Donegal musical icon Moya Brennan, the First Lady of Celtic Music, dies aged 73

There is widespread sadness following the death of Moya Brennan, the First Lady of Celtic Music.

The 73-year-old passed away on Monday night following a short illness.

Her career spanned a staggering 25 albums and 20 million record sales, but despite her global appeal and success Donegal - and Gaoth Dobhair - were where her heart was fondest.

A member of the acclaimed folk group Clannad - who were given the Freedom of Donegal in 2023 - Moya was named as the 2023 Donegal Person of the Year.

In accepting the award, given by the Donegal Association in Dublin, the iconic singer, a Grammy winner and Emmy winner, outlined her love of Donegal.

“I know my fans around the world will be delighted as they know how much this means to me,” she said. “I always talk about my wonderful Donegal when I am abroad.”

Máire Philomena was born on August 5, 1952, the eldest of nine children to Leo, who played in a cabaret band, and music teacher ‘Baba’ Máire.

In 1970, she was part of a five-part band, Clannad, that launched in west Donegal. Initially, the quintet - siblings Máire, Ciarán and Pól Brennan and their maternal uncles, twins Pádraig and Noel Duggan.

The band was initially known as Clan as Dobhar (Family from Dore), but it was shortened to Clannad in 1973.

Clannad won the Letterkenny Festival back in 1970 and earned a recording with Philips, who were said to have been “not that keen” on recording a band who sang primarily through the Irish language.

In a later interview, Moya - as she promoted herself as from 2002 onwards - told how the people in an audience would turn their backs when first performing Gaelic songs. 

"They regarded it as a poor man's language, it was like we were letting them down in some way,” she said. “We fell in love with Gaelic melodies and Irish was my first language - we loved to sing in Irish, our first six albums were mainly in Gaelic.”

Clannad toured with The Dubliners, The Chieftains and The Fureys. The band toured in Europe and America before their single ‘Theme From Harry’s Game’ hit international attention and acclaim. 

In 1982, Yorkshire TV approached Clannad for some music for Harry’s Game, a drama series based on Gerald Seymour’s novel set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

Theme From Harry’s Game was written in a week and took Clannad to new heights.

“One day, we were in a Transit van in Germany; the next we were being picked up in a limo to do Top of the Pops and taking pictures of ourselves jumping in and out,” Moya later recalled to The Guardian.

Theme From Harry’s Game won an Ivor Novello Award. A Grammy and a Billboard Music Award followed. 

Another sister, Eithne, left the band around the same time. ‘Enya’ has gone on to become one of the world’s best-selling musicians.

Through Moya’s distinctive Gaelic voice, Clannad gained worldwide approval. 

Moya, who studied in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in her younger years, released her first solo album in 1992.

She later sang at the Speakers Luncheon in front of US President George W Bush in 2004. A year later, she performed with Pope Benedict XVI on World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne, Germany - singing in front of a million people.

At World Youth Day six years earlier in 1999, she performed Perfect Time to the largest crowd ever assembled in the northern hemisphere, playing to some 2.7 million in the Tor Vargetta near Rome.

“I didn’t think I had much of a voice,” Moya would tell The Guardian. “I would have loved to have been a rock’n’roller, but gradually I realised that I had a different timbre and an ethereal feel, which is very much part of the Clannad sound. Whenever people ask where that sound comes from I say, “Go to Donegal. You’ll feel the earthiness and the atmosphere.”

The family pub, Leo’s Tavern in Meenaleck, was a haven and a heaven for musicians of both the budding and the legendary sort. 

Moya, the doyenne of Celtic Music, was proud of how she broke a mould.

“It was unreal for a small Irish folk band from Donegal,” she once recalled. “I was the first female Irish folk singer to break abroad. People started calling me the First Lady of Celtic Music - a title I’m really proud of.”

She had tough and troubled times, which she has spoken openly about, including having an abortion in England at 19 having fallen pregnant while on a trip to a music festival in France.

She later wed musician Pat Farrell in 1985, but the marriage lasted less than two years.

When photographer Tim Jarvis arrived in Donegal to take photos of Clannad for NME, Moya clasped eyes on her future husband. The couple got married in January 1991 and they had two children, Aisling and Paul.

She had many battles with her faith, but a chance finding of her grandmother’s prayer book while staying with two of her siblings in Rathfarnham “made me feel calm” and she “began talking to God”.

In an interview, she once recalled: "Faith helps me with so much. I know God is with me, it's when we are doing things by ourselves, that's when we feel the stress. I'm not saying I've got it perfect, we all fall but really that's where my strength comes from.”

Her brother Leon, died in 2021 and Moya Brennan is survived by her husband Tim Jarvis, their children Aisling and Paul, her mother ‘Baba’ Máire Ní Bhraonáin, sisters Deirdre, Eithne, Olive and Brídín, and brothers Ciarán, Pól and Bartley. She was predeceased by her father, Leo, who died in 2016 at the age of 90.

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Some Clannad members, including Moya, embarked on a farewell tour in 2020, but the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic saw that postponed. However, they did do a farewell concert in Dublin in 2023, including Moya, who revealed in 2020 that she had pulmonary fibrosis.

Her voice might have fallen silent, but the echo of the First Lady of Celtic Music will live long in Donegal.