The Burren, Greater Boston’s legendary venue for Irish music – and much more – is celebrating three decades in 2026, with the official commemoration taking place the weekend of Jan. 17-18. 

During the day on Jan. 17, as part of the Boston Celtic Music Fest’s Dayfest, The Burren will host a series of concerts in the Backroom – performers include Flynn Cohen & Matt Heaton; Diarmuid Ó Meachair with Matt Mulqueen; Accardi, Frankowiciz & Straw; Nathan Gourley & Laura Feddersen with Owen Marshall; Joey Abarta; Liz Hanley with David Mickindley-Ward; and the McCarthy Kelly Ceili Band – as well as participatory sessions in the Front Room.  

That evening, The Burren will sponsor the BCMFest Nightcap concert in Somerville Theatre, headlined by renowned Irish band Altan, with appearances by the McCarthy Family, Scottish Fish and other special guests. 

BCMFest tickets and information available through passim.org/bcmfest.

 The 30th anniversary bash continues the following day, Jan. 18, with Altan performing shows at noon and 3 p.m. in the Backroom. At 5 p.m., there will be a tribute to fiddler Helena Delaney, a Galway native who has been a mainstay of Boston's Irish music scene – and of The Burren's weekly sessions – for decades.

It’s the latest milestone for Burren co-owners/spouses Tommy McCarthy and Louise Costello, who opened the pub about 10 years after meeting each other through the local traditional music scene. In the three decades since then, The Burren has become not only a world-famous mecca for Irish music but also an abundant wellspring for entertainment of numerous varieties. McCarthy and Costello also subsequently opened two other Boston-area enterprises, The Bebop and last year, McCarthy’s/Toad.

“The whole thing from the start was to make [The Burren] a home for musicians,” said McCarthy in a 2024 interview for the Music Museum of New England website. “We felt that if we could get that right, everything would work after that, which we believe it did.”

There are countless stories associated with The Burren, of course, and many ways to tell them. Here are several:

•Live music was a fixture of The Burren right from the beginning, with McCarthy and Costello hosting Irish sessions most every night – a pretty demanding task when you’re running a brand new business. Fortunately, says McCarthy, in time he and Costello were able to call on other local musicians to lead the sessions, like George Keith, Helena Delaney, and the Gannon family (John, Sean and Colm), among many others. Currently, there are Irish sessions on Monday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and on Sunday afternoons, in the Front Room. 

But the Monday session has a story, and legacy, all its own: For the better part of a decade or more, the session took place in the Village Coach House in Brookline Village, until the place was sold in late 1987. It was then revived in 1990 at the Green Briar Pub in Brighton, under the benevolent direction of Larry Reynolds, head of Boston’s Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann chapter. A popular feature of “the Briar” was that its first hour or so was geared to less experienced musicians, with an emphasis on well-known tunes played at a slower tempo.

The session continued after Reynolds’ death in 2013, but six years later the Green Briar – like the Village Coach House – closed down. Fortunately, the event landed shortly thereafter in The Burren and is as popular as ever.

•Other music genres have been staples of The Burren’s session schedule, notably Americana, bluegrass, and old-time – even gypsy jazz. “My brother-in-law used to play gypsy jazz, and I liked it,” says McCarthy. “So I thought, ‘Why not have a session for gypsy jazz?’ Fortunately, in a place like Boston, you can almost always find someone who plays the kind of music you’re looking for.”

•The Burren Backroom has long been a prime concert spot in Greater Boston, showcasing a wide spectrum of styles and sounds: traditional, Celtic, folk, rock, jazz, blues, klezmer, reggae, and on and on. But in the beginning, there was only the Front Room. 

“It was a tight fit, because the Front Room has space for about a hundred people, but we felt there was a lot of interest in The Burren having shows as well as sessions,” says McCarthy.

The very first performance at The Burren, not long after it opened, was certainly one for the ages: a combo of accordionist Sharon Shannon, Solas fiddler Winifred Horan, and guitarist Donogh Hennessy and bassist Trevor Hutchinson, both of whom would join Lúnasa shortly thereafter. 

 The Burren's first concert event in 1996 included accordionist Sharon Shannon, along with Winifred Horan, Donogh Hennessey and Trevor Hutchinson.

The Backroom came along about a year or so later, and had a pretty good opener itself: Patrick Street.

•Fifteen years after helping usher in live music at The Burren, Winifred Horan was present for another milestone.

By the beginning of the 2010s, the Backroom was well established as a multi-genre venue, with not only Celtic music but also shows organized by local musician Tom Bianchi featuring rock and other contemporary sounds. In 2011, McCarthy approached broadcaster/organizer/promoter Brian O’Donovan and his wife Lindsay with the idea of running a more regular slate of Celtic music-centered shows to be hosted by O’Donovan and managed by Bianchi. The format also would include on-stage chats between O’Donovan and the performers, to better acquaint the audience with them and their music. 

The Burren Backroom Series kicked off on Oct. 19, 2011, with Scottish harpist-vocalist Maeve Gilchrist as the opener, followed by Horan, her Solas bandmate Mick McAuley, and guitarist/vocalist Colm O'Caoimh. 

"The Burren has a very impressive reputation, as a place for concerts as well as sessions, and what we're trying to do is create a particular vibe based on that,” said O’Donovan in a subsequent interview with the Boston Irish Reporter. “We hope people will trust us as curators for musical experiences that are compelling, interesting, and fun."

Brian O'Donovan chats with Maeve Gilchrist during the inaugural Burren Backroom Series concert in 2011.

O’Donovan died in the fall of 2023, but the series continues as the Brian O’Donovan Legacy Series, organized and hosted by Lindsay O’Donovan. 

•Not so incidentally, Bianchi comes in for considerable praise from McCarthy, who describes his work as “indispensable.” For Bianchi, the good feelings are mutual: “Tommy and Louise have good instincts, and a willingness to be human and let people do their jobs the best they can,” he told Boston Irish last year.

Another key figure in The Burren’s continued success is Joyce In, the lead sound engineer and chief show manager – “a real professional,” says McCarthy, who notes that In has gone on tour with Altan and Sharon Shannon, among others. 

Of course, McCarthy and Costello could happily spend a long evening lauding the many Burren employees and other affiliates who have helped make the place a success.

   If you happened to drop by The Burren in the middle of one day in early March of 2009, you might’ve seen McCarthy chatting with someone who looked an awful lot like iconic U2 vocalist Bono.

That’s because it was Bono.

U2 was in town to play a surprise, invitation-only concert at the Somerville Theatre to promote their new release, “No Line on the Horizon”; those attending had won tickets via a radio contest. McCarthy knew about the show and went to meet the band when they came for a walk-through of the theater, and they accepted his invitation for lunch at The Burren. 

However, recalls McCarthy, U2’s presence didn’t set off pandemonium in the Front Room. The lunchtime crowd wasn’t particularly large, and perhaps simply couldn’t have imagined that a world-famous rock band would be having a bite to eat in Davis Square.

“It just seemed that nobody really knew who they were,” says McCarthy, noting that The Burren has hosted a number of prominent popular performers for meals, among them Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, and John Prine. 

The situation was different six years later, when speculation spread through the Internet that U2 – in town to perform at TD Garden – was going to play a secret concert somewhere in the Boston area. Crowds gathered outside The Burren in anticipation, until U2 officially scotched the rumors via Twitter. 

The Trad Youth Exchange performance in 2014 brought together young musicians from Ireland and Boston, New York City and Philadelphia.

•Even as The Burren has featured established Irish music performers, it’s also given space to the coming generation of traditional musicians. Such was the case in 2014 when the Backroom hosted a special concert for Trad Youth Exchange, which brought together a group of teenage and pre-teen musicians from the Greater Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia areas with their counterparts in Tulla, County Clare. The Tulla contingent spent a week in the Boston area, culminating in the Burren show; the following February, the American kids visited Tulla to complete the exchange. 

A capacity crowd listened appreciatively as the 28 TYE participants performed en masse and in smaller groupings as well on fiddles, concertinas, flutes, tin whistles, bodhrans, and the odd banjo, guitar, and set of uilleann pipes, with Brian O’Donovan and ClareFM “West Wind” host Paula Carroll serving as emcees.

The middle portion of the concert saw a parade of accomplished adult musicians take the stage, including the TYE architects: Lisa Coyne, then the executive director of the Boston Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann Music School, and Tulla concertina legend Mary MacNamara. McCarthy played in a quartet that also included Sean Clohessy, Jimmy Noonan, and John Coyne. Their presence at the event represented “a passing of the torch,” observed O’Donovan – celebrating the arrival of a new generation to keep the Irish music tradition going. 

•Sometimes, an event that was already pretty special to begin with becomes all the more meaningful, simply because of context and circumstances. 

In February of 2022, the Backroom hosted the trio of Sean Clohessy, Kathleen Conneely, and John Coyne, as they launched their album “All Jokes Aside.” Only weeks before, the Covid-19 Omicron variant had swept through the US, after a period which had seen a return to something approaching normalcy after the epidemic had receded. But Omicron prompted the cancellation of numerous live music events, among them the 2022 Boston Celtic Music Fest. 

Still, by the date of the “All Jokes Aside” concert, cautious optimism prevailed. The Backroom was filled to capacity, and before the concert began, many in attendance – including the performers themselves – made a point of greeting friends and acquaintances not seen in months, to such an extent that the show started late. 

When the music began, it was clear this wasn’t a concert; it was catharsis. There was an atmosphere of unbridled joy and enthusiasm over the fact that finally we could all be in one place together again, enjoying one another’s company as well as the music – which, of course, was high quality. It was, I wrote then, “as if Boston’s Irish music community was giving a collective sigh of pent-up relief and contentment.” The fact that this happened in The Burren made it all the more meaningful.