Fundraiser for Cork singer Jimmy Crowley nears €100,000 target

Cork folk singer Jimmy Crowley is less than €10,000 away from reaching the €100,000 target for his fundraiser after just four days. The money will help finance his care when he returns home from the hospital following a series of serious health issues. Within the first day of the GoFundMe campaign, it had raised more than €66,000 and currently sits at around 93 per cent of its target.

“Hello folks, Eve here. We're so overwhelmed by the donations here. Thank you all so much! We're at a loss for words, to be honest. Thanks to you all, we will be able to afford a live-in carer, and Jimmy will be able to come home! We'll leave the gofund.me open for now, and further contributions will go towards all the major house modifications and increasing medical expenses.”, Crowley and his wife, Eve Telford, wrote in an update on his GoFundMe.

The Cork singer was diagnosed with stage three cancer last September and has since experienced a series of health complications. Three months after suffering a stroke, he has remained in a Cork hospital ever since. In order to return home to Cobh, the 76-year-old requires an additional full-time carer alongside his wife.

“I'm having to call upon your kindness as a last resort. I've been rather under the weather of late”, the singer wrote on Facebook last week, breaking the news of his health conditions. “Before the cancer diagnosis and stroke, I was a full-time musician, cyclist, all-year-round sea-swimmer, and walker.”

Jimmy Crowley has been an important figure in Irish folk music since the 1970s and is regarded as an archivist of songs that may otherwise have disappeared. He first gained prominence through his band Stoker’s Lodge and later with The Electric Band, with whom he released a version of ‘The Boys of Fairhill’ that went straight into the charts. Many of the songs he rediscovered were published in his 2024 collection Beautiful City: Cork Urban Ballads.