Apart from Cran's regular guests, fiddler Kevin Glackin and singer/clavinetist Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, the stalwarts are Sean Corcoran, Desi Wilkinson and piper Ronan Browne: three good men and true who, although individually well-respected in the Irish trad world, are collectively better known abroad than at home.

They make for an unusual mix: the ould moaning majesty of Ronan Browne's much-recorded uilleann pipes (Riverdance/AfroCelt etc); Desi's beautiful, nervy flutter on various flutes (all tongue, throat and upper lungs), with his Irish, Breton and East European repertoire; Sean's propulsive bouzouki and powerfully ornamented, traditional songs in English, Irish and Scots Gaelic - all basted with Cran's manly three-part vocal harmonies.

A fit-looking 54, Sean is the veteran of the outfit: the roadsweeper moustache faintly dating him back to the old folk club in Slattery's of Capel Street, which he ran with Kevin Coniffe. Together, they also formed the vocal harmony group, The Press Gang, who inspired, among others, the Voice Squad.

After doing Irish Studies in Queen's, Sean was a "traditional arts field officer" for the Northern Ireland Arts Council between 1987 and 1995. He is now living in his home town of Drogheda. Exactly a decade younger, Belfast-born multi-instrumentalist Desi is a friendly, self-deprecatory character; the hoarse voice readily wheezing off into absurdist Northern laughter. He is a former "artist in the community" for the Arts Council in the North, and has just finished a Ph.D thesis on ethnomusicology - about traditional music in Brittany, where he lived for four years.

At 34 - and six foot three inches - Dubliner Ronan is both the tallest and the babe of the trio. A technically proficient piper, he oozes confidence from every clean-shaven pore. Having won several All-Ireland and Fleadh prizes, he made his own concert-pitch (in D) pipes himself.

The band came together in Carberry's pub in Drogheda and, later, in the trad scene in Belfast during the Troubles.

"Belfast had a kind of an intensity to it because to go out and play music was almost a statement, even to go out socialising in Belfast, you were making a conscious decision to go out in spite of all this shite that was going on," says Desi.

Even Ronan would go up North regularly to check out older Belfast musicians such as Sean McAloon, the Falls Road piper and reedmaker. "McAloon was a big uilleann piper on the Falls Road when there was only a handful in the country," says Sean. "Even when the Troubles began, he was teaching people from the Shankhill Road."

Desi did not grow up with music in the house - "although my da was a great old yarn-spinner" - but coming from University Street, then an old working class area, he was only around the corner from Botanic Avenue where Tommy Gunn (the influential Fermanagh fiddler and Boys of the Lough founder-member) held court in his B and B.

Sean's background is different: "My father and his mother's side were all Co Meath musicians, the classic rural background, but I came from a seaport town and people there had all kinds of fascinating songs. This whole thing about folk music being a rural thing is nonsense, it was a popular culture and it was everywhere."

While still a schoolboy, he recorded locals and factory workers, in particular a great local song-source, Mary Ann Carolan - "one of the Usshers, a Drogheda woman who never left the town in her life." He adds: "My grandfather sang shanties."

Ronan, meanwhile, had a famous grandmother: Delia Murphy from Mayo, the Irish balladpopstar of countless 78s (If I Was A Blackbird, Spinning the Wheel, for instance).

"They had this practice set of pipes which Leo Rowsome had made for my older brother Garvan, but he stopped playing. So they started me when I was seven, and then drummed it into me, and took me to the Piobairi Uilleann from the beginning, and did all the Fleadhs, won the all-Irelands."

Sean magisterially observes of the fleadhs: "Younger people don't remember how crucial they were in the 1960s. When you think of the newspaper headlines about the Enniscorthy Fleadh - you'd think it was Sodom and Gomorroh, the ICA constantly railing against these scenes of mortal sin. After the 1950s, when the Fleadhs really began to catch on, it was like open sesame, and suddenly all these old guys who had been in the dark and sneered at for the past 20 years, suddenly found that thousands of kids wanted to hear them, they were heroes again. The ould fellahs went mad."

Ronan met veteran Clare fiddler Peadar O Loughlin in Milltown Malbay in 1986. "I remembered him from these tapes my parents made playing with Mrs Crotty and Willie Clancy, so when my mother introduced me to him, I said, `but you're dead'!".

The old man seems to have taken it rather well, and Browne and he recorded a popular album together a decade ago, The South West Wind, and are now talking about renewing the acquaintance.

Although all three tap into the sources of the older musicians, music and song-collecting has been Sean's life's work. With the Arts Council in the North, he produced the Harvest Home series, now lodged with the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, and the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Merrion Square.an Breathnach and Tom Munnelly for the Department of Folklore in UCD.

More recently, his recordings of John Kennedy, a singer, fife/whistle/flute-player from Cullybackey, near Ballymena, have been commercially released in the UK. "The fundamental truth is that traditional dance music is a non-sectarian sport," says Desi. "Liking the music or not in the North has never had anything particularly to do with religious or political background. But in the last 20 to 30 years, there has been a fairly conscious attempt to equate political opinions with cultural expression and I would always argue against the simplifications of the `two traditions' theory.

"I would doubt that anyone playing the dance music now would be a rampant loyalist, and I know of Orangemen who play traditional Irish dance music. But some people try to put sectarian meanings on it.

"Another thing that upsets me is the way people juxtapose Irish traditional dance music and Orange marching tunes, which come from a military tradition. You could juxtapose the Orange tunes with a similar green marching tradition like the Land League bands, and everything of the Hibernian ilk, some melodies are even the same. And of course you can get march tunes that have turned into jigs - but the dance music is totally different."

Sean also touches on some interesting experiences in Belfast while working for the Arts Council.

"I used to go around showing people the Sam Henry Collection" - of English language Ulster songs - "but some of these people, with their mindset, couldn't link up with the fact that this was once a popular culture, rather than being part of their heritage alone."

Cran's Music Network tour opens tonight at the Coach House, Dublin Castle, and then tours to Castlecomer, Listowel, Bantry, Tralee, Portlaoise, Clifden, Castlebar, Manorhamilton, Carlingford, New Ross and Cahir. Details on 01-6719429