Ciaran Mac Mathuna has amassed a priceless collection of Irish folklore and music which is now being preserved in CD form and will become a valuable asset for future historians of the genre.
He is not alone in this. Many years ago, David Hammond made his first radio broadcast. A folklorist like Ciaran - in his case, north of the Border - he started collecting when he was 20 years of age; he is now a sprightly 70. The BBC was not interested in the tapes he was offering but Mac Mathuna was, and so began a distinguished career in broadcasting which eventually led him to permanent employment with the BBC. Later, he became a freelance broadcaster and now he runs the independent film company in Belfast, Flying Fox.
He makes documentary films for the BBC, RTE and Channel 4. His passion though, has been to collect and document folklore and music from both traditions in Northern Ireland. It has led him along interesting paths, into the heartland of divided communities - unionist and nationalist - gathering the rich tradition that both sides have to offer.
There are stark contrasts, he says, but also some uniting factors. One of them is the bloodcurdling nature of many of the songs he has listened to over the years. No question about it, he adds, some of the songs bear the hallmark of bitterness and hatred. But he was a collector, and his function was not to judge - more to observe and document.
All of this is in the context of this year's Merriman summer school at Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare. The cliche is that the school is nothing more than "a lark in the Clare air". Of course there is no bar on fun at the school, but the participants also get down to serious issues, to debates of some importance and to set dancing.
There is some concern that not enough younger people are coming to the school, but Ciaran Mac Mathuna thinks he has never seen so many young faces at the Clare event and believes the school will go on and thrive.
In David Hammond's rambles around Northern Ireland - in houses, pubs and wherever the wind took him - he collected some extraordinary material. It will be passed on to the Irish Traditional Music Archives in Dublin and to Robbie Hannon of the Ulster Folk Museum.
Ciaran Mac Mathuna' s efforts south of the Border and David Hammond's in the North will form a body of research material that will provide a source bedrock into the new millennium. The two friends will be remembered as the templars of a special quest.
If there is plenty of sedition in the Southern tradition, there is no less in the Northern one - but of course, there is more to it than North and South. The two traditions encompass all the emotions, David Hammond said in his lecture to the summer school at the weekend, including sense of place, love, distress and sometimes, the pain of living.
Hammond's tastes are eclectic. He also likes north American music and believes that the Scottish and English musical traditions in the North have created a special and unique fusion.
The theme of this year's Merri man school is the significance of song and singing in popular culture. Tonight John A. Murphy, the emeritus professor of Irish history at UCC, will deliver a lecture entitled A Personal Inheritance of Song.
He won't be offended, I hope, if I recount that a wag at the summer school said he was very hard to crank up into song but that once started, it was even harder to get him to stop.