Nora Brown & Stephanie Coleman perform “Pretty Fair Damsel” live at Volume Records in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, for Stól Sessions.
Old songs, travelling well. From the Appalachian tradition to an independent record shop on the Irish coast — two musicians keeping the music alive by making it their own.
Renowned Irish musician Dónal Lunny dies aged 79
Dónal Lunny, one of Ireland’s most celebrated musicians, has died at the age of 79.
Dónal Lunny, one of Ireland’s most celebrated musicians, has died at the age of 79.
Lunny, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, was considered central to the revival and growth of Irish traditional music.
Revered by many in traditional music, he had early musical success with the groundbreaking Planxty in 1971, then The Bothy Band, and subsequently Moving Hearts in the mid 1980s.
A member of Aosdána, it was Lunny’s unique understanding of the importance of tradition mixed with innovation that meant his influence on the flourishing of Irish traditional music was unique.
Over the years, Lunny wrote melodies to be played on all pipes and whistles, and arranged harmonic structures and chord patterns for guitar and harmonium.As his fans mourn his passing, he leaves a treasure trove of fascinating recordings behind him both as a uniquely talented musician and a producer.
Early Years
Born in Tullamore in March 1947, Lunny’s family moved to Kildare when he was five years old, and he was raised and educated in Newbridge.
He enjoyed learning music from childhood, and first met a young Christy Moore in 1959 where they quickly recognised a musical connection between them that would last for decades.
After secondary school, a young Lunny had decided to pursue his artistic studies, so in 1965 he headed to Dublin to study at the National College of Art and Design but within a short time, his blossoming musical career started taking up more and more of his time.
He would go on to form some of the most influential musical groups in the Irish music scene.
Bands
Lunny’s earliest music adventures included the Parnell Folk band, before moving onto the Emmet Folk band, which in turn grew into Emmet Spiceland in 1966, affectionately referred to as Ireland’s ‘first boy band’.
It was the first group to break into the pop charts with Irish music.
During his college years, Lunny met fellow musician Andy Irvine and the pair formed a lifelong friendship and musical connection.
It was when he was visiting Irvine’s flat in the 1970s that Lunny first spotted a bouzouki that Irvine had brought home from his European travels.
Lunny recalled that once he picked it up and strummed it, “something happened to me” and from then he championed its sound and inclusion for a new generation of Irish trad players.
A founding member of ‘Planxty’ along with Liam O’Flynn, Christy Moore and Andy Irvine, the quartet recorded three albums in the period 1971-1973.
Lunny’s influence was key to the sound they created, which redefined traditional Irish music.
He also played bouzouki, guitar, keyboards and bódhrans on all ‘Planxty’ recordings.
Lunny’s family includes his brother, Manus Lunny, also a noted musician and producer.
In 1975, Lunny joined the beloved ‘The Bothy Band’ and again, pushed musical frontiers for traditional music with the group which included Matt Molloy, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, Kevin Burke, Paddy Glackin and Paddy Keenan.
Dónal Lunny would go on to play with these and many, many of the country’s leading musicians for decades to come.
Producer/Composer
In 1973, Lunny set up the label Mulligan Records where he went on to produce 17 albums and the label published music from a wide range of artists including Boomtown Rats, The Radiators, and Agnes Bernell.
Such was his reputation in the studio that Bono has referred to Lunny as Ireland’s answer to the legendary US producer Quincy Jones.
Dónal Lunny also composed for a wide range of projects including TV dramas and documentaries for RTÉ, BBC and Channel 4.
In 1992, he was musical director and producer of the award-winning and musically significant TV series Bringing It All Back Home. The project also cemented his working relationship with producer Philip King. The duo would go on to work on a range of musical projects together.
Lunny branched into films too and wrote scores for several films including ‘This is My Father’, a major international production starring Aidan Quinn and James Caan.
In more recent years, Lunny had become more involved with contemporary music, producing albums for Kate Bush, Paul Brady, Elvis Costello, Mark Knopfler, Rod Stewart and Clannad.
He also produced the internationally acclaimed album for EMI, Common Ground, featuring Kate Bush, Sináad O’Connor, Bono and Elvis Costello.
Lunny said in an interview in The Irish Examiner in 2014 that: “I was dedicated to expanding the reach of traditional music. You want to push the boundaries and broaden the treatment of the music in an acceptable way — one that wouldn’t turn people off, that wasn’t alien to the music. It was a matter of finding approaches that worked”.
In February 2025, Lunny was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the RTÉ Radio 1 Irish Folk Awards in the presence of then-president Michael D Higgins in Dublin’s Vicar Street.
In tributes on the night, U2’s Adam Clayton noted that Lunny’s influence was such that “when you go back to listen to Planxty or The Bothy Band, it’s punk rock with traditional instruments.”
Paddy Glackin previously said that Lunny’s unique influence on the sound of Irish traditional music happened because “Dónal tries to understand where the musician is coming from”
Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill said he “always embraced the rich tradition of Irish music.”
As he presented the award to Lunny, his old pal Christy Moore said that “over 65 years, it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to play music with my neighbour Dónal”.
As the audience gave him a standing ovation, Dónal Lunny stepped forward to collect the award and address the enthusiastic audience, saying “my whole sort of reason for living was playing music” adding that “I’ve had an amazing run of it, so thank you very much.”
Lunny performed live during the Fleadh Ceoil festival in Belfast 2026.
The documentary biographical film, In Time: Dónal Lunny, made by his friend and producer, Nuala O’Connor was broadcast on RTÉ in August.
Lunny is survived by his family including his children Oisin, Cora Venus, and Sora Chan, as well as his loving partner Una O’Boyle.
His son Shane died in 2022 at the age of 17. Shane’s mother – singer Sinéad O’Connor – died in 2023.
“The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order”
Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
Oct 18, 2026
Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.
The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.
A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.
After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.
In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.
Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”
Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”
In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”
Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”
The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”
Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”
Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.
The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.
And yet, here we are.
But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American