DANIEL O’DONNELL will receive the Lifetime Achievement in Country Music Award at The Irish Post Awards in Mayfair, central London on November 26.
Daniel told The Irish Post: “It’s great privilege to be noticed in this way. I’m forever grateful to the people who have supported me down through the years. I’m very grateful to The Irish Post for thinking me worthy of this honour.”
The singer from Donegal has welcomed the enthusiasm of younger audiences for Irish country music and ballads, saying a new generation of performers is helping to carry familiar songs into the future.
More than four decades into his own career, the Donegal singer points to acts such as The Tumbling Paddies and Ireland’s younger country singers as evidence that the music continues to find an audience.
“There’s nothing new about it, but young people are drinking it up,” he says. “This music is done with heart.”
For O’Donnell, its appeal is bound up with the experience of emigration and the connections Irish people maintain with home.
“Wherever you go in the world, if there’s an Irish bar, it will be full,” he says. “When people left Ireland, they brought very little with them but the music they could carry. It was a link to home. That’s why the culture has stayed so strong.”
Raised in Kincasslagh, Co. Donegal, O’Donnell grew up listening to American country stars including Charley Pride, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, as well as Irish performers such as Philomena Begley and his elder sister Margo.
“It’s the type of music I ended up singing,” he says.
His professional beginnings were a family affair: he joined Margo’s band in 1980 before establishing his own solo career. His debut album, The Boy from Donegal, followed in 1984, with From the Heart bringing his first British album chart entry in 1988.
Since then, his repertoire of country songs, Irish ballads, gospel and familiar standards has sustained a recording and touring career on both sides of the Atlantic. Television has brought him another audience, through programmes including TG4’s Opry le Daniel and Daniel and Majella’s B&B Road Trip, alongside his wife.
Despite that international career, Donegal remains central to his life. He is a longstanding host and ambassador of the Mary from Dungloe festival and a supporter of Relay for Life Donegal, which raises funds for the Irish Cancer Society. Daniel and Majella were announced as joint patrons of the Donegal event in 2024.
For O’Donnell, supporting those causes is part of belonging to the community that helped shape him.
“Giving back is really important,” he says. “I’m doing what I can do. I’m no different to the man that’s standing on the corner.”
On November 26, that man from Donegal will take his place among The Irish Post’s Award winners. The honour recognises a hugely successful, international career in country music. But the award also celebrates something else: a familiar voice that has made home feel a little closer, wherever we happen to be.
For more information go to The Irish Post Awards
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