Irish Music Selections

Why It Still Matters There’s a simple power to a song that can be a love song and a map of loss at the same time. Róisín Dubh, with its image of 'my Róisín Dubh' and lines like 'Oh! my sweet little rose', sits in that curious place between private longing and public voice. People still sing it because it carries both personal ache and a sharper, political edge — so the tune never feels trapped behind glass. In modern Ireland and among the diaspora the piece functions like a mirror. A young player in Galway will bring a different ornamentation to a sean-nós line than a band in New York, but both pick up the same mood: yearning, defiance and tenderness. Those moods travel well. Emigration and return, memory and reimagining — listeners find in the song a vocabulary for homesickness or pride, sometimes in the same breath. Adaptability is a big part of its staying power. The melody’s clarity leaves room: a harpist can make it sparse and intimate; a fiddler can thicken...

There’s a particular hush that falls over a pub when someone starts 'Still Here'. It isn’t the kind of silence that comes from shock, but the kind that gathers — a pocket of attention focusing on a voice and a handful of chords. You can hear it in the catch of the throat as the singer reaches the line 'I won’t leave, no, I won’t leave' and the room breathes with them. On a Tuesday night session or a Friday kitchen ceilidh, the song sits low and honest. It doesn’t try to dazzle. A spare guitar or piano, maybe a fiddle that weeps on the edges, gives it space. That space lets the words land: the headlines, the queues, the stubborn love for this place. People lean in. Someone wipes a glass. A child at the bar hums the chorus without knowing the politics, just the promise. For the singer, 'Still Here' lives under the palate. It needs an anchored delivery — not too pretty, not shouty. There’s a weight to those verses that asks for steadiness. When you deliver 'I...

It’s striking how a single song can wear so many faces. Belfast Land So Bold has been picked up by solo singers, community choirs and folk bands, and each rendition seems to reveal a different city. A pared-back singer-songwriter version will linger on the line “Oh, Belfast, land so bold,” turning it into a quiet, personal address. That intimacy makes you hear the memory and homesickness in the words. Different Voices, Different Belfast In pub settings it becomes communal. When a chorus of voices pushes the melody along, the same refrain reads like a pledge — the Lagan flows, the harbors shine — and the rough edges of history become something people share rather than simply observe. Choir and choral treatments, meanwhile, add a sense of sweep: harmonies lift the image of shipyards and cranes into something almost cinematic, emphasising scale and collective endurance. Then there are arranged, band-led takes. Folk-rock groups often bring drums and guitar, sometimes accordion and ...