Two years ago, Bernie Lloyd and Terry McCabe started planning a concert that would bring together music lovers from North and South and commemorate all the dead of 1798. This week they saw the fine result of all their plans, practice and panic - three performances of Mozart's Requiem in Wexford, Dublin and Belfast.
Appropriately, the huge choir was made up of groups from Fermanagh, Carlow, Belfast and Wexford together with the Ulster Orchestra under the baton of Christopher Bell. The Dublin performance, in the National Concert Hall on Wednesday evening, was attended by the President, Mrs McAleese, as well as politicians and religious representatives.
The concerts also got the firm support of the British Council and indeed, its newly elected director-general, Dr David Drewry, came to Dublin for the event. It was his first trip to Ireland, being more accustomed to travelling slightly further afield as leader of scientific expeditions to Greenland, Antarctica and Svalbard.
Harold Fish, the council's Dublin representative who hosted a reception in the Carolan Room during the interval, confided that he had a rather unusual plan for breakfast the next day. After hearing that the Mountjoy Prison kitchens had recently been awarded the Q Mark for quality, he asked the Mountjoy governor, John Lonergan, if he could bring Dr Drewry for breakfast in gaol on the way to the airport.
Another constant presence at the concerts included the BBC film crew committed to making a documentary about the project called The Trumpets Shall Sound. Director Clare Delargy and her team have followed the organisers for the past few weeks, even trailing Bernie into her kitchen, which had become an impromptu concert office.
There was a large Dail presence packed into the National Concert Hall's balcony, including Hugh Byrne, Tony Gregory, Ivan Yates, and Brendan Howlin, while the Papal Nuncio, the Most Reverend Luciano Stroero, Gavin Broder, the Chief Rabbi, and Frank Sellar, the Presbyterian Moderator, were just three of the religious leaders on hand. Other guests included Jean Kennedy Smith, the US ambassador; Veronica Sutherland, her British counterpart; Michael Henson, the chief executive of the Ulster Orchestra; Declan Kiberd, who was there as a guest of the British Council, and Seamus Dooley, the Wexford County Manager.