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Sleeve Notes
"Do you realise we're only 14 miles apart?" said Paddy Moloney, chief of the Chieftains, on the phone from London to Dublin to tell me about their new Irish-Scottish album with James Galway. He wasn't talking about himself and myself, nor yet about the Chieftains and James Galway … Who knew where Jimmy was just then? Probably delighting audiences in Tokyo or Leningrad or Vancouver … or his native Belfast.
Paddy was in fact referring to the 14 miles of sea that divide (or link) Ireland and Scotland, across the narrow North Channel between Fair Head in Antrim and the Mull of Kintyre. He was reminding me that the peoples of Ireland and Scotland are close neighbours. Indeed, they can claim to be cousins, with much in common. But the things they've shared for centuries have acquired a distinctive flavour in each country.
Whisk)e)y is, I suppose, the best-known example. Irish and Scotch certainly taste different, and each has its own partisans. They can't even agree on how to spell the word in English; but they both know they share the Water of Life (uisge beatha in the Gaelic language they also share). Mind you, the Gaels of Skye and the Gaels of Connemara may have a little dialect difficulty when they first meet. But a dram or two of the water of life soon solves that.
Music is another bond between us, a bond of great strength and sweetness. Again, the songs of love and of battle, the laments and the lullabies, may differ in mode or cadence; but these too, like our great store of music for dancing — reels and strathspeys and hornpipes and the rest — are clearly rooted in a common tradition.
The present album is mainly an Irish musical treasury. It ranges from a work by the great 18th-century harper-composer Carolan to a sad and simple ballad of the post-famine Irish in exile, Skibereen, and from the heroic Cath Chéim an Fhia, which chronicles one brief encounter in a people's struggle against petty tyranny, to Moore's Last Rose of Summer, that exquisite essay in 19th-century melancholy which Friedrich von Flotow borrowed for his opera Martha."
But the treasures also include some jewels from Scotland: The Dark Island, Over the Sea to Skye, Bonny Prince Charlie. The Prince who was born to be king," but never was, remains a hero in both our traditions.
One of the great Jacobite airs, The White Cockade, is played and sung with fervour even today by Irish and Scots alike … and though the air isn't listed here, the keen ear will detect it in the unlikely company of Lilibulero, a tune not usually favoured by Jacobites. In a brilliantly mischievous collage, Paddy Moloney has achieved an unlikely marriage of Orange and Green!
Anyone who knows and loves the traditions of Ireland and Scotland will especially enjoy this album — as will all who share the Celtic heritage: Welsh and Bretons, Manx, Cornish and Galicians, peoples of Europe's Atlantic fringe, at home or in their worldwide diaspora. And the same goes for all who aren't Celts but would like to be.
— Seán MacRéamoinn
Seán MacRéamoinn is a longtime broadcaster and commentator on Irish affairs.