Mac Mathúna, Ciarán (1925–2009), folk music collector and broadcaster, was born Kieran MacMahon on 26 November 1925 at 14 St John's Avenue, off Mulgrave Street, Limerick city, youngest among five sons and one daughter of James MacMahon (1875–1967), national school teacher, native of Newport, near Birdhill, Co. Tipperary, and Christina MacMahon (née Ford; 1888–1927), of a family from Co. Clare. When Kieran was fourteen months old, his mother, aged 39, died of heart failure while in hospital for a minor operation, leaving six children under eight years of age. As a boy Kieran (who with his siblings spent summer holidays with paternal relatives in rural Tipperary) was influenced by the deep interest in Irish traditional culture entertained by his father, who taught Irish in the national school curriculum, was involved in Conradh na Gaeilge, and interested in Irish music and dance. After early primary education in the Presentation Convent, Kieran attended Sexton Street CBS; a good student, he sang in school operettas, played hurling, and cultivated a passion for tennis. Winning a corporation scholarship, he entered UCD (1943), initially to study engineering but soon switching to arts, and was awarded a BA in Latin and modern Irish (1947), and an MA for a thesis on the themes of Irish-language folksong (1951); the latter was interrupted by a year-long hospitalisation with pleurisy, which also induced permanent cessation of his sporting activities.
A temporary teacher in Castleknock college for six months in 1951, Kieran MacMahon also did relief teaching with Dublin VEC (amid a huge demand owing to an influenza epidemic). He worked for two years in the Irish Placenames Commission (1952–4), engaged in research aimed at supplying authoritative Irish-language versions of topographic nomenclature for official and public use; the research involved extensive fieldwork, often in remote and marginal locations, including consultation with the oldest surviving native Irish-speakers in a locale, whereby he discovered a talent for talking and especially listening to people, for putting his interlocutors at their ease. In 1954 he joined Radio Éireann (RÉ) as a scriptwriter, with special responsibility for collecting folk music and song for broadcast. (About this time, in the mid 1950s, he adopted the Irish form of his name.) Assigned to the station's outside broadcast unit, he travelled widely throughout the country, often on excursions of several weeks' duration, seeking out and recording traditional musicians and singers. While much of his work was done at the local and regional music festivals (fleadhanna cheoil) organised by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, he also recorded informal performances in musicians' homes, at house parties and at public house sessions (one isolated Co. Clare pub of his discovery, renowned locally for its all-night sessions, was nicknamed 'the house of the rising sun'). He also collected music in Irish émigré communities in Britain. In the early years of his tenure, such field recordings were essential to supply sufficient material for broadcast, as the existing corpus of recorded traditional music would have been exhausted by programmers within several weeks. Mac Mathúna regarded as an advantage his being neither a musician nor singer, thus possessing a professional detachment as an impartial listener, and regarded by his subjects as an unthreatening presence, not a potential competitor. Continuing to make field recordings into the 1980s, he accumulated a vast body of material, providing the substance for numerous radio programmes and constituting a rich repository of enduring archival interest.
Mac Mathúna debuted as a radio broadcaster in 1955, when he succeeded Seán Mac Réamoinn (qv), the station's other outside broadcast officer (who upon Mac Mathúna's arrival at RÉ returned to his initial concentration on news reporting and collection of spoken folklore), as presenter of Ceolta tíre, a weekly, fifteen-minute programme of field-recorded folk music; he remained a sometime presenter of the programme till about 1970. In autumn 1955 he launched his own half-hour, bilingual programme of field-recorded music, A job of journeywork (named after the title of a set dance), which continued into the mid 1960s. In 1962 and 1966 he recorded musicians in centres of Irish population in the USA; the resultant programmes were titled American journeywork.
Noted for his distinctive broadcasting style, Mac Mathúna had a relaxed, unhurried, conversational delivery, slowly and softly spoken; his informed commentary conveyed a deep knowledge and love of the music, and respect for the musicians. Poet Seamus Heaney observed that Mac Mathúna's was 'one of the most intimate and least insistent voices ever, but at the same time one of the most recognisable and authoritative' (Ir. Times, 16 December 2009). These qualities were epitomised on Mac Mathúna's long-running Sunday morning programme Mo cheol thú (1970–2005), which featured spoken poetry, instrumental music, and song. On the air for thirty-five years, it was one of the longest-running programmes in the history of RTÉ radio, attracting a large, eclectic audience with its calm, soothing, peaceful tone. With no intention to be 'scholarly', Mac Mathúna selected the playlist – opening always with a theme tune, 'The lark in the clear air', in a version by fiddler Geraldine O'Grady – 'with a view to easing people into a Sunday morning', when listeners had no desire for 'a great blast of a céilí band', conceding that he included 'a lot of blatant nostalgia' (Ir. Times, 1 February 1996). In its latter years the programme was pre-recorded, Mac Mathúna working without a script or notes, and nearly always without retakes; he chose not to disillusion aficionados who commended him as a great man to be out working so early of a Sunday morning: 'I hate to say anything. Let them find out some other way' (Ir. Times, 7 May 2005).
In the 1960s Mac Mathúna presented the studio-based radio programme Pléarácha na hAoine. He co-presented, with Padraigín Ní Uallacháin, Reels of memory (1978–80), drawn from the radio archives. The humours of Donnybrook was an occasional television series (1978–81) that placed traditional musicians in a big house setting, such as Bunratty or Dunsany castles. (Mac Mathúna remained stubbornly insistent that radio, as a 'purer medium', was superior to television for the transmission of music, believing that the shifting images distracted an audience from closely attentive listening.) He presented or spoke the voice-over for several television series and documentaries. Appointed head of folk music and folklore at RTÉ in 1984, he formally retired from the station in 1990, but continued to present Mo cheol thú weekly for a further fifteen years; the last programme was broadcast on 27 November 2005.
As a music collector and a broadcaster of the music that he and others collected, Mac Mathúna played a leading role in generating and guiding the revival of interest in Irish traditional music in the 1960s–70s. To critic Fintan Vallely, Mac Mathúna's programmes were the voice of the revival. They exposed regional styles to a national audience, illustrated the variety amongst those styles, and demonstrated the quality of the music and the musicians. Mac Mathúna's personal interests and tastes established a canon of artists and styles (in which that of Co. Clare was preeminent), and so helped shape the perception of the existing tradition and the future direction of the genre. He shifted interest away from the ensemble playing of the céilí bands to a concentration on individual instrumentalists performing solo or in small groups. Among the musicians he championed were concertina player Elizabeth Crotty (qv) (whom he recorded on his first field trip, to Co. Clare, in January 1955), piper Willie Clancy (qv), tin-whistler Micho Russell (qv) and fiddler Junior Crehan (1908–98). He revived the fiddle music of Michael Coleman (qv), whose commercial recordings had been dormant since their wide popularity of the 1920s. Some commentators have faulted Mac Mathúna for over-stating the primacy of the Clare style, followed by those of Galway and Kerry, at the expense of other regions.
By preserving and propagating the existing musical tradition, Mac Mathúna helped create a much larger, geographically dispersed, and socially diversified audience for Irish traditional music, and inspired new generations of practitioners, in both instrumental music and song, some of whom, exploiting the commercial potential embodied in the broader audience, pursued professional careers. Musicians whose careers he helped launch included uilleann piper Liam Óg O'Flynn (b. 1945) and fiddler Paddy Glackin (b. 1954). Unlike some musicians, commentators and enthusiasts, Mac Mathúna was not purist in taste, and was receptive to the stylistic innovations and fusions with other genres undertaken by some of the new practitioners. Encountering the music of the American-based Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem on his USA trip of 1962, he subsequently played their records on his RTÉ programmes, thereby initiating their popularity within Ireland, while also helping ignite the Irish 'ballad boom' of the 1960s. He likewise promoted the music of the balladeers, most notably the Dubliners, and of the traditional revival groups that emerged in the 1970s.
The RTÉ project of collecting, preserving and disseminating native folk music and lore was one element of the station's larger mission, as the national broadcaster, of being an agent in the forging of a national identity, and was founded on the conceit of a surviving but imperilled traditional culture – rural, timeless, Gaelic-speaking, and authentically Irish, uncontaminated by alien (specifically, Saxon) influences. However, a major result of Mac Mathúna's work was the emergence of a highly eclectic, commercialised Irish traditional style, sustained by young, urban, cosmopolitan audiences in Ireland and abroad, effectively a sub-genre within the international folk-music revival of the 1960s, and the later phenomena of 'world' and 'roots' music.
Several albums of material selected from Mac Mathúna's radio broadcasts and his field recordings stored in the RTÉ sound archives were issued variously on vinyl disc, audio cassette, or compact disc. The album Mo cheol thú (1977) was released on the Gael Linn label. RTÉ issued albums on its own label of Mac Mathúna introducing Irish traditional music from Clare and Kerry (1987), Galway and Limerick (1988), and New York and Philadelphia (1989). The touch of the master's hand: mo cheol thú (RTÉ; 1995), following the format of one of his eponymous programmes, included poetry readings by Mac Mathúna himself, Heaney ('The given note'), Ben Kiely (qv), Mac Réamoinn, and others, and such musicians and singers as Glackin, O'Flynn, Denis Murphy, Larry Redican, Rita Connolly and Donal Lunny; Mac Mathúna was bemused by its placement in the Irish charts between Bruce Springsteen and Björk.
Heavily involved with Cumann Merriman from its inception (1967), Mac Mathúna was sometime director of the Merriman summer school in Co. Clare. He served on the cultural relations committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs. A regular contributor in the 1950s to the journal Comhar, he was an occasional contributor to many newspapers, periodicals and journals in Ireland, North America and continental Europe. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the NUI (1990) and UL (1997), and was made a freeman of Limerick (2005). He won two Jacob's broadcasting awards, in 1969 for his work on traditional music collecting, and in 1990 as presenter of Mo cheol thú, and received the Gradam na gCeoltóirí (special contributions award) at the 2007 Gradam Ceoil TG4. A critically acclaimed RTÉ programme that he presented (28 September 1977), featuring classical flautist James Galway and traditional flautist Matt Molloy, won the award for outstanding interpretive musical performance at the Prague International Television Festival (1978). An RTÉ radio programme that he produced, 'The pleasures of Galway', featuring traditional dance music performed by Frankie Gavin, Alec Finn and Johnny McDonagh of the band De Dannan, won top prize among thirty-seven entries from fourteen countries in the annual Radio Bratislava Folk Music Festival, Czechoslovakia (1987).
Mac Mathúna married (8 August 1955) Brigid 'Dolly' Furey, a shop assistant from Manninnard, Craughwell, Co. Galway, whose father, a farmer, was one of the last native Irish speakers in the area. As Dolly MacMahon, she pursued a career as a traditional singer in Irish and English in the 1960s–70s. The couple had two sons and one daughter. At the time of the marriage, Mac Mathúna was residing in Dublin on Cromwell's Fort Road, and latterly lived for many years on Templeogue Road. He died 11 December 2009 in St Gladys nursing home, Harold's Cross, Dublin. The funeral was from Terenure College chapel to Mt Jerome crematorium.
Sources
GRO (subject's birth, mother's death, subject's marriage certs.); Ir. Times, passim, esp.: 9 Dec. 1975; 27 July, 28 Sept. 1977; 26 June 1978; 29 Nov. 1984; 27 Jan. 1986 (profile); 25 Sept. 1987; 1 Feb. 1996 (profile); 7 May (profile), 22 June 2005; 12, 14, 16, 19 (obit.) Dec. 2009; University of Limerick: honorary conferrings, citation (25 Feb. 1997), www.ul.ie; Cultural relations committee, Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland: fifty years (1999), 19; Fintan Vallely (ed.), Companion to Irish traditional music (1999); Richard Pine, Music and broadcasting in Ireland (2005); 'Ciarán Mac Mathúna bids farewell to RTÉ radio after fifty years', RTÉ Press Centre, 13 Nov. 2005; Guardian, 11 Jan. 2010 (online version, www.theguardian.com), 14 Jan. 2010 (print version); Harry White and Barra Boydell (ed.), Encyclopaedia of music in Ireland (2013); website of Irish Traditional Music Archive, www.itma.ie; Gradam Ceoil TG4, www.gradam.ie; online material accessed Apr.–May 2015
PUBLISHING INFORMATION
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.009730.v1
Originally published June 2015 as part of the Dictionary of Irish Biography
Last revised June 2015
