"If Máire wasn’t around, Irish harping would be so much the poorer: her work restores the harp to its true voice." - The Irish Times

MÁIRE grew up in a well-known West Cork musical family & began to play the harp at the age of eleven. Using her knowledge of the idiom of the living oral Irish tradition, she developed a variety of new techniques, particularly in relation to ornamentation, with the aim of establishing an authentically traditional style of harping. As a teenager her originality was quickly recognised: having won the All-Ireland & Pan-Celtic Harp Competitions several times, a number of TV & radio broadcasts followed.

In 1985 she recorded the first harp album ever to concentrate on traditional Irish dance music, 'The New-Strung Harp', described by The Irish Examiner as “an intensely passionate and intelligent record… a mile-stone in Irish harp music”. The techniques which she invented for the purpose have been profoundly influential - “a single-handed reinvention of the harp”. She has been giving masterclasses in Europe and the USA since the mid-1970s with the result that her ideas and techniques are now very widely disseminated. 2003 will be her eighteenth year as senior tutor at the Cúirt Chruitireachta (Harp Summer School) organised by Cairde na Cruite (The Irish Harp Society) in Termonfeckin, Co Louth, where harpers come from all over the world to study with her. Within the last couple of years she’s been harp tutor at Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School and at Boston College’s “Gaelic Roots”. Two books of her arrangements, The Irish Harper Vols. I & II, have been published by Old Bridge Music. She holds an honours degree in Celtic Studies from University College Cork. She contributed two articles about the Irish harp and modes in Irish music to the Companion to Irish Traditional Music (Cork University Press) & is profiled in Celtic Women in Music (Mairéad Sullivan, Quarry Music Books, Canada).

Máire is harp & voice soloist with the New English Chamber Orchestra & the Choir of New College Oxford on John Cameron's Missa Celtica (Erato Disques, Paris). The Goldcrest film Driftwood features her singing, and her harping & compositions feature with other Celtic music luminaries on Dan ar Braz's Gold Disc-awarded album Finisterres (Sony France). She's featured on the major BBC 2 TV series on Irish music Bringing it All Back Home - the associated BBC book features a large photograph of Máire on the front cover! – and on Polygram USA’s major 1998 Celtic harp album & associated PBS TV special Celtic Harpestry.

Go to Chris & Máire's website