He was like that when he came to our folk club, not keen to jam along after the gig... but that was thirty years ago...

On the matter of blues harps for Irish tunes, the Paddy Richter tuning is highly desirable. There are many G tunes that you'd want to play on a G harp that won't work well for you with just the standard tuning, and that's a lot of tunes. The sixth note in the lower register isn't there on the harp. The fix is to tune up the hole 3 blow reed by a whole tone. That note is already replicated at 2-draw so you don't actually lose a note of the scale. It isn't so vital with D harps, but I retune all my 10-hole harps to Paddy Richter. You need a bit of inexpensive kit to do the fix yourself. As long as you understand the mechanics of free reeds and have a steady hand it's fairly simple. Incidentally, I've always preferred low D harps to the standard ones, which, for me, are too shrill to be in keeping with what other sessioneers are doing.