The Dublin Legends

What was left after the last night at Vicar Street

The Dubliners played their final concerts at Vicar Street in Dublin on 28, 29 and 30 December 2012, then appeared on Jools Holland's New Year's Eve Hootenanny, and that was the end of a band that had been working since 1962. The decision followed a bad year: Barney McKenna, the last founder member still playing, died on 5 April 2012, and the group finished its 50th-anniversary commitments without him. The banjo player Gerry O'Connor stepped in from 18 April 2012 for a Denmark tour that had already been booked.

Not everyone in that touring party wanted to stop. Patsy Watchorn, Seán Cannon, Eamonn Campbell and O'Connor kept the diary going under a new name, The Dublin Legends — a name that says what the act is without claiming to be the band that had just retired. Promoters across Europe have billed them ever since as "formerly The Dubliners", which is the plain truth of the arrangement rather than a slogan: the songs and much of the personnel carried over, the title did not.

The continuity mattered commercially as much as musically. The Dubliners had been a fixture of the German, Dutch, Danish and Swiss folk circuits for decades, and those promoters, halls and audiences were still there in 2013. The Dublin Legends inherited the route more or less intact, and it is still the route they work today.

A line-up shaped by who was left

The band that started in 2013 no longer exists in that form. Patsy Watchorn announced in April 2014 that he was stepping away on medical advice, having been told that continuing to tour would damage his health further. Eamonn Campbell, who had joined The Dubliners in 1987 as producer-turned-guitarist and stayed until the end, died in 2017. Each departure was filled from inside the same circle rather than by audition: after Campbell's death the group asked Shay Kavanagh, a long-standing friend of the band, to come out on the road, and he agreed.

The current four are Seán Cannon on guitar and vocals, Kavanagh on guitar and vocals, and Gerry O'Connor and Paul Watchorn both on banjo — a line-up confirmed in the programme note for their Laeiszhalle concert in Hamburg on 3 December 2025. Two banjos is an unusual front line even in Irish folk, and it gives the rhythm a hard, percussive edge that the Dubliners' single-banjo sound did not have.

Cannon, born in the Claddagh in Galway on 29 November 1940 and raised in Coventry after his family moved there in 1955, joined The Dubliners in 1982 and became a full member the following year. He is the only former Dubliner left in the group. Paul Watchorn — Patsy's older brother, born in Crumlin on 19 July 1958 — arrived from a different route again: he played with Derek Warfield, and before music took over he spent thirteen seasons as a professional snooker player, from 1982 to 1995. In 2025 Cannon's son James began appearing with the band, taking the stage party to five.

One record, and a songbook much older than the band

The Dublin Legends have not tried to build a studio catalogue. Their one substantial release is An Evening With The Dublin Legends: Live In Vienna, recorded at the Metropol in Vienna in September 2013 with the original four-piece of Cannon, Campbell, Patsy Watchorn and O'Connor, and issued the following year on Blue Groove. Nineteen tracks run from an opening "Welcome" through "The Ferryman", "The Rare Aul' Mountain Dew", "The Town I Loved So Well" and "Dicey Reilly" to "Dirty Old Town", "Whiskey in the Jar" and "Molly Malone", with three instrumental sets of reels and hornpipes threaded between the songs.

The record is a fair document of what the band does, because the band does not really change what it does. The material is the common Irish ballad repertoire — traditional songs, plus Ewan MacColl and Pete St John numbers that entered it through The Dubliners in the 1960s and 1970s — arranged for two guitars, banjo and voices, and performed at a pace that leaves room for talk between songs.

Setlist.fm has logged 156 Dublin Legends setlists between 2013 and 2025, and the tally of most-played songs reads like a list of what audiences turn up for: "Whiskey in the Jar" 23 times, "The Black Velvet Band" 22, "Molly Malone" and "The Wild Rover" 21 each. The same database records 60 shows in 2013, the first full year, and nine apiece in 2024 and 2025 — a sharp drop in volume that reflects a group of men in their sixties, seventies and eighties pacing themselves.

September 2026: the first part of a goodbye

The 2025 run went out under the banner "Still Going Strong", with individual dates such as Hamburg billed as "On The Road Again!". That framing has now changed. The German promoter Lars Berndt Events is selling the November and December 2026 dates as ONE LAST TIME PART 1, described plainly as the start of the band's farewell tour, with a second part implied by the numbering. Ticket prices across the German leg sit at roughly €50 to €55.

Songkick currently lists 25 upcoming Dublin Legends concerts across Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany and Ireland. The autumn opens at the Stadsschouwburg in Antwerp on 26 September 2026, then De Oosterpoort in Groningen on 29 September, TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on 30 September and Metropool in Enschede on 3 October, with Silkeborg Viseverseklub in Denmark on 23 October. A four-night residency at Mühle Hunziken in Rubigen, Switzerland, from 19 to 22 November leads into the German run.

That German leg is the substance of Part 1: Bremen on 23 November, then churches and concert halls through Cologne, Münster, Bochum, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Paderborn, Lübeck, Hamburg's Laeiszhalle on 3 December, the Passionskirche in Berlin on 4 December, Stuttgart, Munich, Augsburg and Saarbrücken on 9 December. Demand has already forced one upgrade: the Munich date on 7 December has been moved out of the Werk7 theatre into the larger TonHalle. The year closes where the parent band closed, at Vicar Street in Dublin on 28 December 2026 — the same room and the same slot in the calendar that The Dubliners used for their last stand fourteen years earlier.

What the night actually consists of

Nothing about the presentation has been modernised. The Hamburg programme note describes the effect the band is after — within a few minutes of them starting, the room is meant to feel like an Irish pub — and the staging is built to get out of the way of that: four men, chairs, no video, no production. Promoter copy for 2026 makes the same point in almost the same words, folk played from the heart rather than dressed up.

Audience reaction tends to split along the same line. The playing draws consistent praise, particularly the instrumental sets; the complaints that surface in German venue reviews are about sound, with one listener noting that vocals were buried early on before the mix improved, and that the band's older recorded sound was missed.