A new album called Sanctuary, which features the cream of Irish musical talent and has been produced by a Benedictine monk in Glenstal Abbey, was launched at the weekend. Proceeds from the sale of the album, produced by Fr. Joseph McGilloway, are to go to three charities which help victims of domestic abuse - Adapt House in Limerick, the ISPCC and AMEN.
Fr McGilloway persuaded several of the country’s most popular artistes to perform voluntarily for the project and he said he hopes it will help hundreds of troubled families.
The album was launched on Monday following a special concert at Glenstal itself to mark its release.
Moya Brennan, Mary Coughlan, Nóirin Ní Riain, Cara O’Sullivan and the monks of Glenstal are among the well-known performers on the album, which straddles traditional Irish, folk, Gregorian chant, classical and contemporary music.
Fr McGilloway said the proceeds of the concert would pay for production costs so that all the hoped-for revenue from sales would go to the three charities.
"Domestic violence affects people from every walk of life; every social class, women, children and men and the compilation of musical styles in our album reflects that fact” he explained.
He said he wanted to find charities that struggled to raise funds and Adapt House in Limerick was his first choice.
“We initially set about to help women’s charities only, but realised we were wrong about this when we discovered the shocking statistics from Amen, that 40 per cent of victims of domestic abuse are male”.
“And of course, ISPCC was the obvious choice, because whatever type of abuse goes on in the home, the children always suffer”, he added.
Fr McGilloway said all his students at Glenstal know of his interest in music but he was amazed to find that their own tastes in music were limited.
“They’d regularly show me what they had on their iPods and I noticed that the music they were all listening to was 95 per cent all the same,” he remarked.
“I set about trying to teach them about the various different styles and genres of music and invited musicians to come here so the students could appreciate music as it was originally intended to be heard – live.”
One of the songs was written by Rob Hope of Seneca who was prompted by seeing a documentary on domestic abuse.
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