Songlines review: Traveller singer Thomas McCarthy explores a painful history through song

Thomas McCarthy’s beautifully mournful singing voice is the perfect vehicle for communicating the joy and pain experienced by the Traveller community across the centuries. But in addition to his abilities as a singer, he is also a collector of songs, and in Songlines (RTÉ One, Thursday, 10.15pm), director Pat Collins accompanies him as he sets off around Ireland to meet Travellers as part of a project for the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

This fascinating documentary is full of pride but also sadness. In Drogheda, he meets siblings Trish and Martin Reilly. Trish recalls being separated from her parents and put into care at the age of eight and learning how the rest of society perceived the Traveller community. The emotional scars have endured.

“In the care system there was an institutional attitude towards Travellers,” she says. The message she received was that she and her community were “dirty filthy tinkers”. “This is not the way I have seen myself,” says Trish, who performs Broken Lines, a song about her experiences in care.

Songlines follows a previous documentary by Collins about McCarthy, Songs Of The Open Road. The singer takes more of a back seat in this new film. He is our guide and Songlines isn’t really about him. It meanders slightly – one moment McCarthy is in Macroom, Co Cork, the next in Tullamore, Co Offaly. And there is no grand conclusion – the entire point is to accompany the singer on his journey and to see the rich landscape of song through his eyes. The trip is what matters, not the destination.

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Still as a travelogue is intrigues. “You sing – the voice comes out with the song,” says Kitty Cassidy in Waterford, who remembers inheriting her love of music from her father, the noted storyteller John Cassidy. Songs are “a way of reconnecting with you people,” explains Ellen McDonagh in Navan. Her family couldn’t read or write – instead, they “made up songs about their life events”.

McCarthy has experienced that intense connection to the past, too. He recalls his mother’s death and its impact on his singing: “When my mother passed away, a week later, I had a big [concert]. What would Mammy want? She’d want me out there.” He pauses as if the meaning of the words is only now sinking in. “These songs are not mine. I got them from my mother and her people.”