Mudlark Ballads

Digging is a national Irish pastime. From Irish migrant workers toiling in Scottish potato fields to navvies tunnelling the canals and roadways of Empire, the Irish hand has never been far from a spade. That was, at least, until the digital age, when life’s joys seem to lie not in the ground, but conspicuously beneath our fingertips. For Macdara Yeates, an Irish folk singer barely midway through his thirties, his digging takes a different form. “I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life,” jokes Macdara. “Though I suppose, yes, I do a fair bit of digging for songs. In old books and archives.