Oileán Na Marbh is a musical collaboration that speaks out against cruelties of the past, writes Siobhán Long

'Genius is clever theft." Donegal poet, Cathal Ó Searcaigh cites TS Eliot's observation on the nature of creative genius with relish, basking in the delight of mining the past to illuminate the present. He's ruminating on the challenge set by composer, Neil Martin, entranced by Oileán Na Marbh (or "The Island of the Dead"), off the coast of their shared home county of Donegal.

It was here that unbaptised babies were buried, on unconsecrated ground, far from home, in keeping with the dictates of the Catholic church during the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the beginning of this year, at the behest of Temple Bar Cultural Trust, Neil Martin was commissioned to write a suite of music, and it was to Oileán Na Marbh that he cast his ears. Cathal Ó Searcaigh, although lodged high in the mountains of Katmandu at the time, jumped at the chance to populate Martin's music with words both inspired by and impaled on the horrors of a past.

"I saw the island as a kind of limbo, a craggy, desolate, bleak place," Ó Searcaigh says, recounting his first visit there last spring, in the company of Martin.

"I have a great interest in the song tradition in Gaelic, especially the anonymous folk songs of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. I have channelled the energy of those songs into my own love poetry, because I think it's important for a poet to pay homage to what has been done before. Máire Mac an tSaoi was very influential in directing me because she re-possessed the song tradition. From her first collection, she was so immersed in our song repertoire, and I was startled by the newness of it, but at the same time fascinated by how she used the old. It was like this pendulum that was moving from the past into the present, ensuring that there was a future for that past."

Neil Martin, composer, piper, cellist, and founding member of the West Ocean String Quartet, could hardly resist the temptation to lure Ó Searcaigh to the commission, as the pair had previous experience of conjuring words and music out of the ether.

"A few years ago, I had set some of Cathal's poetry to music, in a four movement suite for his own speaking voice," Martin recounts, "and I knew how musical and how rhythmic his poetry was. When Ó Searcaigh reads, he sings his poetry. It's not an arid declamation of something. He brings a musicality, a tone and a tension in a way that I've never heard any other poet do."

Cathal Ó Searcaigh's first step in this collaboration was to locate the voice of the bereaved mother. It was this perspective that created the fulcrum of the suite of music.

"I felt that I had to write it in the voice of a woman from the last century," he explains, "of a mother lamenting the death and burial of her child in this anonymous place, and her suffering. She speaks out strongly against a church that bequeathed these terrible, cruel laws. The whole idea that a child would be buried outside the consecrated territory of a graveyard, and that nobody would speak about it, that forbidden aspect of it was very striking to me."

It was Ó Searcaigh who cast a fresh perspective on the subject matter, when Martin took him to visit Oileán Na Marbh for the first time last spring.

"I knew instinctively that Cathal would bring something highly individual", Martin insists. "It was effortless. Within two weeks of being on the island, he had written four beautiful poems for Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill to sing, and he deliberately put them into an Irish, and a way of thinking, that would have been contemporaneous with 18th- and 19th-century speech and poetry. He made it living within the time when Oileán Na Marbh would have been in use, and that was what set the scene."

"Maighread's is an extraordinary voice for the lament in Irish, I think," Ó Searcaigh adds. "Of course for me, she's the diva of delight in Irish as well."

Having premiered Oileán Na Marbh in Temple Bar last June during the Diversions summer programme, both Martin and Ó Searcaigh are animated at the prospect of this song cycle returning to its home place, or as near as, when it is performed in Ionad Cois Locha, Dunlewey, on December 29th.

"I think all my work is very musical," Ó Searcaigh says. "I identify so much with that singing tradition. The first poems I heard were those of Robbie Burns, read to me by my father when I was only three or four years of age. Burns often wrote words for existing melodies, and when I heard my father read the poems, there was this oracular aspect to the reading, this sense of incantation when he read them out aloud, and ever afterwards there was nothing I wanted to do but to imitate the sounds that I heard as a child. It's a mantric soundscape when someone reads out the poem so well. That has hugely influenced my poems: I want them to be heard in public, so when Neil asked me to do this, it really wasn't that difficult at all."

The West Ocean String Quartet and Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill will perform Oileán Na Marbh at the 13th Frankie Kennedy Winter School in Ionad Cois Locha, Dunlewey on Fri, Dec 29. The Winter School runs from Dec 27-Jan 2. For tickets and all listings, contact: 087-9309656