2026 Composition Bursary Winners

The joint winners of the Irish Heritage Bursary for Composition 2026 are Ferdia Ó Cairbre and Donnchadh Mac Aodha. The £3,000 bursary, generously funded by the Ireland Funds Great Britain, will be used to further each composer's studies/research and artistic development. The panel this year comprised Dr Anne-Marie O’Farrell (composer, harpist, Professor of Harp RNCM), Dr. Michael Boyle (composer, Chair of the Ina Boyle Society) and leading Irish cellist Yseult Cooper Stockdale. You can hear the winning works performed by Irish Heritage Performance Bursary 2026 winner cellist Seth Colin at our Summer and Winter concerts respectively. Tickets for our 1st of July concert in Leighton House available now.

Donnchadh Mac Aodha is a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Dundalk, Co.Louth. He studied music and Irish at University College Cork, where he was a Quercus Creative & Performing Arts Scholar. Donnchadh’s compositional output engages with the boundary of contemporary music and traditional Irish music, drawing on his extensive experience as a traditional harper and flute player.

His pieces have been performed at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival, Ostrava Days Festival, Cork International Choral Festival, West Wicklow Chamber Music Festival, and the New Ross Piano Festival. In 2024 he was commissioned to write a suite for Consairtín, The National Concertina Convention. Donnchadh’s final-year composition project, Éist le Fuaim na hAbhann: Echoing Sean-nós in Contemporary Classical Composition, won the Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Undergraduate Award for Exceptional Innovation in Research.

Donnchadh is honoured to be the joint-recipient of this year’s Irish Heritage Composition Bursary, which he will use to fund further study at the Royal College of Music, London.

Ferdia Ó Cairbre is a composer from Dublin. He completed a Bachelor of Music with Maynooth University in 2025 (First-Class Honours) and is currently approaching the end of his MA in Contemporary Music Practices (also with Maynooth University), having received multiple scholarships throughout both degrees. He is excited to commence his doctorate inMaynooth this year with a project that will study, through composition, the role of the Irish language in contemporary music and the underexplored musicolinguistic connections between the two areas.

Since Ferdia started composing in 2017, many of his works have received festival performances, including five New Music Dublin premieres in the National Concert Hall and a Pipeworks appearance. In 2021, two of his choral works were sung by Chamber Choir Ireland as part of their Choral Postcards project, and in 2024, Anne-Marie O’Farrell and TimoKinnunen performed his work, In Eleventh Heaven, in Kalajoki, Finland.

Ferdia has compositional and performance experience across genres such as (contemporary) classical music, Irish traditional music, jazz, choral music, and electroacoustic music, and his work has appeared in short films and other media formats. He has also contributed to the Irish Traditional Music Archive as a writer and performer. Ferdia has taught piano and theory for several years and has been conductor and assistant conductor of the National Concert Hall’s Training Choir and two youth choirs respectively. He currently holds positions as organist in various locations in Dublin and Meath, and has performed lunchtime concerts and recitals in Maynooth University for Entente Florale Europe and other groups.