She has slipped beyond the veil; and so too slips her voice.

Máire Ní Bhraonáin, eldest of nine, is ‘put to God’ today, up there in her homelands of Gweedore, Donegal.

Hers was the ethereal voice of Clannad, a group which laid down its unique roots through six Gaelic-language close-harmony albums across the 1970s.

Art created with authenticity will find its light.

By the 1980s, the music of Clannad would come to the attention of the world – winning Emmys and Ivor Novellos, later spawning collabs with Bono, Led Zeppelin and Chicane.

Art begets art.

Clannad would inspire a host of Irish musicians over the coming decades. Those artists include The Cranberries, Hozier, Máire’s sister Eithne; indeed, even me and my friends.

As a teenager, I was in Niall Smith’s house when I first heard Clannad’s theme to Harry’s Game.

Apparently, it took success in the UK for Irish musical gems to find a mainstream domestic listenership, including teenage me.

The family from Gaoth Dobhair had created an unforgettable sound, elevating an ITV mini-series to the mantle of timelessness. The story was about the Troubles in Belfast, which gave credence to their lyrics ‘as Gaeilge’. The music seemed effortlessly to evoke the riven landscape of Ulster, catching its keening essence in a refrain that transcended words:

Fol lol the doh fol the dé

Fol the doh fol the dé

I recall nothing else of Niall Smith’s house.

***

Máire was Moya – the phonic sounding of her name expressed in the beautiful Donegal accent.

She was a Gaeltacht girl, raised by an educator mother and a musician father. The latter, Leo, opened a tavern in the 1970s when the showband era was slowing up. Inadvertently, Old Mister Brennan created a permanent stage upon which his family could find their sound and tell their story.

There is no music without soul; there is no soul without performance.

***

Donegal is Ireland’s Wild West. Its landscape is massive and strewn. It has Atlantic waves that brood and a unique Gaelic that dances.

Donegal folk are Irish like people of any other county, only more so.

A decade back, when I took to discovering my own country on the saddle, I spent a beautiful summer’s day cycling through the hillocks and bog pools of The Rosses. There was heat in the air that day, and the scent of meadowsweet in my nostrils.

At length, I found Leo’s Tavern.

Being the mid-afternoon, there was no live music – but I sat in, and had a lovely roast with plenty of mash. Browsing the walls, beer in hand, I examined photos of Moya and the brothers and uncles who composed Clannad, at various stages of their careers. There was pride and ordinariness in that lovely gallery.

***

‘I realise now that my sound is in my timbre,’ said Moya in a recent interview, also bemoaning that she could never be a rock chick bellowing out some anthem, in a dank venue after midnight.

Yes, her tone was exceptional, but it was also the pinpoint accuracy of that high voice that gave her music wings.

Just as the calligrapher is drawn to the ballpoint’s ultra-fine gauge, so is the lover of Irish music drawn to Ms Brennan’s line of sound. Each note is carried with tenderness, weaving first, the  moving on. The result is a filigree of beauty.

***

There are echoes of Moya and Clannad marbled through my musical life.

During my folk years (yes, I was a church boy) we tended to have a musical interlude as a reflection. One of our choices was Clannad’s Lady Marian, from the soundtrack of Robin Hood. There is a vulnerability in Moya’s harp playing which, to this day, can make me weep.

Living in Vienna in the 90s, I introduced my Austrian musician friends to Clannad, and their music became part of our ‘Ein Ganz Irischer Abend’ concerts to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. Very Irish indeed.

When a dear American friend made the excellent choice of a Donegal man as her future husband, I flew to North Carolina and sang Buachaill Ón Éirne at their wedding. It is a traditional air from Donegal, and my rendition was all-Clannad in its arrangement, if not quite managing that county’s beautiful blas.

In life, there comes a mood on me from time to time which only Clannad’s Caisleán Óir will match.

The opening track of Macalla – the album’s title meaning Echo – is perhaps their most accomplished. It is hard to describe the feeling Caisleán inspires in me, sitting as it does in the liminal zone between longing and love; simultaneously affirming who I am.

***

In a famous moment on Swiss TV from 1982, Clannad is seen performing with Moya’s sister Eithne, who is carrying the lead vocal.

Eithne, in the naming manner of her sister, is Enya – and within a few years, she would launch a solo career, become a global star and the best-selling Irish female artist of all time.

Enya met her composition partners (Nicky and Roma Ryan) on the road with Clannad; she established her musical roots under the tutelage of her family band; her big sister then encouraged her to walk alone, and make music splendidly as herself.

***

I met Moya Brennan once, backstage at a Gospel gig in which I was part of a choir, and she was the main event. We chatted casually for a few minutes about the gift of music; how it can access the soul, allowing us closer to the godhead.

‘Of course,’ she exclaimed. ‘It can be no other way.’

***

In the early 1990s, Moya appeared on Irish television to account for her band’s extraordinary success, and maybe to choose a song to sing for us.

She did so, seated in the interview chair, unaccompanied.

It was a Tory island folk song, about a woman who, by dint of a secret and magical cloak, could transform herself from maid to mermaid at will.

But this mythical young woman fell in love, and for a long time had no use for her magical cloak. All the better for it – as her husband, desperate to keep the mother of his children by his side, had it well hidden.

One day, the kids find its remnants on the shoreline and bring it home.

In sight of cloak, swoon-like, the woman becomes gripped yet again by the calling of the sea. 

There is a veil that separates the land from the great wide ocean. Silently, to the immense sadness of all, she dons her cloak and slips beyond the veil.