Released: 1973

RTÉ Choice Music Prize Classic Irish Album 2026

Consistently hailed as one of the greatest Irish albums of all time, The Táin's influence on the subsequent 5 decades of music coming from Ireland is immeasurable. Featuring Horslips' most successful and now legendary track “Dearg Doom”, this album has informed the careers of everyone from Thin Lizzy to U2 to poet Seamus Heaney.

Bruce Eder from AllMusic says "The most ambitious and successful of their early albums, Horslips' most progressive creation, and maybe the most successful rock concept album ever done, The Táin is rock put into the service of epic storytelling (or is it the other way around?)."

TRACKLIST

1. Setanta

2. Maeve's Court

3. Charolais

4. The March

5. You Can't Fool the Beast

6. Dearg Doom

7. Ferdia's Song

8. Gae Bolga

9. Cu Chulainn's Lament

10. Faster Than the Hound

11. The Silver Spear

12. More Than You Can Chew

13. The Morrigan's Dream

14. Time to Kill!

15. The Táin Live Extended Sequence [My Father's Place, New York, 1974]

PRESS RELEASE

🏆 RTÉ Choice Music Prize Classic Irish Album 🏆

And the winning album is…

The Táin by Horslips

The RTÉ Choice Music Prize Classic Irish Album, in association with IMRO & IRMA, has just been announced on RTÉ Gold by Will Leahy. The winning album is: The Táin by Horslips. A concept album centred on Irish mythology, The Táin was the band’s second full-length offering and was released on their own label in Ireland in 1973 as well as RCA in the UK and Atco in the US.

“We can’t believe it, really. We knew at the time that The Táin was a different kind of album. And we could see that Dearg Doom had a great riff going on. We just didn’t think that it would sustain in the way it has. Both Italia 90 and ‘Saipan’ have served to keep the album and the single surfacing but even without that, there seems to be an inbuilt determination to survive in both. 50 years is a good innings!” – Horslips, 2026

The panel chose The Táin by Horslips as their Classic Irish Album for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize and explain further – “Horslips lasted 10 years – 1970 to 1980. Their impact was immense. They literally changed the course of music in Ireland in the seventies, not just because they fused traditional Irish music with rock and in so doing inspired many local and international acts or that they released 10 albums in that 10-year period leaving a legacy much bigger than that of the defining band of the so-called Celtic Rock genre”..

The judges for this year’s prize are Dave Fanning (Radio and TV Broadcaster), Caroline Henry (Artist Management), Stevo Berube (Artist Management & Music Publicist), with Paul Russell (Radio producer, formerly RTÉ 2FM) as the chairperson.

The album was played in full on RTÉ Gold.

“Dearg Doom” was arguably the most popular track on the album and was included in Tom Dunne’s 30 Best Irish Hits compilation, released in 2003.

Horslips: Jim Lockhart, Eamon Carr, Barry Devlin, Charles O’ Connor, Johnny Fean

A few of the band members will attend on March 5th 2026 to collect their award.

#rtechoiceprize