Coppers and Brass The Mulligan family

The Mulligans.
This is the only one of the 12 programmes I made for DCTV dedicated to a non-Traveller musical family. In it, we celebrate the Mulligan family who continue to grow in numbers and influence throughout Ireland, and abroad, as they have done for over a century. Tom Mulligan (1915-1984) had a unique south Leitrim fiddle-playing style, which was influenced by his musical father Thomas, fiddle-master Jack Conboy, and the extensive world Irish music that he embraced and encountered throughout his life. A man, generous in friendship and hearty by nature, he cultivated and nourished a depth of Irish cultural warmth that transposed to all who knew him. Tom was born into a family of four brothers and two sisters in Currycramp, Bornacoola, near Mohill in County Leitrim in 1915. His father Thomas played fiddle and flute and his grandfather played concertina. Tom’s siblings were mainly fiddle players and singers. Being the eldest, Tom eventually headed to Dublin in 1935 to work, initially finding work in a shoe factory and subsequently he got a job with Irish Life Assurance where he worked until his retirement. He met up with Séamus Ennis after arriving in Dublin and within 3 years had a set of C# pipes, similar in pitch to Ennis’s Coyne set, made by James Mulchrone, a pipe maker from Abbeyshrule, County Longford. It was from Mulchrone that he also bought his treasured Ole Bull fiddle. Tommy Reck, with whom he struck up a musical partnership for many years before he got married, provided piping lessons for the young Leitrim lad, who was newly immersed in the world of uilleann piping and further tackled the art of chanter making at a later stage of life. Musical times in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s were confined to house Céillidhs and some music clubs such as Cumann na bPíobairí Uilleann in Molesworth Place where Tom became a committee member along with Tommy Reck and Leo Rowsome, whom he had first heard playing the uilleann pipes in Mohill in 1932 and fell in love with the sound of the pipes. Public performances were limited to Feiseanna and Piper’s club trips to various locations on the outskirts of the city, like Ireland’s Eye and Skerries, before the musical pub culture started in Dublin in the 1960s. The emerging Fleadh Ceoils were also becoming a common outlet and various excursions around the country were undertaken to adjudicate competitions and enjoy the sessions. Tom married Catherine MacMahon, from Beale in North Kerry, who was nursing in Holles Street Hospital at the time. They went on to have eight children, 5 boys and 3 girls. (N. Mulligan).
This is their remarkable story.