I WATCHED Christy Moore play a bodhran to a packed Point and there wasn't a sound from the audience," says Malachy Kearns. "Just a man and a bodhran on stage. I knew then what he meant by its power. I also understood what traditional musicians were talking about when they described the bodhran as the pulse of Irish music."

Malachy doesn't say that Christy's bodhran had been made by his own company, Roundstone Musical Instruments (RMI). Nor is he in a hurry to mention that it is his bodhrans that give Riverdance its distinctive percussive sound. "The bodhran is a humble product and if I stay as humble I'll be all right."

A bulky man with a lived in face and a philosophical outlook on life, he operates in a low key way a plausible mixture of traditional dreamer and commercial visionary.

Raised in Dublin and spending his school holidays with relations in Sligo, he was equally at home with and fascinated by the quiet strength of the country people and the immediacy and tension of city business. One of his teachers at CBS Monkstown told him. "There is a high road and a low road and a lot of haze in between." For some years Malachy Kearns says he lived in that haze.

After taking a B.Com in UCD he worked with the now defunct Clondalkin Paper Mills and afterwards as purchasing manager with an engineering consultancy firm. After leaving that job he tried to eke a living by selling harps for a friend and he realised a market niche existed for bodhrans.

With his wife Anne and daughter Roma, Malachy moved to Roundstone village in Co Galway to a workshop and house, in the shadow of a bell tower, sited in the grounds of a 16th century Franciscan monastery, where in the summer seals and dolphins congregate at the outer walls.

"I was at the end of my mental and financial tether," he says. "My only plus factors were Anne and Roma. Gradually I seemed to draw strength from my surroundings. I stopped drinking and was able to get the business off the ground." When he became known within the community as "Malachy Bodhran" he knew he had truly come home. "Here once you're nicknamed, you're in."

This year RMI celebrates its 20th birthday. The company now includes a mail order service, an instrument museum, a craft shop, a coffee shop, Malachy's Leaf, and a sales outlet in Clifden. A second Malachy's Leaf opens in Round stone this month. It has also expanded into the manufacture of wooden flutes, tin whistles and Irish harps. Anne, an artist and also an expert on heraldry, is an integral part of the operation, decorating bodhrans with family crests, designs from the Book of Kells or other Celtic sources.

RMI currently employs 12 full time and during the summer six par timers. Each year it makes an estimated 10,000 bodhrans, in large, small and miniature sizes, 70 per cent of which are exported to the US. Canada, the UK, France and Germany. Also catered for is the growing band of musicians who want tuneable bodhrans. On this Malachy has worked in close co-operation with Donal Lunney, whom he describes as being "the engine room" of traditional music, "always redirecting, but never destroying"

Internationally the bodhran business is on an upward curve, much of its bullish market due to the international popularity of Irish culture, such as Riverdance. The Kearns believe. "We've to be equally at home in the music, the gift and the souvenir markets." They attend a variety of major world trade shows including the Los Angeles based The Greatest Show on Planet Earth, generally regarded as a showpiece for world music at its most powerful where they are the only Irish exhibitors.

"I used to slip into worry," explains Malachy, "but now I lean on the more positive aspects of life." His favourite slogan, which hangs in a predominant position in his office, reads. "Today is the tomorrow I worried about yesterday". He gave up smoking last year and in June treated himself to a brand new black Volvo.

While the business has become computerised and employs graphic artists and calligraphers, the manufacturing process is still grassroots and that's the way Malachy likes it. "The making of bodhrans brings you very close to nature and when played it is very freeing on the soul," he says. "The whole involvement is a spiritual experience."

The first Thursday in each month is skin day, when up to 40 people supply RMI with goat skin. The skins, treated in hydrated lime mixed with secret ingredients, are soaked for seven to 10 days in a solution of lime sulphide which softens, dehairs and dissolves fatty tissue. The skin is stretched before being glued on to the steamed beech hoop and then tacked on to prevent ripping. "Goatskins are unique for their stretching properties, hold their tension for a life time and have a deep haunting tone," says Malachy.

The beech for the frames is bought from local timber yards and is steamed, bended and glued. The workshop houses in the region of £70,000 worth of equipment including moulds for steaming the beech which Malachy designed and manufactured himself.