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Derek Bell was born in Belfast on 21 October 1935. His father William Bell, was a banker, a traditional fiddle player and also played in an amateur orchestra. His mother died when Bell was very young. When Derek was two years old his parents received a misdiagnosis from a doctor that their son was going blind. In an effort to develop his sense of hearing Derek’s parents surrounded their young son with musical toys. This resulted in an early aptitude for music. Derek started piano lessons at the age of nine and within two years had composed his first piano concerto.

He was educated at Downey House Preparatory School, Cabin Hill and Campbell College in Belfast. At the age of sixteen he won a scholarship to study composition at London’s Royal College of Music where his teachers included Herbert Howells, Norman Greenwood and Lamar Crowson. During his time there he was awarded the Manns Prize for woodwind. He graduated from the Royal College of Music in 1957. He went on to study music at Trinity College Dublin where he graduated with a MusB in 1959. By now Bell played a number of instruments including piano, oboe, oboe d’amore, cor anglais and cimbalom or dulcimer. He continued to study in Europe and the United States with, among others, British oboist Léon Jean Goossens and Russian pianist Madame Rosina Lhévinne. He appeared as a soloist with many symphony orchestras in Berlin, Moscow, Budapest, Liverpool, Dublin and London and was oboist for four seasons with the American Symphony Orchestra in Pittsburgh.

In August 1957, Derek Bell became the manager of the Belfast Symphony Orchestra. It was only at this stage, in his late twenties, that he began to learn the harp. He made his living as chorus répéiteur and deputy chorus master of the Northern Ireland Radio and TV Orchestra, which he joined in 1965. His harp teachers included Sheila Larchet-Cuthbert in Dublin and Gwendolen Mason in London. Bell also travelled regularly throughout this career to Sea 5 Island, Georgia, United States of America to take lessons from harpist, Artiss de Volt. In 1965 he took up the position of principal harpist and second oboist at the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra. In 1970 he was appointed professor of concert and Irish harp at the Belfast Academy of Music.

Bell met the Irish music group, The Chieftains, in Belfast in 1972. The group were recording a television performance with the BBC orchestra. Bell made some guest appearances with the group after this initial meeting and in 1973 he recorded with them for the first time on their album Chieftains 4 . He officially joined the band in 1974, temporarily retaining his BBC post. By the late 1970s, The Chieftains had become an international attraction, helped by Stanley Kubrick's use of their music on the soundtrack of his film Barry Lyndon (1975). They toured extensively over the next thirty years in Europe, North America and the Far East. Bell's harp added extra colour to the mix of flute, uilleann pipes, fiddle, bodhrán and tin whistles. Bell contributed to more than thirty Chieftains’ albums and won six Grammy Awards with the group.

He maintained his career as a classical composer, writing two symphonies, three piano sonatas and numerous other compositions. He also continued to perform on piano, oboe, pedal harp and a variety of other instruments. He recorded eight solo albums including Carolan's receipt (1975); Carolan's favourite (1980); Derek Bell plays with himself (1981); Musical Ireland (1982); Ancient music for the Irish harp (1989); Mystic harp (1996); A Celtic evening with Derek Bell (1997) and Mystic harp II (1999). In 1999, Bell and Liam Ó Conchubhair published a book of Irish songs entitled Songs from the North of Ireland . Two documentaries called Derek Bell: one man band (1977) and Derek Bell’s concert party (1988) were made by producer/director Alan Tongue. Tongue used visual effects to have Bell playing together on Irish harp, concert harp, piano, tiompán, oboe, whistle, bodhrán and double bass.

Bell married his American born wife Stefanie Rees, who was also a harpist, in [1980?], she was originally from San Francisco. He was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000 for his contribution to traditional Irish and classical music. Bell died suddenly on 17 October 2002 in Phoenix, Arizona, after appearing in Nashville as part of The Chieftains’ fortieth anniversary celebrations.

Born in Co Donegal and now living in Longford, Aidan O’Hara is an award-winning broadcaster, writer, and historian. Through his travels for work and education, he also became an accidental collector of songs, music, and oral history.

Aidan qualified as a teacher at St Mary’s College in Dublin (now known as the Marino Institute of Education). As a young graduate, he moved to Canada and found work teaching in British Columbia—Canada’s most westerly province. That’s where he met Joyce Kuntz: a fine teacher and a singer, and important collaborator on many of Aidan’s subsequent endeavours.

Over the next several years, the young couple lived in a number of locales. They relocated to Ontario, Joyce’s home, and were married there in 1965. They taught near Ottawa for a year before moving into the capital city. While continuing to teach, they also sang in a folk group that featured on local stages, television, and radio. Aidan also pursed part-time studies at the University of Ottawa.

Aidan’s time in Ottawa also led to his acquaintance with Delia Murphy, the Mayo-born songstress. This chance meeting became the foundation for the biography that he published many years later: I’ll Live ‘til I Die’: The Story of Delia Murphy (1997) was the featured book on RTÉ’s Book on One in May 2005.

When Aidan and Joyce moved to Ireland in 1969, they settled their young family in Dublin, and Aidan began his career with Raidió Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). Aidan, however, was interested in furthering his education. So after a few short years, in 1973 Aidan and Joyce packed up their belongings, and their four young children, and headed to St John’s, Newfoundland—Canada’s most easterly city.

Aidan attended Memorial University of Newfoundland, taking courses in folklore, history, and cultural geography. It was there that Aidan met Galway-born scholar John Mannion, a professor of geography and expert on the Irish presence in Eastern and Atlantic Canada. John introduced Aidan to the people of the Cape Shore, sparking the friendships that inspired Aidan to make the recordings featured in the ITMA exhibition A Grand Time.

To make ends meet for his young family, Aidan continued his work as a broadcaster. He worked with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in St John’s, presenting the Saturday evening radio programme Friends and Neighbours. He was also a regular on a series that broadcast across all of Canada: All around the Circle. And, in the autumn of 1975, he took an appointment as the deputy head of School Broadcasts (the Department of Education series that went out on CBC Radio). Aidan’s ongoing work in radio and television provided a forum and opportunity to share some of his recordings. During the mid-1970s, the voices of “The Branch Crowd,” as they came to be known, were exposed to an island-wide audience.

Aidan was active in the cultural and academic life of St John’s. During the mid-1970s, he took on the role of Vice-President with the St John’s Folk Arts Council (the organisation now known as the NL Folk Arts Society). His work with the Folk Arts Council culminated in the founding of the Newfoundland Folk Festival—a now-annual event—in August 1977. He was the programme director for the Festival for the first two years. As was so often the case, this endeavour was a family affair: Joyce coordinated food and lodgings for the many singers, musicians, dancers, and storytellers who travelled to St John’s for the festival.

Aidan was also the founding president of the Irish Newfoundland Association. Initially, the purpose of the organisation was to ensure that the Irish American Cultural Institute had a reason to include St John’s on its annual tour. This tour featured visits to North American cities by leading figures from Irish life. Aidan spoke on Newfoundland-Irish ties as part of the Institute’s 1976 tour.

Aidan was sometimes asked to facilitate Irish guests to the province. Following the 1976 Olympic Games in Montréal, Irish politician John Bruton stopped off in Newfoundland for a short holiday. The Ottawa-based Irish Embassy asked Aidan to coordinate the visit: Aidan took Mr Bruton to visit with Anthony and Mary Power in Branch and arranged for him to stay with John and Maura Mannion in St John’s.

These brief holiday encounters proved formative 20 years later when Taoiseach Bruton negotiated and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin in 1996. This agreement provides ongoing ties between the cultural, educational, and business sectors of Newfoundland and Ireland.

Following his return from Canada, Aidan presented three acclaimed Radharc-produced documentaries on the Irish of Newfoundland—one of them the award-winning, The Forgotten Irish (1981). The broadcasts aired on RTE 1 in 1980 and 1981, and segments were later included in the BBC’s Emmy-award winning mini-series, The Story of English.

Moreover, as RTÉ employed Aidan as a broadcaster after his return from Newfoundland, much as they had in St John’s, selections from his Cape Shore field recordings occasionally made it into his broadcasts. Since retiring, Aidan continues to consult on radio TV series focusing on the connection between Newfoundland and Ireland.

While no longer active as a broadcaster, Aidan works as a writer and researcher. His interests are wide-ranging, though “the Newfoundland connection” continues to inflect his work. In 1991, he published the “The Irish in Newfoundland” in The Emigrant Experience (Galway Labour History Group, 1991). In 1998, his telling of the story of the Irish in Newfoundland, Na Gaeil i dTalamh an Éisc, won the Oireachtas ‘97 literary award for a work in prose. It was also nominated for The Irish Times Literature Prize in 1999 for a work in the Irish language.

Aidan is a keen historian with a special interest in the Irish emigration experience. He is an active member of the Co Longford Historical Society and contributes regularly to the society’s journal, Teabhtha. His articles and editorials have appeared in Irish Music Magazine, and a variety of other journals and newspapers in Ireland. He is also a member of the Knocklyon History Society (Dublin) and the Co Donegal Historical Society. Aidan is Chairman of the Emmet and Devlin Committee, and was a founding member of the Association of Canadian Studies in Ireland.

In 2018, Aidan was awarded the NL Folk Arts Society Lifetime Achievement in recognition of his work.