Spotlight shines again on harpist O’Hara who wowed the world with her talent
Some time before Clannad, The Chieftains and Riverdance took Irish traditional music to a global stage, singer and harpist Mary O’Hara was playing sell-out gigs at the Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall.
The Sligo-born musician released 29 albums, made a series with BBC television and was a guest on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs.
She was also selected for surprise This Is Your Life treatment by television broadcaster Eamonn Andrews.
Yet such is the fickle nature of fame that her name virtually vanished from playlists. This really bothered harpist Cormac de Barra and fellow musician Moya Brennan of Clannad.
Brennan and De Barra decided to celebrate O’Hara’s 89th birthday by releasing an album in her honour and staging a tribute concert in Galway’s An Taibhdhearc theatre supported by Cruit Éireann (Harp Ireland).
Voices & Harps IV, as the album is called, draws on a repertoire of songs, both in English and Irish, which O’Hara had originally recorded, including Lord of the Dance, The Spinning Wheel, Song of Fionnuala (Silent O Moyle) and An Maidrín Rua.
“Moya really felt it was time to give Mary O’Hara credit,” De Barra explains. O’Hara was present for the sell-out performance last weekend and was “deeply moved”, according to her close friend, Sister Meta Reid.
O’Hara was an enormous influence on both musicians, De Barra says. “When Moya Brennan was a teenager in Donegal she was sent as a boarder to the Ursuline Convent in Sligo to learn the harp, simply because O’Hara was from the town,” he explains.
Coincidentally, O’Hara had been taught the harp in Sion Hill, Dublin, by De Barra’s grandaunt, the late Máirín Ní Shéaghdha. “Mary’s first ever tour in England and Scotland was with my grandmother and grandaunt in 1954 when they played Glasgow on St Patrick’s Day,” says De Barra. “Exactly 70 years later, Moya and myself played Glasgow on St Patrick’s Day and performed songs associated with Mary, numbers that are now on this new album.
“Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers wrote about how Mary’s music inspired him and others during the ‘folk revival’ of the 1960s,” he adds.
O’Hara first signed with Decca Records but quit her musical career four years after the death of her first husband, Richard Selig.
She became a Benedictine nun in Stanbrook Abbey in England in 1962, melting down her wedding ring to celebrate her vows.
She stayed in the order for 12 years, then left the convent and returned to music with The Observer, describing her first stage appearance after the break as “the folk music event of the year”.
She subsequently married Aran islander Pádraig O’Toole, who had been a priest with the Society for African Missions before leaving the order. He became her manager until she retired from public performances in 1994.
After O’Toole died in 2015, O’Hara continued to live on the Aran Islands and latterly in Galway.