Launch address
Fintan Vallely, Beating Time – The Story of the Irish Bodhrán
Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, Galway, 21 May 2026

Go raibh míle maith agaibh a chairde agus Dia dhaoibh ar fad. Tá sé go deas a bheith libh chun an leabhar nua seo le Fintan, Beating Time – The Story of the Irish Bodhrán, a sheoladh.

After reading Beating Time this week, and thinking about it, I decided I want to start by mentioning a concert that I attended two weeks ago in Seanscoil Sailearna in Indreabhán. It was by the group Keane Connolly McGorman – the piper Pádraic Keane, the fiddle player Aidan Connolly, and the two Meath brothers Ruairí and Fergus McGorman on Greek bouzouki and flute. 

Half-way through the concert, they played a Spanish tune that Aidan had learned while he lived in Spain, and Fergus McGorman put down his flute and picked up a tambourine to accompany Aidan, and he played the tambourine in the Mediterranean style, by holding it up by the base and beating it with his hand. 

And then, Fergus McGorman played two reels on the flute, and Pádraic Keane put down his pipes and picked up the bodhrán to accompany him, but he played the bodhrán with his hand in the old traditional style, not with the stick or the cipín. 

And then finally, Aidan Connolly played a set of polkas on the fiddle, and Fergus picked up the bodhrán and accompanied him, again using his hand rather than a stick.

It was only after reading Fintan’s book that I fully appreciated the importance of all of this, because in Beating Time he writes not only about the history of the bodhrán, but also the history of the tambourine in Ireland, and the influence of other countries.

It made me think again about how this music is not moving in one direction. It is moving in multiple directions, backwards and forwards all the time, like a loom, and these young musicians were doing just that with the bodhrán, finding new and old connections.

In the opening to Fintan’s book, he says that Beating Time is an investigation into the background to the bodhrán in Ireland and he describes it as a ‘cold case file’ – unresolved, with some misunderstandings and misinterpretations, disguised by myths. And when you read Beating Time you will see that it does read at times a little like a detective story, a forensic report solving a musical case. It has a great narrative and it keeps you reading. It’s a substantial 349 pages, but you keep reading on because you want to discover what Fintan has discovered, and there are hundreds of photos, including fine portraits by Nutan, that you can examine along the way. And if it were a detective story, of course, the solution would not be Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Candlestick, but Ó Riada in the Queen’s Hall Dublin with the cipín!

Because we know, and Fintan goes into detail about this, that Ó Riada played a crucial role in the development of the instrument. Fintan describes him as ‘midwife to the bodhrán’. Within a very short period in  1959 and 1960, he took this goat-framed drum, generally associated with the annual Wren tradition in the south-west and with farming, and turned it into the sit-down accompanying instrument for traditional music that we know today. But of course, it’s important to mention that other musicians had a profound impact too, and I’m delighted to see that Ringo McDonagh and Mary Bergin are here because their collaboration on Mary’s LPs, Feadóga Stáin 1 and 2, had a huge influence.

Fintan brings us through this history and the pre-history, analysing texts, recordings, plays, books, objects, drawings and obscure historical references to try to describe how this instrument has developed and become so important to Irish music, and also how it has at times come to symbolise so much more, even Ireland itself, as he writes.

There are parts that I find particularly fascinating, such as when he pauses on a painting. There is a passage where Fintan analyses a painting called Snap Apple Night by the Cork painter Daniel Maclise from 1832. ‘Snap apple’ is the old name for the game that we play at Halloween when you try to take a bite from an apple on a string or in a bowl. I realised I have seen this painting many times, and perhaps you have seen this painting many times, because it is used as the cover of the 2nd edition of the Companion to Irish Traditional Music. But in Beating Time, Fintan points out something I had not noticed before, which is that there is a young boy up in the top-right-hand corner, kneeling in the window frame above a fiddler, piper and flute player, looking into the room, and playing a tambourine with metal jingles, holding it by the base, and playing it with his hand. Fintan points out that this painting from 1832 may be the first image of a frame drum being played in this kind of Irish music recreational context. Not only that, but he also points out that up in the rafters, there is a sieve, riddle or bodhrán, hanging down, indicating farming use. Fintan then says that this painting may have been embellished and staged to a certain extent, but it gives you an idea of the forensic analysis that you will find in this book.

When I read this book, I also thought of the relationship between writing, research and music. I think this book will direct bodhrán players and other musicians in a variety of directions. It will bring them to tambourine tutors from the 1800s, to paintings and illustrations showing the way tambourines and bodhráns were made, to historical references indicating the use of the instrument in Irish life, to farming practice, to the rise of this music in the mid-twentieth century.

But it’s also going to challenge people, break down myths, and encourage us to be more informed about the instrument, not to rely on old assumptions and jokes – and you know what I am talking about!

On the subject of writing about music, when I began writing about Irish music 26 years ago, as a young know-it-all of course, Fintan had a traditional music column in the Sunday Tribune, and he sometimes took me to task on what I was writing; but I remember reading his last column in the paper in 2002 and he pondered whether the 125,000 words that he had written in the columns had actually had an impact on the music. It’s interesting now to even think that we would question that, because of course they did, and so have the sixteen books that he has produced over the past 27 years, not least the Companion to Irish Traditional Music. Méabh Ní Fhuarthain wrote recently in my own publication, The Journal of Music in Ireland, that the Companion has become essential to the music, and is now referred to in shorthand as ‘the Companion’, or ‘Vallely’s Companion’, like O’Neill’s. And of course, there are the Crossroads Conference papers and many other books, and also now, Beating Time. We rely on Fintan’s work. It educates us, challenges us, makes us think, sets us off on our own musical investigations. To me, books and writing about music are often the silent scaffolding around the music, the foundational supports. I think they make our music stronger, and I want to congratulate Fintan for producing another thought-provoking volume. I’m sure you will enjoy it.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh.