notably the songs he wrote for his radio-ballads. Gravitating around Paddy and Maureen O'Donoghue's Pub, Irvine met like-minded people such as Ronnie Drew, Luke Kelly and Barney McKenna, who would later form The Dubliners. Decades later, he recorded "O'Donoghue's"—released on the album Changing Trains (2004)—a song of eleven verses in which he vividly recalls these happy times, naming many of the people who were part of his transition from actor to folk musician. Sweeney's Men – Sweeney's Men One of these people was Johnny Moynihan, with whom he created a musical partnership which turned into Sweeney's Men in the summer of 1966, after the addition of 'Galway Joe' Dolan. To quote Colin Irwin: "They merged the familiar American folk style so popular in the early sixties with a distinctively home-grown Irish flavour; it was not Irish music but it was real and exciting, it had verve, imagination and style." A distinctive aspect of the Sweeney's Men sound was Moynihan's introduction of the bouzouki—originally a Greek instrument—into Irish music, albeit with a different tuning: GDAD' (one octave lower than the open-tuned mandolin), instead of the modern Greek tuning of CFAD'. In 1996, Irvine wrote: While in the process of adopting the itinerant lifestyle of a musician, Irvine developed a taste for travel, initially within Ireland. The first time he witnessed Willie Clancy playing his uilleann pipes was at a fleadh in Miltown Malbay in the summer of 1963, and he followed the festival trail in Ireland during the summers of 1964, 1965 and 1966. Irvine also returned regularly to London for short stays of a few weeks or months, and ventured further afield across Europe, hitch-hiking to Munich, Vienna and Rome in the autumn of 1965. In early 1966, he was playing the clubs in Denmark with Éamonn O'Doherty. In June 1966, Irvine and Dolan played five nights a week as a duo at the Enda Hotel in Galway and Moynihan would join them at weekends, since he was still working as a draughtsman in Roscommon. It was at this time that Dolan suggested the band's name, after reading Flann O'Brien's comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds, which depicts the mad, anti-religious, tree-leaping pagan King Sweeney of Antrim. In a 2005 interview, Irvine added: The trio recorded their first single "Old Maid in the Garrett"/"The Derby Ram" for Pye Records at Eamonn Andrews Studios in the spring of 1967. The week the single