Maghery Fife and Drum Band celebrate their 80th birthday

Maghery Fife and Drum Band will celebrate the 80th anniversary of its founding this year.

The band took part in the annual Dungloe parade on St Patrick's Day, a date they have only missed once since their first appearance in 1945, and that was when Covid threw a spanner in the works in 2020.

St Patrick's Day parades have been a part of the Dungloe calendar for over a century, long before Paddy’s Day parades featured in any other town in the county and beyond.

This was probably due to the fact that in the Rosses in West Donegal, there has always been a vibrant fife and drum marching band tradition going back over 100 years, and Dungloe on St Patrick's Day was the big opportunity for bands to perform and show their talent.

To this day that traditional parade in Dungloe has never wavered. Maghery Band on its eightieth birthday is still one of the younger recognised names.

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There were already well-established bands in Keadue, Annagry, Meenacross, Mullaghduff, Crickamore and Lettermacaward prior to Maghery's arrival in 1945.

Maghery band started from very humble beginnings with no major fanfare as is the case with many successful ventures. Sometime in the Autumn of 1944, an idea was mooted that Maghery should have a band. This plan was probably spurned by jealousy of other parishes, or even other townlands who already had bands.

Whatever the thinking of the time was, planning to form a band and follow through to fruition was a mammoth task in a very impoverished Ireland in 1944.

World War II had still not ended and food products were rationed. Rural electrification was still more than a decade away and so television and all of the electrically powered mod cons of today were still nonexistent. A few homes may have had the luxury of battery powered radios and in turn would relay major national and world events to their neighbors. A telephone in the local Post Office was the only means of contact with the outside world, and transport of the day was either by bicycle or on foot. Nobody in the area owned a car 80 years ago.

Money was scarce, instruments had to be sourced, members had to be coaxed into the ranks, and the new recruits had to be trained over the winter months. However, all the obstacles were overcome and the new band arrived on the scene making its first public appearance in the Dungloe parade on St Patrick's Day 1945.

In the mid-sixties a junior band was formed to prepare the youth of the area for their entry into the senior band. This young group proved an invaluable conveyor belt of new talent for the senior band and also ensured its longevity. Today that former youth band has its own identity and is known as the Maghery Band Academy.

This band is one of the most successful fife and drum bands in Ireland, having won the overall Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann All Ireland title on twelve occasions, the most recent being at the Fleadh in Wexford in August 2024. They have also taken part in the St Patrick's parade in New York City in 2019.

All the founding members of the Maghery Fife and Drum band have long since gone to their eternal reward, but the legacy they have left behind continues unabated.

One wonders if the people who hatched the idea of forming a band in the Autumn of 1944, and persevered to see that dream fulfilled, were still around today to see the fruits of the seed they had sown flourish, what would be their reaction?

What they started as one band in 1945 is now two bands in 2025. The efforts and commitment that the band founders made all those 80 years ago, and the legacy that they leave behind today can be truly reflected in the sentiments of the old Greek proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit”.