Newmarket was well represented on Sunday evening s TV schedule last weekend.
After the 6pm news, many of you may have tuned into John Creedon s excellent show, Atlas of Ireland, to see our own Timmy O Connor and Eoin Stan O Sullivan appear on our screens.
The show, in its second series, takes a tour around Ireland exploring towns and places and looking into the meaning of their names. Sliabh Luachra was under analysis in the most recent episode, and Eoin took on the task of explaining the boundaries of an area that is more cultural than geographical.
Timmy played a few tunes and spoke to John about the local music and how he came to it. Some of the area s finest musicians spoke about their passion for the Sliabh Luachra music style, including Scartaglin s Emma O Leary, accordian player Bryan O Leary, Maura O Connor and our own Stan. If you missed out on the show, you can catch it on the RTÉ Player.
Eoin Stan O Sullivan launched the second of his Sliabh Luachra Music Series during the week.
The local musician and Sliabh Luachra musician-in-residence has not stood still during the lockdown producing lots of high quality online content featuring the best of our local flavour of music. The biggest part of me doing the Musician in Residence for Sliabh Luachra job was meeting people, schoolchildren, musicians, festival organisers, all the Sliabh Luachra clans and factions in the hills here and out around the wide world, he said. I can t do that at the moment so I thought I d try to create videos and new recordings to entertain you who are missing the sessions and festivals and hopefully inspire some new fanatics. The Sliabh Luachra Music Series is some of his finest work to date. The latest episode includes music from Aine & Francis O Connor, Niamh Ní Charra, Tim Browne, Bryan O leary and great young musicians. Many of the performances were filmed in the Cultúrl
Traditional musicians are beginning to discuss what the post-COVID world will sound like once pandemic restrictions are lifted and life begins to return to normality.
But, according to Eoin Stan O Sullivan, the Newmarket-based Musician In Residence for Sliabh Luachra, musicians are considering whether they will be playing more gigs in community halls and other large venue settings rather than pubs when restrictions begin to be relaxed. There are questions whether many pubs will survive the pandemic and whether people will be willing to go back to pubs to hear live music, he said. During last summer, we were planning to organise a series of music events in some of the new digital hubs around Sliabh Luachra and stream them online - but we had to rethink that.