Friends remember Seán with special musical fundraiser

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

The inaugural Cairde concert, in memory of Portumna publican Seán Henry, will take place this Sunday, October 6, from 4pm in Galway City’s Clayton Hotel.  Performers will include Joanie Madden and Cherish the Ladies, Seán Keane, Matt Keane, Mary Bergin, Jimmy Crowley, Frankie Gavin, Eileen O’Brien, Anne Conroy, Seán Gavin and John Faulkner, among others.

The fundraising concert is a celebration of friendship and life, as Ireland’s top traditional musicians and singers perform in aid of the heart and stroke charity, Croí, and Cancer Care West.

Seán Henry was just 66 years old when he died two years ago. Born in Bekan outside Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, in 1952, Seán’s first exposure to traditional music came from his fiddle-playing father. And although, his dad died when Seán was a child, those early experiences gave him a love of music that stayed with him for life. Seán had one of the finest collections of Irish traditional music, even though, as he put it himself, “he couldn’t get a note in a bank”.

As a young man, Seán moved to Dublin in the early 1970s where he met and fell in love with Wexford woman, Marie Butler. Tragically, she was killed in the 1974 Dublin bombing, aged just 21.

Seán worked as a truck-driver for an oil company travelling all over Ireland and mainland Europe. In Dublin, he socialised in the Man of Aran, owned by Galway man Frank Cooney, and in the Merchant, owned by Kerry man Ned O’Shea, becoming friends with the cream of Irish traditional musicians. These included Joe Burke and Ann Conroy, who became his lifelong friends.

Moving to Galway, in 1983, his favourite haunts became Taaffe’s Bar and Tí Chóilí, both renowned for traditional music.

In 1993, after becoming redundant from his job, Seán moved the USA. He had intended to settle in Chicago, but while visiting Joe Burke and Ann Conroy in St Louis where they were playing music at John D. McGurk’s, he met Jody.  Their shared love of traditional music brought them together and Seán stayed in St Louis, where he proposed to Jody on St Patrick’s Day, 1993.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.