Donal Lunny press release

national | miscellaneous | press release Monday September 18, 2006 22:35 by IPSC - Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign supportpalestine at ireland dot com

Donal Lunny and friends present an evening of traditional music at the Olympia Theatre on Monday 25th September under the heading "Remember Palestine".

Venue: The Olympia, Mon 25 September. Doors open 7.30pm. Tickets Euro 25 from Ticketmaster (phone 0818 719 300) or the Olympia Box Office (phone 0818 719 330). Proceeds to IPSC.

The first traditional musician to be elected to the government-sponsored artists' academy Aosdána, Donal Lunny has been associated with such groups as Planxty, Moving Hearts, the Bothy Band, Coolfin and Mozaik, thus earning the description "the man with the longest CV in Irish music".

Andy Irvine is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, traditional musician and advocate for social justice who has been making music with Donal Lunny for almost 40 years.

Roisín Elsafty is a singer from Connemara. Her father is Egyptian, and her mother is the singer and songwriter Treasa Ní Cheannabháin. She has worked with Donal Lunny and Sharon Shannon.

Graham Henderson has been described as a "keyboard wizard on piano, keyboards, accordion & Hammond Organ". He worked with Lunny and Irvine in the group Coolfinn.

Cork-born Sean Nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird has been described as Ireland's "hippest traditional music figure - ever!" He is a regular member of the Afro Celt Sound System.

The evening will also feature a number of other performers, up-and-coming and established.

"For as long as the Irish have been making songs they have been making political songs." While this sentence from the programme of a 1980 Planxty concert in the same Olympia Theatre might seem particularly relevant to this "Remember Palestine" gig, the emphasis will be on music, not on
politics.

Nonetheless, in a media landscape in which the daily humiliations and atrocities visited upon the Palestinian people by the illegal Israeli occupation are consistently pushed out of sight, the very act of
"remembering Palestine" cannot but be political. According to Donal Lunny: "The more that the people of Europe are made aware of the crisis, the sooner the men, women and children of Palestine can return to having a normal life which, just like the rest of us, they deserve."

If the present spurious "War against Terror" implies the modish notion of a "clash of civilisations", music by its nature demonstrates how civilisations can flow together to generate meaning and beauty, particularly when made by such musicians as Lunny, Irvine, Elsafty, and Ó Lionáird.

Donal Lunny says "it's possible that music is the only and sometimes best way to influence certain aspects of the world. Music can change the way people feel about themselves, and how they feel towards others. When music is crossing borders and leaping language barriers, the message is often abstracted, but I believe it's never quite lost."