When Cooney arrived in the district 12 years ago, he was relatively penniless. Begley: "We gave him the basement downstairs, but he went up to the hill one day walking, and decided he was going to live there, so I said, well `I'll sell you that site for a shilling'."
Begley took us for a walk up to the hill with his shy, nine-year-old daughter, Meabh, laughing at us gasping at the vertiginous view down past the steep cliffs with the sheep and wild goats, perched on the cliffs far above the turquoise water and rocks below. Locally, the weather is more noteworthy than the scenery, but one feature of the landscape that gets everyone going is the spot where Cooney lived for a couple of years in a mobile home. Still nestling in a sheltered niche dug out of the turf, it sits beside Cooney's Buddha statue, which gazes out over the valley, only an ass's roar from the lightning-struck ruin of the Ballydavid tower, a Napoleonic look-out post and signal tower.
After Begley, the 45year-old Cooney is a different creature altogether, but also larger than life. Although an Irish citizen and fluent as Gaeilge, he was born in Melbourne. His father was a first-generation Irish Catholic (and professional swing guitarist) who converted to Methodism when he married. Steve, the youngest of six boys, became politicised at the time of conscription for the Vietnam war, and before leaving Australia to avoid the draft, was initiated into an Aboriginal tribe. He still bears the tribal scars on his shoulders.
Technically, the man's music is a staggering amalgam of didgeridoo and Irish drones, baroque guitar, reggae (he lived and played with Rasta soul brothers for a while) - an encyclopaedic range of classical and folk styles picked up as a session musician in Melbourne, against the backdrop of a busy ethnic music scene involving Yugoslavs, Greeks, Turks and, naturally, Irish.
A busy and elusive man, it took a couple of days to track him down in his house near Ballincota on the southern side of the peninsula. Shuffling around the place in his bare feet, he seemed initially nervous of an interview, and mooched about in the greying dreadlocks, the flickering eyes regarding me dubiously for a while; the soft polite voice belying the extraordinary drive the man has. Every surface in the house was covered in a jumble books, cakes, candles, instruments, Aboriginal artefacts and sheets of paper with the bizarre squiggles and spirals of his own musical notation system.
When I expressed interest, he leapt up and enthusiastically began to explain it to me and, very rapidly, taught me to beat out a whole series of complex time signatures - written in "rhythm rings". It's a system he had used with huge success in teaching, communicating and indeed remembering musical ideas. Now, under music teacher Jean O'Brien at the Mercy Community College in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, it is being used to teach music for a Junior Cert course.
A chaotic character, Cooney is always up to his neck, working through the night on a myriad of local projects which swamp his time: teaching local musicians; the new CD and song-book, Rabhlai Rabhlai, a recording of local people intoning traditional rhymes over Cooney's elegant compositions; or archiving the old musicians and sean nos-ers: "It's very important before these old people pass on, because everything is getting so homogenised, and the young players are playing so fast now, that they're losing some of the feel. I sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but I love the groove of the old players, and it's important to listen into that, because if you can play a roots music true to its heart, then it connects with every other roots music."
Apart from touring the world with Begley, Cooney is probably the most sought-after session player, and one of the most significant trad-music arrangers to emerge since Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine. He regularly attracts big-name musicians such as Sharon Shannon and Liam O'Flynn down to his house to develop and record new material. With his guitars and mandolins, didgeridoos and Hammond organ, the man is a one-man orchestra.
He has been playing didgeridoo ever since seeing Rolf Harris at a benefit gig for cyclone damage in Darwin, and he was taught the instrument by tribesmen in Northern Australia. "It's a little bit like Irish didling, with different rhythms expressed as words, but singing is much more powerful in that culture. Like, for example, when they execute someone, that person is literally sung to death. Some songs I am never going to hear, because you don't hear about where they are sung, until you are initiated to a higher level."
He feels very strongly about the methods used to wipe out the culture. "When I was growing up, we knew some Aboriginal people, and I remember they were very emotional and used to cry a lot. Everyone knew they were being assimilated - which sounded fine - but not that the police were forcibly taking the babies from the mothers and putting them into orphanages - as John Pilger said, `hoping the genes will disappear into the lower echelons of the working classes'.
"Australian white culture is young, its ethos is based on the blood sacrifice of Gallipoli, and white Australians are really displaced Europeans with European values. But from my limited experience of Aboriginal culture, they are gentle, humble and forgiving people, full of unbounded generosity. And I must say, I understand Aboriginal society better after being here in Kerry, because this is an aboriginal society and a lot of the value systems are similar."
"Before I met Seamus, I would only ever play with people for a year or two, because people who invest a lot of time in bands tend to end up jockeying for position, and falling out with each other. But Seamus and myself are a good partnership. Seamus is a very complete man: the family, the farm, he does silage, he grows his own veggies, he kills his own meat, and a great musician and beautiful singer, and a great wit."
The pair of them are certainly appreciated by the local music scene: people such as Muiris Ferris, who runs nightly sessions in his Droichead Beag pub, or the voluntary resource centre of Oifig an Cheoil, run by Joan Maguire and piper Eoin Duignan. Cooney: "I had a great sense of failure when I came to Dingle, that as a musician, I couldn't make a living, so I'm very grateful for the people of west Kerry for letting me live here. You'll be a blow-in for three generations around here, but I actually feel accepted."
Watching the daft beast that is Fungie showing off for the early-season tour boats (someone, probably Begley, gagged that it was a Kerryman in a wetsuit), from Slaudeen Strand, I was more struck by the grim sight of a dead calf washed up on the shore; its corpse half-submerged in sand, its front legs tied together with bailing twine.
Later that day, with Begley down at Feothanach strand (close to the site of the Dun an Oir massacre of 1508) the place hosted a similar carnage. Among the bonelike stalks of the feamanach, or oarweed (which local farmers still use as fertiliser), the beach was strewn with the carcasses of sea birds and sheep blown off the cliffs, all in various stages of decay. There were plenty of dogs and calves too, consigned to the waves in the old style: flung from the cliffs, rather than buried.
Standing over another still-born calf, I remarked that there was something tragic about it. In an almost rare moment without levity, Seamus said: "Who are you telling?" Digging its head up out of the sand with his wellie, he said: "If you saw it from a small farmer's point of view, feeding and watching a cow for nine months, and maybe waiting up all night while she is calving - only to see her throw out a dead calf?"
There was nothing a city boy could add to that.
Over St Patrick's weekend Begley and Cooney play St Stephen's Green (with Sharon Shannon and Liam O'Flynn) on Sunday afternoon; The Merchant Inn, Dublin on Monday night; The Temple Bar Music Centre on Pad- dy's night
Hummingbird's documentary, Meitheal: Cooney And Begley, will be shown on St Patrick's Day on RTE 1, at 11.20 p.m. It was originally produced for TnaG, in Irish with subtitles.
Thanks to Joan Maguire and piper Eoin Duignan at Oifig an Cheoil