Sir, – Great news! I am suddenly very rich!
The copy of The Irish Times that I happened to buy last Saturday morning included a series of astonishing misprints that will render it very valuable to collectors in the future.
An article appeared in The Ticket, purporting to be an estimation of "The 50 greatest Irish albums of all time" (Ticket, July 11th) but, excitingly, the correct number one ("Ghostown" by The Radiators) (yes, that is how the title is spelled), was missing!
And there were other amazing mistakes.
Yes, there were albums that all Irish music fans adore. (There were also one or two that should be used as Frisbees, in my view. But that is the nature of these lists.) What got me and finally convinced me that the printer had been befuddled is that not one of the following brilliant artists appeared: Aslan, Frances Black, Mary Black, the Blades, the Boomtown Rats, the Bothy Band, Sonny Condell, Damien Dempsey, Mick Flannery, Dolores Keane, Sean Keane, Rory Gallagher, the Gloaming, Sinead Lohan, Horslips, Imelda May, Microdisney, Christy Moore, Moving Hearts, Eleanor McEvoy, Lisa O’Neill, Declan O’Rourke, Camille O’Sullivan, Saint Sister, September Girls, Sharon Shannon, Something Happens, Stiff Little Fingers, That Petrol Emotion, Pierce Turner and the Virgin Prunes.
How can the printing process have gone so embarrassingly wrong? I assume these ghastly errors of omission were corrected in later editions, and that my own copy is almost if not completely unique.
I enjoyed the rest of the paper, a tonic for the troops. – Yours, etc,
JOSEPH O’CONNOR,
Frank McCourt Professor
of Creative Writing,
University of Limerick.
Sir, – I would like to commend Lauren Murphy and Ed Power for their 50 best Irish albums of all time list. It was refreshing and, as a young Irish musician and music fan, empowering. I would not have read the article had I not been told there was going to be few surprising selections. Even still, I was half expecting “U2 – Greatest Hits” to place first.
To see contemporary artists shown the respect they deserve by placing them in and among the greats was a welcome change.
The pantheon of legendary Irish musicians is often made to seem impenetrable, but this list showed that new artists should be inspired, not intimidated, by their predecessors. – Yours, etc,
JAKE TIERNAN,
Galway.