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Renowned Irish musician Dónal Lunny dies aged 79

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Dónal Lunny, one of Ireland’s most celebrated musicians, has died at the age of 79.

Dónal Lunny, one of Ireland’s most celebrated musicians, has died at the age of 79.

Lunny, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, was considered central to the revival and growth of Irish traditional music.

Revered by many in traditional music, he had early musical success with the groundbreaking Planxty in 1971, then The Bothy Band, and subsequently Moving Hearts in the mid 1980s.

A member of Aosdána, it was Lunny’s unique understanding of the importance of tradition mixed with innovation that meant his influence on the flourishing of Irish traditional music was unique.

Over the years, Lunny wrote melodies to be played on all pipes and whistles, and arranged harmonic structures and chord patterns for guitar and harmonium.As his fans mourn his passing, he leaves a treasure trove of fascinating recordings behind him both as a uniquely talented musician and a producer.

Early Years

Born in Tullamore in March 1947, Lunny’s family moved to Kildare when he was five years old, and he was raised and educated in Newbridge.

He enjoyed learning music from childhood, and first met a young Christy Moore in 1959 where they quickly recognised a musical connection between them that would last for decades.

After secondary school, a young Lunny had decided to pursue his artistic studies, so in 1965 he headed to Dublin to study at the National College of Art and Design but within a short time, his blossoming musical career started taking up more and more of his time.

He would go on to form some of the most influential musical groups in the Irish music scene.

Bands

Lunny’s earliest music adventures included the Parnell Folk band, before moving onto the Emmet Folk band, which in turn grew into Emmet Spiceland in 1966, affectionately referred to as Ireland’s ‘first boy band’.

(L-R) Andy Irvine, Liam O’Flynn, Dónal Lunny and Christy Moore in 1973
Dónal Lunny pictured with The Emmet Spiceland

It was the first group to break into the pop charts with Irish music.

During his college years, Lunny met fellow musician Andy Irvine and the pair formed a lifelong friendship and musical connection.

It was when he was visiting Irvine’s flat in the 1970s that Lunny first spotted a bouzouki that Irvine had brought home from his European travels.

Lunny recalled that once he picked it up and strummed it, “something happened to me” and from then he championed its sound and inclusion for a new generation of Irish trad players.

A founding member of ‘Planxty’ along with Liam O’Flynn, Christy Moore and Andy Irvine, the quartet recorded three albums in the period 1971-1973.

Lunny’s influence was key to the sound they created, which redefined traditional Irish music.

He also played bouzouki, guitar, keyboards and bódhrans on all ‘Planxty’ recordings.

Lunny’s family includes his brother, Manus Lunny, also a noted musician and producer.

In 1975, Lunny joined the beloved ‘The Bothy Band’ and again, pushed musical frontiers for traditional music with the group which included Matt Molloy, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, Kevin Burke, Paddy Glackin and Paddy Keenan.

Dónal Lunny would go on to play with these and many, many of the country’s leading musicians for decades to come.

Producer/Composer

In 1973, Lunny set up the label Mulligan Records where he went on to produce 17 albums and the label published music from a wide range of artists including Boomtown Rats, The Radiators, and Agnes Bernell.

Such was his reputation in the studio that Bono has referred to Lunny as Ireland’s answer to the legendary US producer Quincy Jones.

Dónal Lunny also composed for a wide range of projects including TV dramas and documentaries for RTÉ, BBC and Channel 4.

In 1992, he was musical director and producer of the award-winning and musically significant TV series Bringing It All Back Home. The project also cemented his working relationship with producer Philip King. The duo would go on to work on a range of musical projects together.

Lunny branched into films too and wrote scores for several films including ‘This is My Father’, a major international production starring Aidan Quinn and James Caan.

In more recent years, Lunny had become more involved with contemporary music, producing albums for Kate Bush, Paul Brady, Elvis Costello, Mark Knopfler, Rod Stewart and Clannad.

Christy Moore and Dónal Lunny pictured in Dublin in 1985

He also produced the internationally acclaimed album for EMI, Common Ground, featuring Kate Bush, Sináad O’Connor, Bono and Elvis Costello.

Lunny said in an interview in The Irish Examiner in 2014 that: “I was dedicated to expanding the reach of traditional music. You want to push the boundaries and broaden the treatment of the music in an acceptable way — one that wouldn’t turn people off, that wasn’t alien to the music. It was a matter of finding approaches that worked”.

In February 2025, Lunny was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the RTÉ Radio 1 Irish Folk Awards in the presence of then-president Michael D Higgins in Dublin’s Vicar Street.

In tributes on the night, U2’s Adam Clayton noted that Lunny’s influence was such that “when you go back to listen to Planxty or The Bothy Band, it’s punk rock with traditional instruments.”

Paddy Glackin previously said that Lunny’s unique influence on the sound of Irish traditional music happened because “Dónal tries to understand where the musician is coming from”

Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill said he “always embraced the rich tradition of Irish music.”

As he presented the award to Lunny, his old pal Christy Moore said that “over 65 years, it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to play music with my neighbour Dónal”.

As the audience gave him a standing ovation, Dónal Lunny stepped forward to collect the award and address the enthusiastic audience, saying “my whole sort of reason for living was playing music” adding that “I’ve had an amazing run of it, so thank you very much.”

Lunny performed live during the Fleadh Ceoil festival in Belfast 2026.

The documentary biographical film, In Time: Dónal Lunny, made by his friend and producer, Nuala O’Connor was broadcast on RTÉ in August.

Lunny is survived by his family including his children Oisin, Cora Venus, and Sora Chan, as well as his loving partner Una O’Boyle.

His son Shane died in 2022 at the age of 17. Shane’s mother – singer Sinéad O’Connor – died in 2023.

Source: Renowned Irish musician Dónal Lunny dies aged 79

“The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 18, 2026

Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.

Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Donald Trump and the Age of Evil

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By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level — the level of evil.

By Chris Hedges

Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.
But is he evil?
If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.
In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”
She continues:
There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.
Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.
In short, he does what all who commit evil do.
He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.
Concepts of fairness, decorum, justice and empathy are imploded by the Trump administration. His threat to annihilate Iran – i.e. carry out genocide – announced of all places at the United Nations, is greeted with indifference by a public rendered numb by his moral vacuity.
“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.”
The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.
To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.
Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump:
Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the international stage like Richard Dawkins’s ruthless genes, he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn’t mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they’re relieved to watch a man who never hides it.
The worst evil, Neiman argues, “may be the denial of evil – as well as disdain for any goodness that might oppose it. When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself. It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”
This evil leads us down the familiar road to fascism. It was Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term, who warned us, calling Trump “fascist to the core.”
The media — too spineless to label Trump a fascist — prefers the word “authoritarian,’ which Neiman notes may be a more bearable word, but “will not make fascism more bearable.”
Authoritarianism, she notes:
[I]s a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they’ve never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, ‘To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.
We are in deep trouble.
The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.
We must fight back while we can. But to do so requires that we recapture the language of good and evil. It requires us to make moral choices and to accept self-sacrifice. It requires us to name the bleakness before us, not turn our faces from the fascist monolith being cemented into place.
Denying these truths and refusing to defy evil will ensure our enslavement.
Speaking these truths and standing with the oppressed and the marginalized, even at the cost of our own financial and physical security, will set us free.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.Source: Donald Trump and the Age of Evil | Chris Hedges

Ken Russell’s The Devils definitive 4K restoration to launch ahead of major BFI retrospective

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Censored for over half a century, Ken Russell’s visionary masterpiece The Devils will be back on the big screen in its definitive version on 30 October 2026, released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland by BFI Distribution in partnership with Warner Bros. Clockwork. Fully restored in 4K and cut to Ken Russell’s specific direction, Ken Russell’s The Devils is the first publicly released version of the film as intended by the filmmaker. Fifty-five years after its initial release, the definitive version of The Devils was unveiled at the 79th Cannes Film Festival as an official selection in Cannes Classics. Warner Bros. Clockwork will be releasing the film in all other territories, beginning with the US on 16 October for an exclusive one-week engagement.

An enduring masterpiece of cinema starring Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, Ken Russell’s The Devils is a prescient epic of obsession and corruption, and a defining work of art from seminal filmmaker Ken Russell. Inspired by the true story of 17th-century priest Urbain Grandier, accused of bewitching a convent of nuns, the film lays bare the collusion of church and state through a searing vision of religious persecution, collective hysteria and institutional corruption. In addition to powerhouse performances from Reed and Redgrave, Ken Russell’s The Devils showcases the stunning work of artists at the peak of their craft: Academy Award-winning cinematographer David Watkin (Out of Africa, Chariots of Fire); editor Michael Bradsell (Local Hero, Jabberwocky); and visual artist Derek Jarman (Jubilee, Caravaggio), whose work as production designer marked his feature film debut.

Produced by Warner Bros. in 1971, the film received best director awards from two of the most prestigious institutions in the world: the 33rd Venice International Film Festival and the US National Board of Review. Its critical reception in the following decades has only become more impassioned, championed by artists and film historians including Guillermo del Toro and Mark Kermode.

Stuart Brown, BFI Director of Programme and Distribution said:

“Ken Russell’s The Devils is one of the great masterpieces of British cinema: a film of astonishing imagination, searing power and dazzling formal brilliance. The BFI is thrilled to be partnering with Warner Bros. Clockwork to present the new restoration, which reveals anew the extraordinary artistry of Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Derek Jarman and the many others who collaborated to create a truly singular work. The BFI has long supported Ken Russell’s film and television work across BFI Southbank, BFI home entertainment and BFI Player, and so it is a fitting privilege to help bring this landmark restoration to audiences across the UK and Ireland.”

Ken Russell was a pioneering Academy Award-nominated British filmmaker, the disruptive visionary behind classics such as Tommy, Women in Love and Altered States. He directed an Academy Award-winning performance from Glenda Jackson in Women in Love.

To mark the centenary of Ken Russell’s birth on 3 July 1927, in July and August 2027 BFI Southbank will present the most extensive retrospective ever mounted of one of Britain’s truly pioneering figures. Spanning more than five decades of restless creativity, the season will explore Russell’s extraordinary work, from his amateur films of the 1950s through the form-breaking BBC productions of the 1960s that transformed the possibilities of television arts broadcasting, before he embarked on one of the most distinctive careers in world cinema. The BFI celebration will bring together every one of Russell’s theatrically released feature films, alongside rare television works – many screening from original film prints preserved in the BFI National Archive’s collections – later digital productions and newly created materials by the BFI National Archive.

Ken Russell’s The Devils is the definitive cut of The Devils, and no other director’s cut formally exists. This cut was originally reconstructed in 2004 under the supervision of Ken Russell and the film’s editor Michael Bradsell, in collaboration with Mark Kermode and Paul Joyce. The 4K restoration was completed using the original camera negative at WB Water Tower Color, with audio restoration completed using original composite 35mm magnetic film at WB Sound. Warner Bros. Clockwork’s release of Ken Russell’s The Devils marks the first time Russell’s defining masterpiece has been made officially accessible to the public.

Ken Russell’s The Devils will be released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 30 October 2026.