Certainly the phenomenal success of Bill Whelan's Riverdance, as well as Irish artists such as Enya and even The Cranberries, has revealed a huge market for Irish music abroad, but one feels that with a band like Altan, it was always going to be purely a matter of time before the world cottoned on to their graceful charms. I think they already proved that there was an audience for our type of music. If you look at the likes of Clannad's 'Harry's Game'. That's in Gaelic, so out of the millions of people who bought that record, very few would have had a clue what was being sung, all they knew was that they liked it. And it's the same for ourselves.
People pick up on the emotion, the expression of that emotion, rather than the actual words.
And that's a very universal thing. If Ciaran readily admits similarities between Clannad and his own band, he's still quick to dismiss such comparisons being taken too far. I think people draw these comparisons more out of our sharing the same roots rather than our necessarily aping their sound. The similarities that are there are perfectly natural, given that we came from the same source basically. Musically, or any other way, I couldn't really say which way we're going to go.