Saw Doctors raise €18,750 for Sunflower with Mayo shirts

The Saw Doctors raised €18,750 for the Sunflower Children’s Hospice through the sale of 750 limited-edition black T-shirts at their two sold-out gigs at the TF Royal Theatre in Castlebar on 4 and 5 September. The shirts featured a photograph of the band performing The Green and Red of Mayo, with the song’s lyrics on the reverse, and they sold out on the first night. All proceeds support the development of the €12-14 million specialist palliative care facility for children with life-limiting illnesses across eight western counties.

Leo Moran of the band expressed delight at the support. The Castlebar dates marked the group’s first Mayo shows in fifteen years.

A Tuam band still packing western rooms

Formed in 1986 in Tuam, County Galway, The Saw Doctors have spent four decades writing and playing songs that map the west of Ireland onto the charts and the stage. They have scored eighteen Top 30 singles in the Republic of Ireland, three of them number ones. I Useta Lover topped the Irish charts for nine consecutive weeks in 1990 and still holds the record as the country’s all-time biggest-selling single.

The early albums fixed the sound and the following: If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back arrived in 1991, All the Way from Tuam in 1992, and Same Oul’ Town in 1996. Sing a Powerful Song and Songs from Sun Street closed that decade. On 15 February 2008 the band received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Meteor Ireland Music Awards, in recognition of a catalogue and a live reputation already deep in the Irish circuit.

The recent run of releases shows the group are still writing and recording. In 2024 they issued the singles I Love To Go Awanderin’, Man In The Moon, Quicksand and Sound Sham, together with the EP WHA’D’YA THINK A THAT? In 2025 came Same Oul’ Town with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the single Tuam Beat. The Castlebar stand sits in that same working continuum: a band whose audience still fills theatres when the dates come round close to home.

Merch that matched the night

Putting The Green and Red of Mayo on the limited shirts made plain sense for a Mayo room. The song has long been a staple of the live set, and printing the performance photograph on the front with the lyrics on the back turned the merch table into a direct fundraiser for a western cause. Seven hundred and fifty shirts delivered the €18,750 total; selling out on night one left none for the second house.

The Sunflower Children’s Hospice project is planned as a specialist palliative care centre serving eight western counties. The €12-14 million development will need far more than one merch run, yet the figure from two nights in Castlebar is a concrete contribution from a band and an audience that know the territory. No further shirt runs or additional Mayo dates have been announced since the gigs closed.

For a group that began in Tuam in the mid-1980s and has kept its following through the chart years and the quieter ones, the return to Mayo stages after fifteen years was itself a marker. That the nights also produced a five-figure sum for children’s hospice care in the west is the practical outcome that travelled beyond the theatre doors.