As anyone who is Irish or has Irish connections can tell you, today is St Patrick’s Day, which is celebrated wildly by so many. I’m not Irish, but I have always liked a lot of the music that comes from the country, and for a few years I marked the occasion by playing some tunes. I’m cheating a bit today by reworking the third of those, from 2023, which gave you a highlights package of some of my favourites from previous selections. Are you ready…

I’ll start with the one song that I have played each time, as I think it gets us off to a rousing start. It is a meeting made in Heaven between two of my favourites. Van Morrison and The Chieftains got together in 1988 to make an album called Irish Heartbeat, and this is the opening track:

That is a fabulous album, which I bought at the time – in those days I got a lot of my music on cassettes, and I wore out the tape on this one! Highly recommended, if you don’t already know it.

My next one is a standard of Irish music, so much so that I was spoilt for choice on which version to include. It is well known as an Irish folk song but, at the risk of upsetting folk purists, I went for a rock version and am playing that again this time:

Even after all these years I still can’t watch any of Thin Lizzy’s videos without feeling the loss of Phil Lynott, taken from us at just 36. But the music lives on. This was released as a single in November 1972 and became the band’s breakout hit, reaching #6 in the UK and spending a phenomenal 17 weeks at #1 in their native Ireland.

When you think about Irish folk music over the past fifty or sixty years, there are several names that really stand out. You’ve already heard from some of them, and here is another. It just wouldn’t be right to leave these guys out, as they don’t come much more Irish than them. To join up the dots, the opening track on side two of the Irish Heartbeat album was a version of a song which has been sung as an accompaniment to children skipping in playgrounds for well over a century. Here is the Dubliners’ version of it:

That comes from The Dubliners’ album Live At Vicar Street, which was recorded at a concert in July 2006 and reached #53 in Ireland. They had first released it on their debut album, The Dubliners With Luke Kelly, all the way back in 1964. The song is very much a standard of Irish folk music, though it has travelled far around the world: versions with different locations in the lyrics were known in England in the 19th century, for example.

Another favourite Irish band for me is The Pogues. Typically, their version of a traditional Irish song is taken at breakneck speed, and this collaboration with The Dubliners is fantastic:

I thought I’d take a bit of a breather now, before the crescendo of the finale. I first played this one five years ago and love it now as much as I ever have:

This isn’t one of Christy Moore’s own songs – it was written by Jimmy MacCarthy – but it is, simply, a piece of musical magic and beauty.

My final song selection for today was actually written and originally performed by an American, Steve Earle, but the famous accordion player, Sharon Shannon, played on that recording and was instrumental (see what I did there?) in getting together this wonderful celebration of the joy of music, and it couldn’t be more Irish. This is such a great way to close the songs:

I do have one final video for you, though. Again, it is one I have played before. This is a piece that became a phenomenon after it was included as the half time entertainment in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Dublin. Normally I would travel a long way to avoid that show, but this one turned out to be an exception. Our younger daughter was around two and a half, and had been having trouble getting to sleep. We did a deal with her: if she came downstairs to watch the show for a while she would then be a good girl and go back to bed. Yeah, right! But that explains why I was sitting on our sofa, cuddling an impish bundle of mischief, when this came on the tv:

The music of Anuna, the lovely Jean Butler with Michael Flatley, the man who makes Bono look as though he doesn’t have an ego. It was such a huge and welcome surprise when that happened and, as I am sure you know, the show they built around it has propelled them to worldwide fame. That seems to be a good way to close for today, I think.