The Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) is committed to providing free, universal access to the rich cultural tradition of Irish music, song and dance. If you’re able, we’d love for you to consider a donation. Any level of support will help us preserve and grow this tradition for future generations.
Cathal McConnell, renowned musician and singer donated 700+ cassette tapes to ITMA in 2023, a vast collection that spans more than four decades from the late 1960s to the early 2010s. It contains a wealth of significant private recordings that capture prominent figures in traditional music from the north of Ireland and further afield. His late sister Maura’s collection was donated to ITMA in 2002 and contains over 400+ non-commercial audio tapes, photographs, printed materials and features recordings from the 1960s–1980s.
The non-commercial audio material in these collections was recorded both in Ireland and abroad in a range of settings including field recordings in houses, informal sessions, concerts, outtake studio recordings, music classes and workshops. Cathal cast his musical net far and wide and listeners can enjoy an informal gathering in a kitchen in rural Fermanagh before being transported to stages from New York to Melbourne. This reflects Cathal’s life as a performing musician who maintained a steadfast link to his native tradition.
In 2024, ITMA published five playlists that explore the treasure of traditional music and song contained in these collections. Cathal features prominently in the collection and the playlists include his solo and duet playing and singing.
In 2023, ITMA undertook a large-scale digitisation project, which is the first stage of a larger plan to develop ITMA’s digitisation and archiving capabilities. The project was generously funded by the the Government of Ireland’s Shared Island Fund, and processed through the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The 250k investment supported, among other items, a new digitisation studio specifically designed to grow ITMA’s digitisation capacity. The digitisation studio brings together specialised playback equipment with a state-of-the-art analogue to digital converter, facilitating a large-scale in-house digitisation program and giving ITMA one of the best audio digitisation facilities in the country. This digitisation studio has allowed ITMA to digitise the McConnell collections and many others in line with archival best practice, while adhering to professional and technical standards.
