It was poignant to see Dónal Lunny sitting, alone, in UCD’s otherwise empty Theatre L lecture hall during a scene in Nuala O’Connor’s entrancing In Time, the 2025 documentary film tracing Lunny’s artistic journey, the filming of which was interrupted by his illness. In 1972, Theatre L was packed to capacity as Lunny and fellow members of the recently formed folk group Planxty enthralled the students. Lunny was the linchpin; as Christy Moore recalls in the film, “every harmony I sang on Planxty was taught to me by Dónal”.

As a player, composer, facilitator, arranger and teacher, Lunny, who died last week, was a master of inventiveness and redeploying tradition. Even before the end of the 1970s, journalist Joe Breen noted in a profile of Lunny, still barely aged 30, that “he has played with more people than this piece could accommodate”. Breen described him as a man of “many faces ... for he is at home with rock as quickly as with a traditional piece”; a product of a time when “the different musical camps found that they had more in common than they believed”.

It was Lunny’s mission to make them confident believers, and the attention to every detail involved intense work. There was nothing cavalier about the experimentation, or any attempt to obscure the source: “I was dedicated to expanding the reach of traditional music,”........

© The Irish Times