1. How and when did you get interested in composing?

It is hard to date as I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to compose. I started piano lessons at the age of six and at around the same time read a children’s book on Mozart. I was hooked! However the more I learned about classical music, the more I discovered just how dead and male all these composers were. It wasn't until I was studying music in college that I realised it was a viable (somewhat) career for a female who wasn't dead!

2. Is composing your 'day job' or do you do something else as well?

I teach music in a resource centre for disadvantaged children in Sligo for a few hours a week. I also have a handful of private students. At the moment it is something I do for financial reasons but I find it very rewarding and fulfilling, something I would always like to devote some of my time to, no matter how successful I become.

3. Where do you mostly get your ideas?

In the pub.

4. What are you working on at the moment?

A multimedia piece based on the [Irish epic] Táin Bó Cuailnge involving an actor, a bodhrán [traditional Irish drum] player and live electronics.

5. Describe your typical working day.

I procrastinate until I am bored silly or a deadline can't be ignored. Then stay up half the night trying to get the job done.

6. What is it like hearing a new piece played for the first time?

Depending on who is playing it or how well rehearsed it is (or how well I wrote the piece), exhilarating or cringingly embarrassing.

7. What has been the highlight of your career so far?

There was a concert of my music performed in Bologna in 1997 at the end of my residency there. It was in the Capella Farnese, the most beautiful venue I have ever been in. The Italian ensemble played my music, which can be quite heavy-handed, with great delicacy -- an interesting marriage!

8. What has been the lowlight of your career so far?

In the early 1990s I was composing loads, sending pieces to musicians, competitions, everywhere, to try and get my music performed. In 1995 I finally decided to give up when my piece Deuce! wasn't shortlisted for the RTE Musician of the Future competition. A month later, the same piece won the Pepinières international award. Things are so different now. Everything I write gets performed and musicians are more than willing to take on my music. The moral of the story is, KEEP AT IT!

9. What is your greatest ambition?

To learn enough French to read Proust and Balzac without relying on translations. I am too lazy to do this in reality so it will remain a lofty ambition.

10. Which musician in history do you most admire and why?

Clara Schumann. She interpreted so many new pieces to the admiration of composers such as Liszt, Mendelssohn and Chopin. It’s hard to judge but I think she would have made a great composer if she hadn't the restraints that women composers had at that time, not to mention the demands of her mentally ill husband.

11. Which present-day musician do you most admire and why?

Eminem for his honesty and even more for his humour.

12. Which period of history would you most like to have lived in and why?

It’s nice to have fantasies about eras such as the ‘Belle Epoch’ in Paris or maybe Bardic Ireland or Swinging Sixties London, but really it is far easier to be a woman in Dublin in the Noughties.

13. What is the best thing about being a composer?

Not having a nine-to-five job.

14. What is the worst thing about being a composer?

Financial insecurity.

15. If you weren't a composer, what other career might you have chosen?

A writer or a social butterfly.

16. What is your concept of heaven?

Pass

17. What is your concept of hell?

Pass

18. What is your favourite food?

Foie gras and truffles with a glass of Sauternes. It sounds terribly politically incorrect but there is a humane way to rear the geese now, rather than the old-fashioned way of ‘encouraging’ the bird to overeat.

19. If someone gave you three months off with unlimited travel and living expenses, what would you do?

Travel from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in considerable style.

20. If you could have one thing in the world that would really help you as a composer, what would it be?

An understanding bank manager.