What a Difference a Day Makes: Chance encounter with composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin changed my life

He recognised me, which surprised me: I was one of hundreds who’d gone through University College Cork (UCC) during the late ’80s at the time Mícheál’s public profile was in full swing, with albums like The Dolphin’s Way. He was beginning to gather talented traditional music students around him in UCC, but I was very much on the periphery. I was a classical pianist, aware of the energy around him, but not part of it.

It was five years since I’d finished in UCC. I’d had no contact with Mícheál in that time. He began telling me about this new music centre he’d started in Limerick the previous January. He was so enthusiastic, so full of energy, and excited about it. He said, “You must come in and see it,” and I said I would.

I was at a moment in my life where I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. I’d just finished a master’s in music education. I’d always been passionate that every child should have access to music education. I was teaching music in a Galway secondary school and I was already experiencing the limits on young people being truly creative — the system was so dominated by exams — and the limits on what I could do as a teacher in second-level.

So I visited the centre in Limerick a month later and Mícheál told me he wanted to tackle two things. Up to then, music education was very elitist: Essentially classical music. He was going to bring in popular, country, dance, as well as classical and traditional. This was very radical. And university degrees in music were very theoretical then; he was going to bring performance into the heart of the university.

And I thought: ‘Oh. my goodness! This is exactly what I’ve been thinking about, reading, writing about.’ All these ideas I had in my mind, he was saying, ‘I’m going to do this’. I was so excited. I’d no idea how, but I wanted to be part of this plan.

The encounter on the avenue in Glenstal, whether it took five minutes or 10, changed my life. But I didn’t know then I would spend the next two and a half decades working with Mícheál to realise this dream, would fall in love, marry, and share my life with him.

At first, I had no idea of any sense of love, or spark. I just found it terribly exciting and stimulating to be building something new and different that was going to change the way music was taught, not just in Ireland, but internationally. So those were the emotions in the early days.

As time went on, some sense of excitement and passion for the project grew more personal. It was very gradual: I think both of us tried to deny it for quite a while for reasons including that we had a professional relationship. The feelings were there, but we put them aside; didn’t act on, or acknowledge them.

I think Mícheál was always a very good person and wanted to do the right thing, and the right thing by everyone. He was negotiating the end of his first marriage, so it was a complex time; it was a time of love, but also of loss. It wasn’t a clear, uncomplicated road in front of us, so we probably avoided it for as long as we could. And then a point came where we just couldn’t anymore.

I know where it was… on the river Shannon in Loughrea. It was maybe 1999. We were always drawn back to the river. We’d go out on one of those cruisers, just for space away from everything. It was on one of those trips we first put words on it, actually named it for what it was: That it was love.

Love makes its own demands. I guess, for the first time we were answering those demands and acknowledging the truth of them and that was wonderful, but perhaps also a little daunting. We both worked very hard to live out our feelings with awareness that the circle of love was bigger than just us. There were children as well, and other relationships.

Over time, the growing reassurance that everyone was OK as much as they could be opened up more space for us to really live that love. As we felt on more solid ground, the more wonderful and magical that space became, and we could live in to it. The two greatest gifts in my life are that relationship, and our son, Luke.

I genuinely feel that, for all the loss, I am extraordinarily blessed, because I have two enormous loves. And what more could you want from your life? Only that.

‘Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin: A Life in Music: A Collection of Essays, Reflections, and Poems’ is inspired by the musical life of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, with contributions from musicians, dancers, artists, academics, students, and poets. Published by Cork University Press; from bookshops and www.corkuniversitypress.com.