I had a good corps at St Joseph’s and we were in Grade 1 but we’d lost a lot of pipers and we struggled for three or four years  until 1998, playing locally in the All Irelands and at the Worlds a couple of times. We didn’t do so well, always around the bottom.  Then Johnny Keogh left the O’Tooles and Dean Hall from Australia took over and one night…

I’m hosting a Zoom meeting for the Piobaireachd Society on Wednesday evening at 8pm UK time to which all members are invited. If you are one of the enlightened you should have already received the link; if not please get in touch. Peter McCalister continues to do a great job for the Society with the Facebook tunes initiative but I thought we should do a bit more. Not sure how…

Composer, arranger and piper Craig Muirhead is offering copies of his popular bagpipe arrangement of ‘Over the Rainbow’ in return for a donation to the National Health Service. Craig writes: ‘I did a wee arrangement of the famous Judy Garland song from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ and it’s on my Facebook page. It’s had a lot of attention and requests for the music. ‘Would it be possible to mention in…

In the first excerpt of his interview Stephen Creighton, Leading Drummer of the World Championship winning St Laurence O’Toole corps, talked of sweeping the boards in Grade 2 at the 1990 Worlds with the St Joseph’s band. But now he wanted more…… We were asked to go to Grade 1 the following season by our own association [the Irish Pipe Band Association] but we chose not to because we didn’t feel…

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report….. The aircraft had as many as six people aboard when it went down yesterday. Sub.-Lt. Abbigail Cowbrough, seen in her Facebook profile photo (above), has been identified as one of the victims of the Canadian military helicopter crash in the Mediterranean on Wednesday. Cowbrough, 23, graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada in 2018 and was serving as a marine system engineering officer aboard HMCS…