Brendan Mulkere obituary
My friend and colleague Brendan Mulkere, London-Irish musician, festival-maker, educator, Anglo-Irish connector and red-hot fiddler, has died at the age of 73.
Brendan was a fiddler who organised – an unusual talent. You could hear him in the Thatch Céilí Band, at lock-ins all over London if you knew where to look; at the Kilburn Irish Centre if you could stay up late enough; and even on Trafalgar Square hurtling Irish music at one and all with a gang of pupils, disciples and joiners-in on St Patrick’s Day.
The Kilburn Irish Centre (Áras na nGael) in north-west London, where Brendan’s organisations were based, was the place to hear Irish traditional music in its purest form. There, circles of Connemara men held hands and sang Sean-nós, and a standing army of Irish and London-Irish musicians seldom went home. Brendan organised it all, as well as teaching amazingly large classes. His class would be a meditation on a tune and included conversations on history, locality, speech rhythms and anything else that occurred to Brendan – and many things usually did.
Born in Crusheen, County Clare, Brendan learned music from his father, Jack, a fiddler and farmer, and his mother, Angela (nee Fogarty), a singer. He attended Moyrhee national school, Ruan, going on to study for the priesthood at All Hallows seminary, Dublin. Following degrees in arts at University College Dublin and in psychology at University College London he moved to London in the early 1970s, teaching in primary and secondary schools before going into full-time music in 1979.
In 1983, Brendan founded the London-Irish Commission for Culture and Education, which ran Síol Phadraig, the month-long London-Irish arts festival, from 1985 to 1993. He became one of the great bearers and teachers of Irish traditional music.
Brendan’s festivals were ambitious, including high-profile plays such as Gabriel Gbadamosi’s No Blacks, No Irish, Ray Brennan’s Sidewind, on the families of the Birmingham Six, Brendan Kennelly’s Cromwell and Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. His education projects linked London and Irish schools, and piloted classroom materials that encouraged mutual understanding between the two cultures.
He returned to County Clare in 2015 to play more music, teach more children and inspire another generation. He taught at Limerick University, and was awarded the Gradam Comaoine (outstanding contribution) award by TG4, the Irish-language TV station, in 2019.
Brendan is survived by his partner, Sharon Coffey, her daughters, Claire, Collette and Sinéad Egan, his brothers, Des and Enda, and his sisters, Hilda, Florence and Frances.
