Peadar O’Loughlin was a musician who played the fiddle, uilleann pipes and flute. He was born at Cullen, Kilmaley, Co. Clare. Influenced by his father, who played fiddle, flute and concertina, his growing up was among local and visiting musicians, including fiddler Ellen Galvin. Beginning on whistle, he moved to flute, then fiddle, then pipes. Solo playing for set dancers was common practice in his youth, making his first experience of attempted group playing odd enough to be memorable. He joined the Fiach Roe Céilí Band in 1948, in later years played with the Tulla and Kilfenora, and recorded with Aggie White, Willie Clancy and Elizabeth Crotty, and with Paddy Canny, Bridie Lafferty and P. Joe Hayes he recorded All-Ireland Champions. Much local music was originated in O’Neill’s collection (learned and transmitted by fiddler Hughdie Doohan), but travelling players were also a major source: Jerry O’Shea introducing ‘The Blooming Meadows’, dancing master Paddy Barron (who taught regularly in Peadar’s home) bringing ‘The Drunken Gauger’. Seán Reid introduced him to piping – via the Tulla Céilí Band – and gave him Bro. Gildas O’Shea’s Egan set of flat pipes as a wedding present. From the early 1950s O’Loughlin was best known for his playing in Fleadh and Oireachtas competitions with concertina player Paddy Murphy. He played much with Paddy Canny and Ronan Browne, with whom he has recorded. He teaches at the Willie Clancy Summer School.
Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA). (Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann). A national public archive and resource centre for all with an interest in the contemporary and historical art forms of Irish traditional song, instrumental music and dance. It was founded in 1987 with the primary aims of collecting, preserving and organising the materials of Irish traditional music, and of making these materials and related information as widely available as feasible to the general public. The Archive documents performers and performances of Irish traditional music within the island of Ireland, among the Irish Diaspora, and among non-Irish Irvine, Andy 364 performers worldwide, and it also collects representative materials on other national music traditions, especially those most closely linked to Ireland. multimedia. The Archive now holds the largest multimedia collection in existence of the materials of Irish traditional music: currently over 90,000 items – commercial and non-commercial sound recordings, books and serials, ballad sheets and items of sheet music, programmes and flyers, manuscripts, photographs and other images, videotapes and DVDs, melodies in digital form – and a mass of other materials such as posters and artefacts. It also holds the largest body in existence of information about the music – over 500,000 content items – organised on unique computer catalogues. access. The materials and information held are made fully available for reference to all visitors to the Archive, free of charge. Current opening hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, and one Saturday each month. Guidance to the collections is given, and general information and consultancy on the music, in English and Irish. An information service is also provided directly by phone, post and fax and through the internet, and remotely through exhibitions and publications. These publications include seminal volumes on the historic Edward Bunting and James Goodman manuscript collections. Materials and information are also disseminated by the Archive through its extensive co-operation with the performing, teaching, broadcasting, publishing and archival activities of others, including RTÉ Radio and Television, TG4 Television, the Journal of Music, Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum, Gael Linn, Viva Voce Recordings, etc. It is a member of many international and national archive and library networks. staff. The Archive currently has a core staff of ten, with other part-time workers. Its operations are directed by a board of twelve with performing, collecting, broadcasting, archival, financial, marketing and management experience. Users of the Archive include singers, musicians, dancers, private-interest visitors, students at all levels, teachers, researchers and writers, librarians, broadcasters and publishers, arts administrators and the general public, a significant number of whom come from abroad. funding. This is received from the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon in Dublin and also from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in Belfast, and from individual donors, especially through its support group Friends of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. It receives project funding from sponsors such as the Heritage Council, Cairde na Cruite, the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, the Ireland Newfoundland Partnership, and Enterprise Ireland, and it receives support in kind from publishers. It has been enabled to grow to its present flourishing state by the support of hundreds of private donors of materials and information, notably by private field collectors who have generously donated their collections for the benefit of the traditional music community. The Archive is a company limited by guarantee, and as such keeps audited accounts and makes annual returns to the Companies Office. It is also recognised by the Revenue Commissioners as a charity. location. Since 2006 the Archive has occupied new premises at 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, a heritage building allocated to it by the state through the Office of Public Works. It has there public rooms equipped for listening to, viewing, reading and studying items from the collections and accessing its databases; an audio and video recording studio; specialist rooms for the preservation, processing, copying and cataloguing of audio, video and print materials; reception and administrative areas; and specialist storage areas. web. Extensive detail on the ITMA, its collections, services and personnel, is on itma.ie. To mark its twenty-first anniversary, a programme was initiated to make the computerised catalogues and sample digitised materials available worldwide on the internet via this website. [NIC]
John Oliver Moran (1 January 1933–27 May 2017) was born in Killarney and grew up in Cahirsiveen. His father was chief veterinary officer for Munster. Oliver qualified as a solicitor, worked in Rhodesia, returned to Ireland and worked there as a qualified town planner. He was the youngest of a singing family of five, but didn't play an instrument. He was unmarried.
MacMahon, Tony. (1939– 2021). Accordion player, television producer, commentator; born at the Turnpike, Ennis, Co. Clare. His father P.J. was a builder, of Irish-speaking parents from Kilmaley. His mother Kitty (née Murphy), from Connolly, was a first cousin to concertina player Paddy Murphy and a neighbour of fiddler Hughdie Mac Mathúna, Ciarán 420 Doohan. Hugely influenced by Joe Cooley (who was a regular visitor to the family home) from age ten, it was ‘the master’ who gave him his first accordion (a small piano model), and later piper Seán Reid provided a button instrument. His brothers Brendan and Christy played accordion too, and sister Ita (mother of Mary and Andrew McNamara) danced. Training as a teacher in Dublin from 1957 introduced him to Sonny Brogan, Bill Harte, John Kelly and Breandán Breathnach. Sharing Séamus Ennis’s apartment in Bleecker Street, New York in 1963, he was coached by him in air-playing. He played sessions at O’Donoghue’s in Merrion Row, met Seán Ó Riada and singers from Coolea at An tOireachtas in the RDS, and played for the BBC sound recording of The Playboy of the Western World. In 1966 MacMahon played with Bobby Casey, recording with him and others on the Topic record Paddy in the Smoke. Busking in France and Morocco led him back to Dublin where he ran a weekly session of traditional music and poetry at Slattery’s of Capel Street in aid of the ANC. From 1969 he was a freelance TV presenter with RTÉ for traditional music programmes Aisling Geal, then Ag Déanamh Ceoil; in 1974 he joined the RTÉ staff as radio producer, and initiated The Long Note. values. An exceptional performer on accordion – particularly in his interpretation of airs – he nevertheless considers that instrument inappropriate to the ethos of traditional music, is unimpressed by modern trends in traditional music, and strongly believes that the art of the older traditional musicians is dying. This is refl ected in the choice of musicians for his later television series The Pure Drop. The flashback series Come West along the Road, drawing on television archive material, is his most recent traditional music media work. His earlier presentation of music and his later production complemented an intense rigour in music expression and a personality which created and maintained an active consciousness of the artistic understatement involved in traditional music. His work demonstrated this, and his articulate intelligence was a vital sound-post through the fi nal three decades of the twentieth century. music. MacMahon’s first solo recording was, in the manner of the times, self-titled: Tony MacMahon (1972), reissued two decades after as Traditional Irish Accordion. He played on Cry of the Mountain (1981) with Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, and with concertina player Noel Hill on I gCnoc na Graí (1985), an outstanding production of thrillingly interwoven, balanced music, social dance, rural artistic ethos and technology that stands timelessly as universally appreciable collaborative art. Also with Hill is Aislingí Ceoil (1993), with singer Iarla Ó Lionaird. MacMahon recorded with the Boys of the Lough on Good Friends (1978) and his 2001 solo MacMahon from Clare brings production skills to the fore again as a quite dramatic reworking of solid old tunes. His retirement from RTÉ in 1998 marked only a transfer to reflective performance. His music-making has involved work of varying intensity with poetry, prose and music integrating the past with the present: The Well, a theatrical/ music production, experiment and performance with Kronos, 2009 visual work with Dermot Bolger – all challenging, inventive productions with spoken word and authoritative musicianship. In 2004 he was given TG4’s Gradam Saoil for his contribution as a broadcaster and a musician.
