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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Rory Carroll in Dublin

The Guinness heir who became the ‘saviour’ of traditional Irish songs

Lucian Freud Ireland Bono Mary Hayes Patrick Kavanagh
Garech Browne against the backdrop of a mountainous peak among clouds
Guinness brewing heir and arts patron Garech Browne. Photograph: Perry Ogden

When Garech Browne was growing up in the 1940s, he fell in love with the traditional Irish tunes whistled by a worker on his father’s estate in County Mayo. Browne would toddle after him, enchanted, as if following the Pied Piper.

A strange, gilded, troubled life stretched before Browne. As an heir to the Guinness fortune, he would have a jetset existence of bacchanalia and celebrity friends, including Mick Jagger and Lucian Freud.

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