Keeping the Well Full: Dónal Lunny, the Irish Traditional Music Archive, and Why I'm Giving My Proceeds Away

When Dónal Lunny died on October 23, I did what a lot of musicians do with grief. I picked up an instrument. I'd written a tune as an instrumental in 2025, and that night I set words to it and had my friends sing it. It's a rough job, but it became "The Man Who Rewired the Tune," and I wanted it out in the world right away. Then came the harder question. What do I do with the money?

It isn't a fortune. A download on Bandcamp is $1.50. But it didn't feel right to keep money made from a tribute to a man who gave so much away. So I looked for a place that carries on the work he cared about, and I landed on the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, known as ITMA. From today, 100% of my proceeds from the song go to ITMA. If his family names a charity of their own, I'll happily follow their lead, and I'll tell you here when I do.

Here's why I chose ITMA, and why I think every musician and every fan of this music should know about it.

What ITMA is

ITMA was founded in 1987. It grew out of a proposal to the Arts Council by Harry Bradshaw and Nicholas Carolan, who had turned up a wealth of historic recordings while making the RTÉ radio series "The Irish Phonograph." Those old sounds needed a home. After stints on Eustace Street and at 63 Merrion Square, the Archive opened its permanent home at 73 Merrion Square in Dublin on November 15, 2006.

Today it holds the largest collection of Irish traditional music, song and dance in the world. Sound recordings, manuscripts, photographs, film, printed music and more. Its staff do the slow, careful work of digitizing, preserving and cataloguing all of it, and then they do the part I love most. They give it away. Free, universal access is the core of their mission. A fiddler in County Clare and a fiddler in Granby, Massachusetts can both hear the same old field recording.

And every one of their staff is a player, singer or dancer. These aren't outsiders filing away a curiosity. They're people who live inside the tradition, looking after it for the rest of us.

Dónal Lunny's connection to ITMA

ITMA's tribute to him is one of the most personal I've read. They called him "one of the most creative and influential figures in Irish traditional music," and said something that stopped me. Dónal's legacy, they wrote, "is also visible throughout ITMA's own catalogue." The records he produced, arranged and played on "form an extraordinary thread through the recorded history of Irish traditional and folk music."

Think about that. Planxty, the Bothy Band, Moving Hearts, Coolfin, the albums he produced for so many others. That's a huge share of the sound of modern Irish music, and ITMA is where it's kept safe.

He wasn't only a name in their catalogue, either. ITMA called him "a great friend" to the Archive and to many of its board and staff. Very recently, he was at 73 Merrion Square rehearsing with fiddler Zoë Conway. In 2023 he took part in ITMA's "Drawing from the Well" concert at the National Concert Hall for the late fiddler Tommy Peoples, playing alongside Tommy's daughter Siobhán and his old Bothy Band mates Matt Molloy, Paddy Glackin, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and Paddy Keenan.

There's a lovely story in ITMA's current Christy Moore exhibition, too. As a teenager, Christy found "The Curragh of Kildare" in P. W. Joyce's old collection of Irish folk music and songs and brought it to his friend Dónal. Two boys from Newbridge took a song collected generations before and gave it new life. That's exactly what an archive is for. Somebody wrote that song down long ago, somebody kept the book, and two kids picked it up and changed Irish music with it.

Even the recent film about his life, "In Time – Dónal Lunny," came from ITMA's circle. It was directed and produced by Nuala O'Connor, a former ITMA board member, and Iarfhlaith Ó Domhnaill, the Archive's treasurer.

Why musicians should support it

I studied musicology and ethnomusicology at Hampshire College, and later earned my master's at New England Conservatory. If those years taught me one thing, it's that traditions don't survive by accident. They survive because someone sat in a kitchen with a tape recorder, or wrote a tune down on the back of an envelope, and someone else kept it safe.

Every tune I play came from somewhere. Every session standard was once one player's tune in one parish. When we learn from old recordings, we're drawing from a well that someone else had to dig and keep full. ITMA keeps that well full, and it keeps the bucket free for anyone who wants a drink.

There's a practical side too. ITMA says every year it receives a vast number of important private collections, and that without new funding many of them won't be available beyond its building in Dublin for years. That's music sitting in boxes, waiting. Donations are what get it digitized and out into the world.

And there's a living side. ITMA records musicians itself, more than 1,300 singers, players and dancers since 1993, and connects today's artists with the old material to make new work. Dónal Lunny spent his whole life doing exactly that. He took the old music, respected it, and found new harmony underneath it.

Why fans should support it

You don't have to play a note to love this music, and you don't have to play a note to help keep it. If you've ever been moved by a Planxty record, a slow air at a funeral, or a session that went on far too late, you've already benefited from people who kept this music alive. Supporting ITMA is a way of saying thank you, and making sure your grandchildren can hear what you heard.

How you can help

The easiest way, and I hope you'll forgive the plug, is to download "The Man Who Rewired the Tune" for $1.50. Every cent of my share goes to ITMA.

Download it here: https://adamrsweet.bio.link

Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6p1tDivry0Y

You can also give to ITMA directly. If you're in the United States, the Irish American Partnership in Boston takes tax-deductible gifts for ITMA and sends 100% to the Archive: https://irishap.org/itma/

Or donate straight to ITMA in euros: https://www.itma.ie/donate

I saw Dónal play with Coolfin at the Iron Horse in Northampton years ago, and I never forgot it. I can't thank him in person now. But I can help keep the well full that he drew from all his life, and that so many of us will keep drawing from long after.

Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann. We won't see his like again.

Adam Sweet