Kildare's Christy Moore donates personal memorabilia to national music archive

For more than 50 years, Kildare singer Christy Moore’s music has reverberated throughout the world. A legendary singer, collector, storyteller and activist, the songs that he sings help to tell the story of Ireland — the good and bad, the triumphs and hardships.

After turning 80, Christy Moore has donated his entire personal collection to the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) in Dublin. This collection contains a vast store of rare manuscripts, recordings, letters, setlists and unseen lyrics that opens a window into a creative spirit and social conscience that has shaped generations.

Cartlann Christy Moore, a new documentary from ITMA and TG4, uses these collections to explore the life and music of Christy at a level never captured before. Directed by Ciarán Ó Maonaigh (Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s, Sé Mo Laoch), the film features new interviews and recordings of Christy, along with contributions from some of Ireland’s best-known artists. 

“I love the idea of my songs being in the archive and some young person in Australia or America, Clare or Belfast, being able to go on a website and get the words and hear the tune and the melody and have the chords,” says Christy Moore. “Songs have a power within them to draw us in, affect us and cause us to go forward with laughter, or to shed a tear, or to stand up and be counted. Those things are what make great songs.”

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“Encountering Christy Moore and his personal collections, I was struck by the sheer vastness of his output over almost 60 years,” says director Ciarán Ó Maonaigh. “Countless songs and melodies that are engrained into our consciousness as Irish people. His focus, energy and all-out to commitment to song was fascinating and awesome to behold.”

“It is a tremendous honour that Christy Moore is placing his trust in ITMA to illuminate his artistic philosophy, his deep gratitude to those who preserved songs before him, and to inspire younger generations to continue composing in the traditional ballad form he has mastered,” says ITMA CEO Liam O’Connor.

Cartlann Christy Moore will premiere on TG4 at 22:10 on New Year’s Eve, December 31^st, 2025. 

About ITMA

Based in Dublin, the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) is home to the largest, most comprehensive collection of Irish traditional music, song, and dance in the world. ITMA digitises, preserves and offers free universal access to valuable recordings, photographs, manuscripts, and other archived materials that would otherwise be lost.

ITMA is a living archive serving a living tradition, at the core of that is its philosophy to engage contemporary artists with archival materials to inspire new art. In recent years, this philosophy has manifested itself through ITMA’s own productions, which include its Drawing from the Well YouTube series, the 2024 series Taoscadh ón Tobar, which aired on TG4, and the 2024 feature documentary Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s, which premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival, was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2024 Irish Film and Television Academy Awards, and has been screened and broadcast across Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Japan.