Garech Browne

Garech Domnagh Browne (25 June 1939 – 10 March 2018) was an Irish art collector and a notable patron of Irish arts, in particular traditional Irish music. He was the founder of Claddagh Records and was instrumental in the formation of The Chieftains. He was often known by a Gaelic translation of his English name, Garech de Brún, or alternatively Garech a Brún, especially in Ireland.

Family and early life Browne was born on 25 June 1939 at Glenmaroon House, on the edge of the Phoenix Park in Chapelizod, Dublin, the eldest of the three sons of Dominick Geoffrey Browne, 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne (1901–2002) and his second wife, Oonagh Browne (née Guinness), daughter of The Hon. Ernest Guinness, the second son of the 1st Earl of Iveagh. Oonagh was a wealthy heiress to the Guinness fortune and the youngest of the three "Golden Guinness Girls", along with her sisters Maureen and Aileen.

Browne's early life was divided between his father's home at Castle MacGarrett, near Claremorris, County Mayo, and his mother's home at Luggala, set deep in the Wicklow Mountains in County Wicklow, which her father Ernest Guinness had bought for her as a wedding present around 1936, from Mervyn Richard Wingfield, 8th Viscount Powerscourt. He later recalled dancing to Irish music at around the age of three as one of his earliest and most vivid memories. Browne subsequently spent more time at Luggala, where his mother hosted lavish parties, more akin to salons, that brought together many Irish and British writers, artists and poets, including Seán O'Casey, Claud Cockburn, Lord Dunsany and Robert Kee, with whom Oonagh had a relationship for several years. One friend recalled being invited to Luggala for lunch and re-emerging "days later blinking into the sunlight, not sure what happened to you but knowing you had a good time".

Financial difficulties and sale of Luggala Although he had inherited a large amount of money, Browne's lifestyle far exceeded his income for much of his life. Purna was the youngest child of HH Sri Mahendra Sinhji, Maharaja of Morvi (1918–57), and his wife, HH The Maharani Sri Vijay Kuverba. The couple had no children. From the time of their marriage Browne spent part of every year in Singapore and India, and in later years the couple lived largely apart, with Purna based in the East, though they remained attached to each other. He was cremated in a private ceremony, and on 10 August 2018 around two hundred guests, including President Michael D. Higgins and his wife Sabina, John Boorman, Paddy Moloney, Bob Geldof, Paul McGuinness, Thomas Kinsella and the former ambassador and poet Richard Ryan, gathered on the shores of Lough Tay, where his nephews Dorian and Julien scattered his ashes. The gate was one of a number of items left to the Irish State by Browne, along with his collection of sixty-nine horse-drawn carriages.

A portrait of Browne as a boy, Head of a Boy, painted at Luggala by Lucian Freud in 1956, was sold at auction in London in March 2019, reported variously as fetching €6.7 million and £5.8 million.

Browne was interviewed at length for the Grace Notes traditional music programme on RTÉ lyric fm, broadcast on 18 March 2010.

A documentary on Browne's life, Garech Browne: Last Days at Luggala, directed by Mick Mahon and produced by John Boorman and Liam McGrath, was broadcast on RTÉ One on 18 December 2019. It featured interviews with Boorman, Bono, Paddy Moloney, Tony Boylan, Grey Gowrie and the biographer Robert O'Byrne, among others, and examined both Browne's cultural legacy and his struggles with alcoholism, loneliness and debt.

In September 2023, Real to Reel: Garech Browne & Claddagh Records, a book by James Morrissey, was published, accompanied by a vinyl album of remastered Claddagh recordings. In the book, the musician Bono compared Browne's preservation work to that of the American folklorist Alan Lomax, saying Browne "saw himself as protecting our music for us", while Morrissey described his subject as "a good old-fashioned cacophony of contradictions", capable of great warmth but also chronic lateness and procrastination. Following Browne's death, a five-year licensing agreement was signed with Universal Music Ireland in 2021 to digitise and remaster more than 300 recordings from the Claddagh catalogue, and in 2023 the label signed the group ØXN, its first new act since 2005.

President Michael D. Higgins paid tribute to Browne following the book's publication, saying that "not only is our generation indebted to him, but future generations will recall his insightful, pioneering work".