He began by touring the country with a mobile recording unit, to capture Ireland's folk songs. Now, as he approaches 80, Ciarán Mac Mathúna can look back on 35 years of his treasure of a radio show, writes Arminta Wallace.
It's a normal day at the RTÉ radio studios. A presenter trundles into studio 7, lugging a large black bag and a fistful of CDs. He nods at his producer and shakes hands with his sound operator. "Where's my hairdresser?" he quips. All very ordinary, except that the presenter is almost 80 and has been presenting this programme for 35 years. For many listeners, in fact, CiaráMac Mathúna's Mo Cheol Thú is not so much a radio programme as a treasure, the perfect start to a Sunday.
A CD released to celebrate Mo Cheol Thú's 25th anniversary, in 1995, describe it as an "unashamedly nostalgic and wistful" mix of poetry, instrumental music and song. Mac Mathúna looks out from under a cloud of white hair as he reads the sleeve notes aloud in his trademark unhurried style.
"The mood is generally slow and peaceful . . . some would say soporific." His eyes glint wickedly. "An old friend of mine - Donal Foley, God rest him - used to say: 'That programme of yours is the most marvellous programme on radio. If I wake up at eight on a Sunday morning you can put me back to sleep in three minutes flat.' " He leans back, triumphant. "Well, that's great praise," he says. "We do like to try and keep it quiet. We wouldn't start out with a brass band. You have to ease people in."
Mac Mathúna joined RTÉ as a radio producer in 1955. Having emerged from University College Dublin armed with an MA thesis on the themes of Gaelic folk songs, he soon found himself travelling the country in the company of a mobile recording unit. "What I mostly did was go to festivals - fleadh ceoils - and record local musicians. We did that for something like 30 years," he says.
There were also occasional trips abroad. To the centres of Irish music in the US - New York, Boston and Chicago - to London and Manchester; once, to a music festival in Russia.
"They were great times. A lot of late nights," he says with a wry smile. "Irish song made people look at their own music, not just in Ireland but in other countries. Especially Scotland but also, to a lesser extent, in England and in Germany. The Scandinavians were very interested, too."
In conversation his voice is quiet, fading at times to a whisper. He seems bemused by my questions and is, at first, guarded with his answers. He must, I muse aloud, have come across some amazing musicians. "Well, of course I did," he says. "Some good, some bad. Some of them were very young when I met them first, like Liam O'Flynn and Paddy Glackin, superb musicians by any standards." Once they start coming, the names flow. Fiddle players from Donegal. Singers from Belfast. Eileen Crotty: the first concertina player he ever recorded. Áine Tuohy from Limerick, she of the unearthly voice. Accompanying each name is a story, composed as often as not of equal measures of alcohol and mischief. "Well, anyhow, I was able for that in those days," he says. In those days people moved from one session to another, which, of course, meant from one pub to another. One establishment in Co Clare, the last on the nightly circuit, was referred to by those in the know as the house of the rising sun.
It was the best of times. "The country was buzzing. Do you know the joke about the priest at the crossroads?" Tell me, I say. "Well, the priest happens on a crowd dancing at the crossroads, and he isn't too impressed. 'On the sabbath! You should be ashamed of yourselves,' he says to them. Then he rounds on one of the dancers. 'Do you know the Fourth Commandment?' he demands. 'No, father,' says the young fella. 'But if you can whistle it we might be able to give it a go' "
It was also, though, the worst of times. Mac Mathúna is no rose-tinted sentimentalist. "Folk music, traditional music, whatever you like to call it, has become very popular now, of course. But at one time it wasn't. At one time it tended to be associated with older people. I can remember when people going to a session at a house in the country at night with a fiddle would hide it under their coat, you know. They were kind of half-ashamed or afraid of being laughed at. But now it has changed." Without missing a beat he switches to his poetry-reciting voice. "A terrible beauty is born," he intones. We laugh. "There are a lot of people playing traditional music who really ought to be listening," he says. "I won't name names. I don't play anything, which is an advantage. I can't play, but I know what's good and what's not good. That's all I need."
At the studio control desk, rows of tiny red lights glow softly. The equipment is like something from the bridge of the starship Enterprise. On the other side of the glass, Mac Mathúna holds up a pair of headphones with undisguised disdain. "Do I have to wear these?" Heads shake. Only if he wants to. "Good," comes the muttered reply. "I hate them."
He clears his throat and adjusts his glasses. "After the poem we'll go straight into the CD," he tells the sound operator, who responds with a thumbs-up. As the familiar theme music - a swooping, sighingly romantic version of The Lark in the Clear Air, played by the violinist Geraldine O'Grady - fades away, the technician holds up the index finger of his left hand. He pauses for a beat or two. Then he flicks his wrist. Mac Mathúna begins to speak, quietly and as casually as if he had resumed an interrupted conversation with a friend in a supermarket queue. There is no script. No notes. It's all in his head.
"Ciarán did the first live programme I ever produced, in 1977," says the producer of Mo Cheol Thú, Peter Browne, who is also RTÉ's commissioning editor of radio music programmes. "It was from the RDS, and the programme was due to go on air at 4.30. He arrived at 4.15, as cool as a cucumber. I was up to ninety."
About three tracks into the recording session Mac Mathúna emerges from the studio and announces that he has to run upstairs for a CD. Browne offers to go. "No, you wouldn't be able to find it," comes the reply. Browne grins. "His filing system is labyrinthine. Now that most of the music is on CD, it's easier. When it was boxes of tape . . ." He shrugs helplessly.
"There were rows and rows and rows of boxes, but he knew exactly where everything was. This music we're listening to now, by John Gordon, the fiddle player from Fermanagh: on the outside of the box it might just say 'Fermanagh', but Ciarán would know exactly which box John Gordon would be in. And he always spoke the name of every player on every tape he recorded, which was invaluable. You wouldn't believe how many labels have come off tape boxes over the years."
The fiddle tune sounds as fresh as it must have done when Mac Mathúna recorded it, in 1956. When Gordon died, in 2002, the pianist Charlie Lennon asked RTÉ for permission to include the recording, among others, on a memorial CD. This is the one Mac Mathúna is using today. And so the world turns.
This is something of a red-letter year for Mac Mathúna. For one thing he will be 80 in November. For another - and, he insists, much more importantly - this month he will celebrate 50 years of marriage to Dolly, a fine traditional singer from the Craughwell area of Galway. "There's to be a party," he confides. "Of course, I know nothing about it." He is also, he says with a dismissive tut that is half self-deprecation, half pride, to be made a freeman of Limerick, his native city. He already holds two honorary doctorates, one from the University of Limerick, one from UCD.
Does he go back to Limerick much? "Very, very seldom," he says. "I still have brothers there. There were six of us in the family: five boys and a girl. My father was very interested in Irish singing. He used to teach Irish at national school, but he was also very interested in Conradh na Gaeilge, in music and dancing, and I think I was influenced by that. My mother diedwhen my eldest brother was 10 or 11; my father didn't marry again. He brought a woman in from the country, who was a saint. We were all so young. I never saw my mother."
His sister Breda became a nun. "There were nuns all over the place in our family. I had two aunts who were nuns in Scotland, and my sister was sent over there to boarding school. Well, she couldn't be living in the house with five boys. She died a few years ago. And I had one brother who was wild but very likeable. He went off and joined the Canadian air force in London. He was mad about aeroplanes. He was killed in a crash. Not in combat, now . . ."
In the studio the recording proceeds smoothly, comfortably. There are no retakes, no awkward joins. Browne and Mac Mathúna have been working together for so long that they seem able to communicate by osmosis. "He's a piper, you know," Mac Mathúna says, with a knowing nod at Browne. This is not a non sequitur but the cue for a sequence of piper jokes that they bat effortlessly back and forth. "Asked to define a gentleman," declares Mac Mathúna, "the English writer GK Chesterton said: 'A gentleman is someone who can play the pipes but doesn't.' "
Browne counters with a quote from Finbarr Furey. "You know what he used to say about Scottish pipers? The reason they walk up and down is that it's harder to hit a moving target . . ."
"Okay, that's 32 minutes," says the studio operator. "Already?" For the first time, Mac Mathúna looks surprised. He will finish recording Mo Cheol Thú later in the week. "It has to be recorded, for technical reasons," he says as we make our way upstairs, to his desk on the ground floor of the radio building. "People often say to me: 'We listen to you on a Sunday morning. Aren't you great to be up at eight o'clock?' I hate to say anything. Let them find out some other way."
He sits down, fiddles with the pile of compact discs and sighs. "Ah, I've been here too long," he says. "But still, nobody told me to stop. My hearing isn't the best. I was telling a friend recently. An elderly man. Do you know what he said to me? Minus the colourful language, of course. 'Ciarán,' he said, 'you've heard enough nonsense over the past 50 years. You don't need to hear any more.' " But, I reflect as I listen to the broadcast version of the programme, which slips down as easily as a bowl of ice cream, we do. Oh, do we ever.
Mo Cheol Thú is on RTÉ Radio 1 at 8.10am each Sunday morning