In one of this month’s releases, Float Like A Butterfly director and music editor Stephen Warbeck combines a score filled with trad influences and Traveller ballads to capture the emotion, tradition and storytelling power of Irish music. It elevates the clash of tradition, modernity and a young girl’s fight for acceptance and independence in Carmel Winters’ stirring tale. The power of the music isn’t a coincidence – the producers, David Collins and Martina Niland, also worked on the similarly music-powered films Once and Sing Street. They obviously share an appreciation for how music can make a film more resonant, though it also points to a larger in trend in Irish music, which has long celebrated the power of music.

The Commitments is of course the classic Irish film that celebrates music, and though the soundtrack was filled with classic hits rather than original tunes, it acted as an irresistible showcase for the actor-musicians, including a young Glen Hansard, who of course went on to later star in Once. That movie – an intimate romance between two young musicians who wander around Dublin together – became a sensation, going on to win an Oscar for Best Original Song. It was also adapted for Broadway, where it eventually won eight Tony awards.

John Carney’s 2016 coming-of-age film Sing Street combined the best of both approaches, with the Dublin comedy-drama mixing original material with covers of The Jam, The Cure, Hall & Oates and Duran Duran (which had brilliant and hilarious homemade music videos to match).