Donal Lunny died on Friday morning in St James’s Hospital aged 79, ending a six-decade presence in Irish folk and traditional music. Friends and collaborators called him a genius and said his contribution to Irish music was immense.
Christy Moore and 66 years
Christy Moore said he had known Lunny for 66 years when he presented him with the lifetime achievement award at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards last year. Moore recalled meeting him first in school in 1959, adding that he remembered his lack of homework and his habit of being out on the Liffey trying to tickle trout or climbing trees to gaze into wild birds’ nests.
That friendship ran alongside a long professional partnership. Lunny first formed a band with his older brother Frank and Moore as teenagers, and the two remained linked through later projects that helped define Irish traditional music for several generations.
Planxty, The Bothy Band, Moving Hearts
In 1970, Lunny formed a musical partnership with Andy Irvine and created The Mug’s Gig at Slattery’s pub in Capel Street, Dublin. Two years later, he and Irvine joined Liam O’Flynn and Christy Moore to form Planxty, before Lunny moved on to The Bothy Band and then Moving Hearts with Moore and Davy Spillane.
That arc maps the core of his career: first as a player, then as a builder of groups, and later as a producer. He was involved in bands that pushed Irish traditional music into bigger audiences, with Moving Hearts combining rock beats with traditional forms and making a significant impact in the early 1980s.
From bouzouki to Mulligan Records
Lunny was most famous for the bouzouki, which he picked up from Andy Irvine and made his own. He said, “The chords were less dense. It was far easier to play chords. The bouzouki gave a much more open accompaniment to Irish music.”
Born in Tullamore, Co Offaly, and brought up in Newbridge, Co Kildare, from the age of five, he learned the harmonica at six, studied at the National College of Art & Design from 1965 for three years, and later became a successful producer on Mulligan Records after Moving Hearts split up in 1985. He produced work for Paul Brady, Elvis Costello, Indigo Girls and Sinéad O’Connor, played with Kate Bush and Mark Knopfler, and served as producer and music director of the five-part 1990 documentary Bringing It All Back Home.
The immediate question now is how much of Lunny’s influence will be felt through the players, recordings and productions he shaped rather than through any single band name. His death leaves Irish music without one of the people who helped build its modern grammar.
