Pluck of the Irish

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2016 (3842 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With St. Patrick’s Day only five days away, let’s kick things off with a wee bit of advice: if you ever take in a performance by Irish folk duo MacTague & MacAnallen, you might want to refrain from shouting out requests for ditties about mythical beasts with long, spiralling horns protruding from their foreheads.

“We’ve been asked for The Unicorn numerous times and we’ve always replied with a staunch, ‘Sorry, never going to happen,’” says Ross McKernan who, along with his bandmate Michéal O’Hanlon, moved to Winnipeg from Ireland last August. (The guys’ stage moniker combines their mothers’ maiden names, McKernan explains to a suddenly confused scribe.)

“Back home (The Unicorn) is not known and neither are the Rovers. The first time we played Folklorama we were told, ‘You know, at some point you’re probably going to have to do that unicorn song and we were like, ‘Uh, what’s that, exactly?’”

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Just eight months into what McKernan and O’Hanlon hope is a permanent transfer, the lads are already used to people quizzing them, wondering why, precisely, they chose the Canadian Prairies over the Emerald Isle.

“As cheesy as it sounds, it really is the people,” says O’Hanlon, speaking with a thick Irish brogue that brings a smile to the face of a Salisbury House server when he waves off a breakfast menu, stating, “Thanks but I’m trying to watch me figure.”

“Winnipeg’s a city, but it’s got a town vibe — a town-city is what I call it. There’s a definite reason you have ‘friendly’ on your licence plates.”

McKernan, 24, and O’Hanlon, 26, grew up a 10-minute stroll away from one another in County Armagh in Northern Ireland, in a rural community situated roughly halfway between Belfast and Dublin. They attended the same schools, played on the same Gaelic football squads and listened to the same bands, primarily the Clancy Brothers, the Pogues and the Dubliners, they say.

McKernan, who is proficient at drums and banjo, formed the Shenanigans when he was 13 years old. But after an Internet search revealed there were “about 100” other groups in the world answering to that name, the Shenanigans were reborn as Gas Can Ruckus. O’Hanlon, a self-taught guitarist, joined Gas Can Ruckus when the group ballooned to seven members from four, a change that also coincided with a shift in musical direction from rock covers to Irish folk standards mixed with originals.

“The first show we did was a fundraiser for the local hospice,” says O’Hanlon. “We played five or six songs, got a really nice reception and said to each other afterwards, ‘Y’know, we might have something here.’” (Unbeknownst to O’Hanlon, the other members of the band had decided a name-change was in order yet again. He was surprised when they informed him their new tag was O’Hanlons Horsebox, horsebox being a term of affection in their neck of the woods.

“I was like, thanks, now everybody’s going to think I’m the head guy when I’m most certainly not.”)

In 2012, McKernan and O’Hanlon travelled to Dublin to cheer on their hometown heroes, who had qualified for the All-Ireland senior football final. The night before the match, they figured they’d “go on the razz” and popped into the Temple Bar Pub, a popular watering hole in Dublin’s famed Temple Bar district. At some point in the evening, McKernan struck up a conversation with Laura Lazarenko, a Winnipegger travelling through Europe for a year.

“I have cousins in Toronto but I’d never even heard of Winnipeg so I told her, ‘Interesting,’” says McKernan.

Skip ahead 18 months: after touring Lazarenko around his country, and remaining in touch with her once her stay in Ireland was through, McKernan showed up on the doorstep of Lazarenko’s Transcona abode in July 2013. (Quick study: when he is asked what his first impression of Winnipeg’s eastern-most ‘burb was, he replies, “Pink flamingoes everywhere.”)

One of the spots Lazarenko took McKernan during his month-long visit to Winnipeg was Folklorama’s Ireland-Irish Pavilion at Holy Cross School on Dubuc Street. The moment organizers there learned McKernan was a musician, they invited him back the next night as a guest entertainer.

“I wound up playing every night that week and when all was said and done, they asked if I wanted to come again in future years — and this time bring the whole band,” McKernan says.

O’Hanlons Horsebox, which released its latest album Songs and Stories of the Border in August 2015, has appeared at Folklorama twice, in 2014 and 2015. At the end of last summer’s festival, McKernan and O’Hanlon applied for working visas, which would allow them to remain in Canada for two years. The duo put their musical ambitions on hold in order to “let the dust settle,” but by October, they were both itching to strap on their instruments and get up in front of a live audience again.

McKernan placed an ad on Kijiji reading, in part, “We are MacTague & MacAnallen, a pair of folk musicians newly moved to Canada from Ireland. We sing drinking songs, work songs, love songs, protest songs (and) comedy songs.”

In November, a few weeks after their blurb appeared, the fellows opened for Tiller’s Folly, a Celtic band from Canada’s West Coast at the West End Cultural Centre.

“Lots of times back home we’d play in a pub where people wouldn’t necessarily be there to see us — we were like background music,” McKernan says. “But at the West End, people sat and listened intently. As soon as the last note of our first song was played, you could have heard a pin drop before the applause began. That wasn’t a reflection of us — it was a reflection of the audience being respectful of our music. Quite unbelievable, really.”

McKernan and O’Hanlon, who now perform regularly at Fionn MacCool’s on Regent Avenue West, have made the most of their first go-round with a Winnipeg winter. They took in Festival du Voyageur, they toured the sculptures at the Great Ice Show and they tried their hands, er feet, at snowshoeing at Fort Whyte Alive, along with their respective sweethearts. (Yes, O’Hanlon has also found love on this side of the pond.) And although both are well aware this winter season has been a comparatively mild one by local standards, they remain impressed with Winnipeggers’ collective wherewithal to press on in the face of brain-numbing temperatures.

“What I find interesting is nothing stops when it reaches minus whatever, everybody continues to move along as if all is perfectly normal,” McKernan says, doubting he’ll ever get used to “frozen snot and icicles in me beard.

“I’m a smoker so I have to go outside and one time when it was something godawful like minus 25, I heard the crunch of somebody fast approaching through the snow. I thought, ‘Jeez, what horrible emergency has put somebody in such a rush?’ but it simply turned out to be a person out for a jog.”

As for St. Patrick’s Day plans, McKernan will be flying home March 16 to attend his father’s 60th birthday party, while O’Hanlon expects to take up residence at what has become his home away from home, Osborne Village’s Toad in the Hole Pub. (This weekend, the duo is the feature act at an Irish Night event in Miniota.) Past that, the guys intend to record as MacTague & MacAnallen — and see more of their adopted country.

“My girlfriend’s family lives in Montreal and she tells me there’s a massive Irish music scene there so that’s a definite possibility,” O’Hanlon says. “But the two of us have always approached life the same way — we’ve never planned anything but if something looks like fun, we’ll do it.

“It’s like how we ended up in Winnipeg,” McKernan interjects. “Some of our friends back home thought we were crazy but we don’t intend to be 70 years old saying to our grandkids, ‘Jeez, I wish I had done that.’ For us, it’s better to just do it.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca