Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin (; 10 December 1950 – 7 November 2018) was an Irish musician, composer, academic and educationalist. Biography Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin was a pianist, composer, recording artist and academic; he held the Professorship of Music at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance which he founded at the University of Limerick in 1994. I His sons Owen Ó Súílleabháin and Mícheál 'Moley' Ó Súílleabháin are well known as singer songwriters and motivational speakers and perform in the Irish pop band Size2shoes. His first wife is Irish chant singer Nóirín Ní Riain, with whom he collaborated in the 1980s on a series of recordings with the Benedictine Monks of Glenstal Abbey. In a 1995 interview with In Dublin magazine (Vol 20, No 20) he told Damian Corless that he was born into a Clonmel home where "there was no music of any sort. There was a windy-up gramophone and a wireless that came on at lunchtime." At University College Cork he studied under the legendary Sean Ó Riada, who was in rapidly declining health. Ó Súilleabháin attested that his mentor was "suffering a certain amount". But Ó Riada's liberating approach to traditional music left an indelible mark on his pupil, who revealed that he turned his musical limitations into strengths, telling Corless: "I said to myself 'here am I stuck with the wrong instruments for this music that I love. I don't play the pipes or the whistle. I can play the odd tune, but no matter how long I stick with them I'll never master them. I'll always be a piano player.'" He was awarded an honorary D.Mus from the National University of Ireland at his alma mater University College Cork in 2004. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary DMus from the Royal Scottish Conservatoire. In 2016 he was awarded the Freedom of the Town in his native Clonmel in Co Tipperary. He recorded extensively with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. In 1990 he founded the Irish Music Archive at the Burns Library, Boston College. In 2016 he was awarded the O'Donnell Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. In 2017 he commenced a series of concerts with the RTE Symphony Orchestra (Ireland) at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, recorded and broadcast by RTE lyric fm (Elver Gleams 2017; Between Worlds 2018). He was inaugural Chair of 'Culture Ireland' for nine years, the