from Aoife Nic Cormaic Compositions
‘Béal Bán’ and its partner jig ‘56’ were two of the first tunes I ever wrote. I grew up in an Irish speaking household in Dublin but my parents weren’t native Irish speakers and they only began to speak Irish at home when I was born. Consequently and probably as a result of trying to pacify a crying baby while also looking up words in a dictionary our early vocabulary was peppered with words that didn’t mean what we thought they meant or sometimes didn’t exist at all! ‘Béal Bán’ was one of those.