The Cork band plays on - for 20th anniversary

TWENTY years ago, set dancing legend, the late Timmy ‘The Brit’ McCarthy, while teaching Cork and Kerry polka sets in Bavaria, instigated the formation of a band.

Now a Cork musician is following in Timmy’s footsteps as he heads to Germany on the group’s 20th anniversary tour.

Na Ciotógí, so called because its original members were left-handed, came into being due to Timmy’s grá for Irish music and the set dancing tradition of the Cork-Kerry border.

Born in London to Irish parents, whose deaths by the time he was nine saw Timmy raised by nuns, he fulfilled his parents’ own wish to return to Cork.

Timmy, whose English accent earned him his nickname ‘The Brit’, championed the set dancing he first discovered in Dan O’Connell’s pub in Knocknagree, becoming instrumental in the founding of Cork Folk Festival.

A butcher by trade, Timmy brought Irish set dances, many of which he had helped revive, to new participants by teaching workshops at festivals in Europe and America.

When one of the festivals, in Landshut, Bavaria, needed support to allow the set dancing to continue, Timmy stepped up to help organise concerts and the band Na Ciotógí was formed in 2002.

Though Timmy, who lived in later years with his partner Rhona in Baile Mhúirne, sadly passed away in 2018, the band, including his son Tony McCarthy, plays on.

Uilleann piper Dan O’Callaghan, long-time musical fellow traveller of Timmy’s, set off recently from his home in Cill na Martra, near Macroom, heading for Germany to join fellow members of Na Ciotógí for a tour marking the group’s two decades on the road.

His van packed with sound and lighting gear, his first destination was Brittany, to meet up with fiddle player Paddy O’Neill and Timmy’s multi-instrumentalist son Tony, both living in France, before joining up with founder member Dave McMahon and son Seán near Munich. It’s a route Dan has taken many times since taking over the piper’s role previously occupied by fellow Corkman Eoin Ó Riabhaigh. “I collect Tony, we take over the sound equipment and lighting, fill up the van and off we go,” Dan said as he prepared for the band’s November tour.

“Germany is back up and going again and the venues would hold anything from 100 to 1,000,” he said of the theatres, beer festivals, and concerts in Bavaria, where the band performs both Irish and German traditional music and songs and collaborates with Bavarian musicians.

It was Timmy, who developed a great affinity with the music of both Bavaria and Brittany, who invited Dan to first perform abroad.

“My first paid gig was 1989 or 1990 when I went out to Brittany with Timmy the Brit,” he said.

“We became great buddies. Timmy was out teaching set dancing and he wanted musicians and dancers, and I was doubling up as both, dancing with my sister Martina.” Dan, who initially learnt the accordion from Anne McAuliffe in Cill na Martra before taking up the uilleann pipes aged 16 at Cork Pipers’ Club, said “never in a million years” did he envisage making a career as a touring musician.

“The original plan was to stay farming on a small farm and make loads of money - but as everyone knows, that’s not going to work,” he said.

“I was milking cows and I used to be going to Killarney every night in the early 2000s to play in ‘To Dance on the Moon’, a dance show in the Gleneagle - Eric Cunningham and Micheál Carr were the producers,” he said.

“I did that up to about 2009, along with Matt Bashford and other pipers. There’s always work for pipers because they’re just not there,” he added. “They’re a difficult instrument to play and keep in tune, and they’re awful expensive.”

Pipers were also in demand in America, where Dan’s musical journey led him next.

“I was playing music in West Point Military Academy in upstate New York, one of the top academies,” he said. “It’s a huge university and it has the second-biggest theatre auditorium on the east coast of America, a 5,000-6,000-seater auditorium. I played there with [the show] The Women of Ireland.

Connections made in New York then took Dan on the road in a completely different direction.

“They roped me into driving and guiding a bus for them in Ireland for R&R [rest and relaxation],” he said. “When the West Point officers come over to Ireland, I drive them for approximately eight weeks of the year.

“I had the top guy on the bus one time, General Marty Dempsey.” The former chief of staff of the US Army and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dempsey “served under Bush and Obama and he was the man with access to the ‘big red button’ - thank god he was sane, and a nice guy,” said Dan.

German tours aside, Dan describes himself as “kind of semi-retired at the moment”.

“I’m retired from America because basically I’m too old,” he said. “It was hard going. I was nine months of the year on the road. I’d be in America for three months at least and back here in the summer and working in shows, To Dance on the Moon and Spirit of Ireland.

“The biggest downside is probably sleeping on the floor of an airport. It’s great when you’re young but as you get older on the road, it seems to take a lot longer to get from A to B.”

The road to Bavaria, however, is one he relishes for the reunion of old friends and renewal of musical collaborations across Europe.

Like many of his travels with the uilleann pipes, “it’s all through Timmy,” he said. “He was the connection for the whole lot.”