Since 'Guest' does not deign to identify himself, let me do so. He is Tom Munnelly and has been waging a vindictive campaign against anything published by Musical Traditions since Fred McCormick's review of the Cronin collection.

Take the time to read Fred's review at www.mustrad.org.uk and you'll discover a reviewer who was bending over backwards to express his appreciation of Mrs Cronin's singing - his critique was directed towards the book, not the singer.

I cannot make any positive comments about the singing of Ann Mulqueen, a showband singer who discovered sean-nos later in life, but didn't leave her previous vocal style behind.

As for 'Around the Hills of Clare', I stand by everything I wrote in my review. The booklet accompanying the CDs is the worst ever written on Irish traditional song by a long mark and is utterly riddled with errors.

I did make numerous favourable comments about the songs in my Musical Traditions review, a fact which seems to have escaped Tom Munnelly, who's reading between the lines as ever.

More importantly, the fact that Breathnach wrote something doesn't make it right and his comments regarding the Irish Catholic Church's attitude towards traditional music were way off the mark. Munnelly should consult historians on the matter.

Then Munnelly makes the ridiculous comment that Fred's review somehow made the rest of the Cronin material unobtainable. This is a ridiculous conceit - it was her grandson's inability to write lovingly and coherently about his grandmother which caused the problems - when a book on a singer doesn't include even a half-decent biography then something must be wrong.

As for 'Around the Hills of Clare', Pat Mackenzie and Jim Carroll should be congratulated for making their recordings available, but when it comes to writing about the singers' sources they have less than an inkling about not very much.

Geoff