The Crossroad Conference proceedings -- conference in 1996, proceedings copyrighted and printed in 1999 -- include a contribution from Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, whose Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology, from Queens University Belfast, researched Tommie Potts and his music, and was completed one year before Potts' death.

Ó Súilleabháin's biographical sketch of Potts includes these sentences.

"In 1935, at the age of twenty-three, he joined the Dublin Fire Brigade as a full-time fireman, a career which he was to follow for eleven years. The outbreak of the war, however, in 1939 caused the reintroduction of longer working hours, and he made his final switch in jobs in 1946, at the age of thirty-four, when he moved to the Rent Collection Office of Dublin Corporation. The move from Fireman to Rent Collection Officer, however, was also occasioned by a traumatic incident where several of his fellow workers died in an explosion in a Dublin chemical factory, which attracted national headlines. I believe that the post-traumatic stress caused by this incident stayed with Tommie Potts for the remainder of his life, and may well have affected the intense deepening of the nature of his musical expression. It may be no coincidence that it was in the decade immediately following this trauma that he embarked on a systematic exploration of aspects of his music which led directly to the development of his uniquely innovative style."

page 177,
Crossroads or twin track? Innovation and tradition in Irish traditional music
© Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, author, and the Crossroads Conference, 1996
Proceedings published in Dublin: Whinstone Music, 1999