Turlough O'Carolan was a blind Celtic harper, composer and singer in Ireland whose great fame is due to his gift for melodic composition.
The Gaelic revival was the late-nineteenth-century national revival of interest in the Irish language and Irish Gaelic culture. Irish had diminished as a spoken tongue, remaining the main daily language only in isolated rural areas, with English having become the dominant language in the majority of Ireland.
Edwin Greene O'Connor was an American journalist, novelist, and radio commentator. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1962 for his novel The Edge of Sadness (1961). His ancestry was Irish, and his novels concerned the Irish-American experience and often dealt with the lives of politicians and priests.
Edward Bunting was an Irish musician and folk music collector.
The Belfast Harp Festival, called by contemporary writers The Belfast Harpers Assembly, 11–14 July 1792, was a three-day musical and patriotic event organised in Belfast, Ireland, by leading members of the local Society for Promoting Knowledge : Dr. James MacDonnell, Robert Bradshaw, Henry Joy, and Robert Simms. Edward Bunting, a young classically trained organist, was commissioned to notate the forty tunes performed by ten harpists attending, work that was to form the major part of his General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1796). The venue of the contest was in The Assembly Room on Waring Street in Belfast which was opened as a market house in 1769.
Patrick J. Touhey was a celebrated player of the uilleann pipes. His innovative technique and phrasing, his travels back and forth across America to play on the variety and vaudeville stage, and his recordings made his style influential among Irish-American pipers. He can be seen as the greatest contributor to a distinctive American piping style.
Dominic Ó Mongáin, or Dominic Mungan, was an Irish harper and poet, born around 1715 in County Tyrone. The poem and air An raibh tú ag an gCarraig?, translated by Walsh as Have you been at Carrick?, has been attributed to him.
Eachmarcach Ó Catháin, Irish harper and composer, 1720–1790).
Charles Mongan Warburton was a 19th-century Anglican bishop who served two Irish Dioceses.
Martin O'Reilly (1829–1904) was a blind Irish piper.
Pat McDonagh was an Irish piper.
Patrick Flannery was an Irish piper.
William Walsh, Irish piper.
Diarmuid Ó Dubhagáin was an Irish harper.
Hugh Higgins of Tyrawley was a blind Irish harper, 1737-after 1791.
Ruaidrí Dáll Ó Catháin may have been an Irish harper and composer. Recent research, however, raises the question whether he ever really existed. He is said to have been born circa 1580 in County Antrim and to have died circa 1653 at Eglinton Castle.
John O'Gorman, born 1860s, Irish piper.
Arthur O'Neill was an Irish harper, a virtuoso player of the Irish harp or cláirseach: he was active during the final decades of its unbroken instrumental tradition in the later 18th and very early 19th century. He was closely associated with Edward Bunting, and the Belfast Harp Society's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to preserve the instrument, attending the Belfast Harper's Assembly and serving as the Society's harp tutor until 1813. He is best known for his lively and humorous memoir, collected by Bunting, which contained many reminiscences of famous harpers and of the environment in which they played.
James MacDonnell was an Irish physician and polymath who was an active and liberal figure in the civic and political life of Belfast. He was a founding patron of institutions that have since developed as the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and the Linen Hall Library and, beginning with the organisation of the Belfast Harpers Assembly in 1792, was a promoter of efforts to preserve and revive Irish music and the Irish language. Among some of his contemporaries his reputation suffered in 1803 as a result of his making a subscription for the arrest of his friend, the outlawed United Irishman Thomas Russell.
The Belfast Harp Society (1808-1813) and its successor, the Irish Harp Society (1819-1839), were philanthropic associations formed in the town of Belfast, Ireland, for the purpose of sustaining the music and tradition of itinerant Irish harpists, and secondarily, of promoting the study of the Irish language, history, and antiquities. For its patronage, the original society drew upon a diminishing circle of veterans of the patriotic and reform politics of the 1780s and '90s, among them several unrepentant United Irishmen. In its sectarian division, Belfast became increasingly hostile to Protestant interest in distinctive Irish culture. The society reconvened as the Irish Harp Society in 1819 only as a result of a large and belated subscription raised from expatriates in India. Once that source was exhausted, the new society ceased its activity.