O’Connor Donn

O'Connor Donn survives as a reconstruction rather than a tune handed straight down. Cathal McConnell pieced his setting together from an old and worn wax-cylinder recording made around 1901 by the Galway piper Martin O'Reilly — who competed at the Dublin Feis the year he was recorded and later died in a poorhouse — filling in the passages the decayed cylinder had lost. McConnell's version reached a wide audience through Boys of the Lough's The Piper's Broken Finger, and the reel has since been taken up by players from Martin Hayes to Cherish the Ladies.