ITMA Board Member Dermot Diamond pays tribute to fiddle player Andy Dickson who died in April 2020

ITMA have added a selection of traditional Irish tunes as a further layer on the Heritage Maps website (www.heritagemaps.ie) from the Heritage Council.   

Earlier this year Ben Lennon, the renowned fiddle player from Co. Leitrim, passed away at the age of 91. This blog by Alan Woods looks back over the life and music of a much loved member of the Irish traditional music community.

As part of our contribution to the virtual Willie Clancy Summer School for 2020 we asked 4 photographers to give us their favourite photo from the festival.

Photographer Peter Laban has taken photographs at the Willie Clancy Summer School from many years.  He has kindly donated a substantial collection of these images to ITMA.  This is a selection that he choose from the early days of the festival, with some of his own thoughts and memories included.

In October 2019, Catriona Gribben from Gaoth Dobhair, Co. Donegal, joined ITMA as an Intern from Queen's University Belfast. Her ambition to learn more about field recording and archiving in ITMA took a much more local twist than she first anticipated.

On Thursday, 20 June 2018 at 7pm, poet Mary O’Malley and uilleann piper Tommy Keane are taking the stage in Poetry Ireland to explore the oblique angles and intersections between words, sounds, and people. Discover what's in store through examples of Mary and Tommy's poetry and music.

COVID-19 has accelerated our relationship with the digital world with unimaginable speed. Online sessions and performances are becoming a daily feature of our lives. But a landmark digital project launched way back in 2013 by ITMA and the Inishowen Traditional Singers' Circle has had and continues to have a profound influence on many singers, none other than Berlin-based singer Andreas Schulz. 

The uilleann piper Patsy Touhey was the most celebrated Irish traditional musician of his day. Born in Ireland in 1865, he flourished in the USA as a professional entertainer and became a prime mover of the Gaelic music revival in the States. Today his music is a byword for unsurpassed virtuosity.