters. She was also an actor and a visual artist, an avid knitter and a jewellery maker.
She championed myriad social justice issues throughout her long life, always identifying at a deep level with those who felt the hard edges of injustice impinge on their daily lives.
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These included the Travelling community, H Block prisoners and their families, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, the anti-nuclear movement, women who sought out the support of the Rape Crisis Centre and, most recently, the people of Palestine.
Eilish was the second of six children born to Andy and Nancy Moore (nee Power). Her mother, Nancy, was from The Yellow Furze, outside Navan, and trained professionally as an opera singer. Her father, who was from Milltown, outside Newbridge, was a Fine Gael county councillor who died when Eilish was nine. Nancy subsequently ran for election and came very close to being elected.
Her older brother Christy enjoyed enormous international success, and her younger brother, Luke Bloom, pursued a very successful career too. But Eilish made her mark closer to home.
She grew up in Moorefield Terrace in Newbridge and attended St Conleth’s National School and Newbridge secondary school. She transferred to the Dominicans on Eccles Street for her final two years of secondary school. From there she went on to train as a nurse at the Meath Hospital, and then studied midwifery in Edinburgh. She went to Texas briefly before returning to Dublin.
Eilish was a renaissance woman who studied ballet as a child, and trained operatically, following in her mother’s footsteps. She was also an accomplished pianist. In later years, she gave her piano to a neighbour who had had a stroke, as she knew that music could offer a pathway to recovery of language skills.
Eilish was a force of nature with a pristine voice. Christy told Oliver Callan on a radio interview that “we always recognised that Eilish was the best singer of the six of us”. Her voice was shot through with great delicacy, and she sang with an innate sensitivity to the story she was telling, as epitomised in her reading of Maria Muldaur’s The Work Song. Even in recent times, when she attended meditation sessions close to her home in Inchicore, she would naturally segue into a song, bridging the gap between silence and sound.
Eilish rallied artists and audiences in the disparate Dublin folk scene of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with extraordinary verve. She was instrumental in the founding of Dublin’s first Folk Festival, along with Nuala O’Connor and Dot and Phil Callery, which featured, among others, The Bothy Band, Clannad, De Danann and Christy Moore. Eilish was known to claim that she was the first singer with De Danann, having performed in Spiddal with Frankie Gavin and Alec Finn, before Dolores Keane joined them.
Her stewarding of weekly sessions in Mother Redcaps in the 1980s and 1990s was a high-water mark in the city’s burgeoning folk scene. She was a stalwart at sessions in O’Donoghue’s, Slatterys of Capel Street and The Meeting Place, organising tours of Dublin for emerging bands. The post-session parties in her home in Inchicore were legendary.
Stockton’s Wing’s Mike Hanrahan recalled her impact with great warmth: “She gave so many young musicians a start and always with a warm welcome.” He went on to note on social media that “their house was an open house. After much singing and playing, everyone got a place to sleep and a mighty breakfast to send us on our way.”
Eilish’s son, Conor, was born in 1972. His earliest memories of her are of her singing him to sleep with her renditions of songs such as The Cliffs of Dooneen.
In 1980 she married Peter Byrne, and the two were inseparable for the 46 years of their married life. Byrne was always there at her side at the countless gigs and festivals she organised. The arrival of their daughter, Róisín, completed their family. Eilish’s work lives on in her son, a highly accomplished flute player, a long-time festival and gig organiser and now a member of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra’s management team.
In the 1980s Eilish formed The Fallen Angels, an all-female band who released their eponymous album in 1992. She found time for acting in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and The Van, and trod the boards in theatre too, featuring in a production of James Plunkett’s The Risen People, about the 1913 Dublin lockout.
She was instrumental in the establishment of the second Gaelscoil in Dublin, in Inchicore, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Friends, family and the countless musicians who benefited from Eilish’s generosity all speak of her charisma. They spoke of her voice and her heart, her hospitality and her loyalty, but above all else of her kindness. Her connections with people were central to who she was.
Her younger brother, Barry, aka Luka Bloom, acknowledged the immense physical pain that Eilish suffered in recent years. “She was a larger-than-life figure, yet she was always so playful. But she was also incredibly courageous,” he said. “Her courage and bravery in the face of adversity was exemplary. She was brave, she was open and she was kind. She had a big heart and she had no filter.
“After she died, I watched a clip of her singing on The Late Late Show in 1988 and I was struck by something for the first time: more than me, and perhaps even more than Christy, she had a natural self-belief, an unbelievable self-confidence. I never really saw her in that light before, as a performer. She knew that when the spotlight would come upon her that she could sing a complicated song and she could deliver. I don’t know if there has ever been a time in my life where I’ve felt that. I’ve never had that level of confidence that I saw in my sister on that recording.”
Eilish died peacefully in St James’s Hospital, surrounded by her family who sang her onwards out of this world. An extraordinary woman who was still plotting new social justice projects up to the very end. As she sang in The Work Song: “Some said garbage, others cried art/You couldn’t call it soul, you had to call it heart.”
She is survived by her husband, Peter, her son, Conor and her daughter, Róisín, her grandchildren, Rúben and Laoise, her brothers Christy, Andy and Barry and sisters Anne and Terry.
