2026 Obit: Eithne Vallely of Armagh Pipers Club

Subject: Obit: Eithne Vallely of Armagh Pipers Club
From: Felipa
Date: 22 Aug 26 - 10:27 AM

Eithne Vallely, 80, fiddle player, Irish teacher, co-founder of Armagh Pipers Club with her husband Brian, has died as the result of being knocked down by a truck.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/musician-eithne-vallely-dies-after-being-hit-by-truck-in-co-armagh/a/160371295.html

Condolences to Eithne's friends and family, which include several players of Irish traditional music.

Subject: RE: 2026 Obit: Eithne Vallely of Armagh Pipers Club
From: GUEST,Felipa
Date: 24 Aug 26 - 12:05 PM

Journalist and fellow fiddler Martin McGinley's tribute to Eithne Vallely on Highland Radio, at about 38 min into the programme https://highlandradio.com/2026/08/24/the-greg-hughes-show-monday-24-08-2026/

Subject: RE: 2026 Obit: Eithne Vallely of Armagh Pipers Club
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 24 Aug 26 - 12:30 PM

At that point in the program this is what will play:

Tribute to Traditional Music Legend Eithne Vallely: Donegal fiddler Martin McGinley joins the show to pay tribute to Lifford-born musician, educator, and Armagh Pipers Club co-founder Eithne Vallely, who tragically passed away aged 81 following a road collision. Martin reflects on her vast legacy and immense contribution to traditional Irish music.

Subject: RE: 2026 Obit: Eithne Vallely of Armagh Pipers Club
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 29 Aug 26 - 09:58 AM

I was sad to hear of this tragic accident that took the life of a fine musician. I send my condolences to all those who know and love her and have added her name to the "In Memoriam". thread. Rest in Peace Eithne.

Subject: RE: 2026 Obit: Eithne Vallely of Armagh Pipers Club
From: GUEST,Philippa
Date: 07 Sep 26 - 09:41 AM

I expected more response as so many of us would have learned tunes from the Armagh Pipers Club's books. But here is a long personal memoir from musician Brian Finnegan:

https://www.facebook.com/brian.finnegan.710/posts/pfbid02tF7P5ZuRTRYYYxgCMSRrxSoVBjco3ZjFKoUcMt2hvwDUL19dqtoJYbBYxMhbZDPjl

Brian Finnegan
23 August at 23:07
·
Eithne!
I was 8 years old when the story of my young life would cross paths with the story of yours; somehow, miraculously I found my way to that first Armagh Athletic Club training session with Brian and then through the door of the Armagh Pipers Club.
I saw behind your sternness, your no-nonsense discipline in a class of young snotty nosed whistlers, and soon enough you saw me. You'd asked for one tune to be practiced, i arrived the following week with a few extra, just because i was curious, just because the ember had started to glow. I saw the softening in your eyes as you saw me, not a word said but that singular moment of recognition was the moment, and how often were you witness to the very same moment in countless young lives.

Thereafter the lines between where my family stopped and your family began were blurred, so interwoven at times it seemed; the cross countries, and Fleadhs, the track and field meets and Féilte, the mountain races and CBS Slogadh competitions, there i was in the rear view mirror!!

During the darkest days of the Troubles when there were those who told you both that culture was a waste of time, you doubled down and opened the doors of the Pipers Club and your hearts even wider.

In all my life, I've never known your equal, never been more inspired to swim against the flow; 'be yourself' you said, 'anything less is a false salvation.'

You also once told me what a privilege it was as a teacher to have a generation of talent through the club like the one i was part of, that it happened perhaps once in a teacher's life if they were fortunate enough. The truth was Eithne, the generational talent kept on coming and eyes all over the musical world looked towards Armagh. Brilliant young players, former students returning to teach, inspired to teach with a love of teaching handed down by you.

Too many stories, but perhaps one of the most beautiful moments I've ever been witness to in music, and to this day fills my heart with pride was in the summer of 2013 at Celti'Cîmes Festival in the French Alps village of Albiez-Montrond. On the Saturday night of the Fest, there was a thunderous session in full swing in one the pubs with the brilliant young Armagh Pipers Club protégés Cúíg in full flight.
Yourself and Brian arrived and as the crowd parted to give you space and offer stools. Cúíg, without fanfare, shifted down through the gears with such subtlety and grace and landed on Cooley's Reel as way of inviting you both to join in. It was such a moving display of respect and a triumph of the spirit from this brilliant young maverick band that it took my breath away.

Your loss is incomprehensible to me Eithne, my heart is broken, but you live on in all my tunes, in the decency of your children and their beautiful families and in your immeasurable influence on all our lives.

My love and blessings to Brian, Niall, Cillian, Caoimhin, Lorcan and Maire and all the Vallely clan.

Suaimhneas síoraí duit, a Eithne.

The Tune (for Brian and Eithne)

When you intercept a child’s
life with a tune,
you don’t know
what that tune will do.
Inside the child’s body,
in her ribcage,
in her larynx,
in her long, string legs.
What confrontation occurs
between the child’s
private terrors and
the invisible tremor of
mercury under her brow
the tune is now?
Years later, it still yields
windfalls of notes
like apples,
bringing sense and meaning
where sense and meaning
happen to fail.
A tune is a subversive.
The angel-puff of resin on a bow,
the backward scrape of a wrist,
the coil of umber flung
from the chewed fingertips
of the child who isn’t even,
necessarily, the most gifted,
the most dextrous,
but who, for reasons
best known to the tune, has swallowed
the tune.
To teach a child to listen
is to teach a child to sing.
To pull chords from the air like ribbon
and braid them into a child’s hair
and heal them to her wing-
stumps, is to honour
the dark thumps
of the child’s obscure
ache, curling slowly to a flake
of fiddle scroll –
how can you know
what haunted roads
that child will walk down later
kept safe, not by the tune
necessarily, but by having
known and loved and swallowed
the tune.
When you gather
the crusty-nosed cubs
from their sunken estates,
or from the raw
countryside of an occupied land,
and teach them to speak
their indigenous, musical tongue
(which is propulsive in its hum
at the back of the neck,
base of the spine)
you equip them to face
the fists of the world better
than if you’d passed them a gun:
nothing but the sublime
intuition for rhythm.
They’ll learn to lob it from the catapults of their mind at every ogre.
Which is what saved us
once upon a time,
and will save us again.
Ah, tunes of earth,
with your peaty,
seed-meal lines,
your subversive and redemptive beat:
sustain us. Find our children.
Tap their feet.

Morna Finnegan