Career
After college Mac Mathúna worked as a teacher and later at the Placenames Commission. In 1954, he joined Radio Éireann where his job was to record Irish traditional musicians playing in their own locales. This entailed visiting such places as Sliabh Luachra, County Clare and County Sligo, and the resulting recordings featured in his radio programmes:
- Ceolta Tire
- A Job of Journeywork — listened to by Johnny McEvoy
- Humours of Donnybrook — Al O'Donnell and Luke Kelly performed a famous version of "On Raglan Road" on this show in 1979
Director-General of RTÉ Cathal Goan later recalled that Mac Mathúna interviewed him for his first job at the station. Goan assisted in the organisation of Mac Mathúna's music collection for the RTÉ Libraries and Archives.
Mac Mathúna's long-running Sunday morning radio series Mo Cheol Thú (You are my music) began in 1970 and continued until November 2005, when he retired from broadcasting. Each 45-minute programme offered a miscellany of archive music, poetry and folklore, mainly of Irish origin. It was one of radio's longest running programmes. The last episode was broadcast on 27 November 2005 at 8.10 am.
Mac Mathúna won two Jacob's Awards, in 1969 and 1990, for his RTÉ Radio programmes promoting Irish traditional music. He received the Freedom of Limerick City in June 2004. He was also awarded honorary doctorates by NUI Galway and the University of Limerick. In 2007, he received the Musicians Award at the 10th annual TG4 Traditional Music Awards.
Joe Kennedy in the Sunday Independent in 2007 compared Mac Mathúna to "an amiable rock, rolling gently along, still picking up some moss and morsels of music that he may have missed".
Read more about this topic: Ciarán Mac Mathúna
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