A selection of reviews by Irish Times writers.

Best of Irish: Conor Byrne, Méabh O'Hare, Gavin Ralston & Andrew Murray

Little Theatre, Skerries

The mantle has been passed to the next generation. This impromptu quartet, gathered under the fine patronage of Music Network for a whirlwind 14-date tour, is as fine a gathering of trad's next generation as you'll find this side of a Comhaltas-fuelled Starship Enterprise.

Flute, fiddle, guitar and voice were the scaffolding, but the tunes and songs were the bricks and mortar. Marrying the most stalwart traditional pieces - passed on from Tommy Peoples, Paddy Fahy, the Ó Domhnaills and many more, each duly namechecked - with contemporary tunes, many of them written by Byrne and O'Hare, alongside beauties from Richard Thompson, Máire Breatnach, Tim O'Brien and Paul McGrattan, this was not so much the past colliding with the present as the tradition growing into its skin as it navigates a path through the 21st century.

The Little Theatre offered a welcoming gabháil, but O'Hare's fiddle and Ralston's guitar took a while to loosen their collars. Murray's magnificent voice was the glue that held the tunes together.

Lurking in a netherworld in which vocal cords are drenched in a blend of warm tar and brown sugar, his voice enveloped the gorgeous miner's refrain Schooldays Out and the eternally classical Lord Franklin with equal parts of grace and danger.

Byrne's original tunes were a revelation: cheekily flaunting the usual conventions of reel time, yet intensely respectful of the DNA that defines them, they nipped and tucked between O'Hare's fiddle and Ralston's self-effacing guitar, egoless.

O'Hare's viola made a brief appearance, heralding a gorgeous Tommy Peoples tune, and she shifted seamlessly from jigs to reels and polkas, but it was the slow reel that highlighted her bow hand, an apt reminder of why she was voted TG4's young traditional musician of the year for 2001.

The temperature was just reaching boiling point when it was time to go, but this being only the second night of their tour, it's reasonable to suppose they'll keep the fire well stoked for the rest of their heady fortnight on the road.

Siobhán Long

• Touring until January 27th. More details from 01-6719429

Veronica Nicholson,

Fiona Woods & Jim Vaughan

Galway Arts Centre

Three artists based in the west of Ireland provide the opening show for the 2002 visual-arts programme at Galway Arts Centre.

Using elements of traditional sculpture, installation and video, Fiona Woods offers a subtle, clever and enduring combination of imagery and associations, exploring the role of woman as child-bearer, nurturer, artisan, mother and child.

The potency of her vision, together with the inventive quality of the work - at times reminiscent of that of Dorothy Cross - confirms Woods as an articulate and intuitive communicator.

Veronica Nicholson offers two distinct and contrasting strands. The poignant, votive Natur Morte: Roadkills presents a series of photographic tableaux of dead birds and animals posed in naive, stilted semblances of life, accompanied by a collection of small bones.

The second strand explores perceptions of womanhood, the artist photographed in stereotypical situations of perceived feminine weakness and imperfection in Cage, while the complementary Ambiguity offers strident juxtaposed images of the Virgin Mary and Sheela-na-gigs.

Nicholson presents work that is powerful, edgy, upfront and clearly heartfelt. It is perhaps in her quieter moments that she achieves her most enduring work, however.

Jim Vaughan presents a series of small colour photographs depicting seemingly arbitrary moments of everyday life in a rural community.

The results are neither documentary - the only overt hint of subtextual direction coming from the exhibition's ironic title, Local News - nor casual snapshots, any sense of spontaneity being dispelled by the evident attention to composition and technical detail.

Vaughan proposes that everything has equal merit or weight as a subject for artistic expression, and that it is the artist's choice and treatment that

underpin the work, the abstraction of subtext in favour of the purely visual.

Ian Wieczorek

• Runs until February 2nd. More details from 091-565886