Piper Fiachra goes for gold

Piper Fiachra O’Regan from Roundstone is one of eight pipers and seven harpists taking part in a concert in Cork this Friday night, which will be broadcast live on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta.

The event, in the Rochestown Park Hotel, is also a competition where the winner in each category will receive the Seán Ó Riada gold medal.

Fiachra started playing music when he was about 10 years of age, learning the whistle from Noreen O’Sullivan in Carna. He began to play the pipes in 1997 and was encouraged by two great Connemara pipers, Seán McKiernan and Tommy Ó Ceannabháin. Fiachra won the All-Ireland senior competition for uilleann pipes and slow airs on uilleann pipes in 2008, and in the same year he released his first solo album, Aisling Gheal. Around that time he met his partner, French Canadian fiddler Sophie Lavoie, and they started playing music together – a mix from Quebec and Ireland. They began touring in 2009 and released the album, Sophie & Fiachra in 2010.

This will be the third year that musicians will compete for the prestigious Seán Ó Riada gold medal, which is run on RnaG trad programme Cuireadh chun Ceoil.

Presenter Peadar Ó Riada – son of the great composer Seán – took the idea for the competition from his father, who ran a similar event on his own radio programme in the 1960s.

The competition aims to bring together the worldwide family of listeners to the radio programme, using modern technology that allows people to easily record and transmit music at little cost. It rewards musicality and creativity in playing, not just technical proficiency.

The judges are all respected musicians in their own right – Dublin piper Mick O’Brien, Scottish piper Alan McDonald, and Mayo harpist Laoise Kelly. This Friday, they hey will have the task of picking one musician from each category – a piper and a harpist – each of whom will receive the Seán Ó Riada gold medal, and a cash prize of €1,250.

Cashel goldsmith Pádraig Ó Mathúna has designed and created the Seán Ó Riada medal, which features a portrait of the composer on one side and an engraving inspired by the Song of Amergin on the other.