How U2 helped to transform the teaching of music in Ireland…..
The Music Generation programme was started with U2′s seed money 14 years ago and now teaches one in 12 children in Ireland
The old Lynyrd Skynyrd standard Sweet Home Alabama is a rewarding song for aspiring young guitarists to tackle. Built around a basic three-chord structure with ascending and descending bass lines, it is a song that is both clever and simple, easy to play tolerably well, but hard to play exactly right.
In a prefab at St Cronan’s Boys’ National School in Bray, music teacher Tim Doyle plays the guitar solo on a keyboard with his right hand while his pupil Casey Earls traces the bass notes with his left. While they figure it out, other students on guitars are hammering out the three chords in unison.
Casey (10) is the first in his family to play a musical instrument. “I want to be a musician,” he says.
He is not alone. Of the 520 pupils in the school, 162 are learning an instrument through Music Generation, the ambitious scheme set up in 2009 to provide a musical education for as many children in Ireland as possible.