One of Rory Gallagher's guitars is coming home to Cork

Rory Gallagher’s guitar is coming home to Cork after all.

Well, one of them, anyway, as Sheena Crowley, whose dad sold Rory his famous 1961 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster for £100 in 1963, has purchased a 1963 Epiphone Coronet guitar at a London auction which is currently ongoing.

The guitar sold for £11,000, but with commission, VAT and conversion to euro, it came to €23,000.

Ms Crowley has said she intends the guitar to be displayed in Cork.

Rory Gallagher’s instrument collection and other items from his three-decade-long career are currently being auctioned at Bonham’s in London and his 1961 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster is expected to fetch upward of £1m (€1.19m).

Ms Crowley, who is at the auction, told The Echo it was "nail biting stuff".

Rory's green flight case, which had a guide price of £300 to £400, sold for £11,000.

A GoFundMe campaign which had initially sought to raise €1m to bring Rory Gallagher’s Strat home to Cork this week set its sights on a more modest target of €100,000, in the hope of buying some of his less famous instruments.

There has been great interest in the guitar in Rory’s adoptive hometown since news of its impending sale broke over the summer, and a GoFundMe campaign to buy the Strat for the people of Cork, started by Michael Crowley’s daughter Sheena, has already received pledges worth almost €73,000.

The purpose of the campaign had initially been to raise €1m, but earlier this week Ms Crowley changed the fundraiser’s target to €100,000.

“I’m still holding out hope that the Strat will come home to Cork, there’s always hope right up till the last minute, but I felt if we set a more realistic target now, there are other instruments of Rory’s on sale in the auction and we could get those for Cork,” Ms Crowley told The Echo on Tuesday.

“Obviously, we would love if the Strat came back to Cork, with the assistance of either the Government or some private benefactor, but in the meantime the hope would be that we would be able to put together a substantial enough collection and put it on display in Cork Public Museum,” Ms Crowley said.

Rory's brother Donal told The Echo it had been a difficult decision to sell Rory's collection, and he lamented that he had spent many years trying unsuccessfully to establish a permanent display in their adoptive hometown.

Apart from the costs relating to storage, he said, instruments are made to be played.

“The fact that it has been sitting in a bank vault along with the other instruments, any good instrument person will tell you that even if it’s temperature controlled and all that, the best thing for an instrument is to be played and used and nurtured.

“As a guitar collector, and somebody who played the instruments, Rory didn’t collect them to just sit in guitar trunks forever.” Anyway, he said, for all their importance, instruments were only that.

“The main aspect is Rory’s music, the music he wrote, and performed, and recorded, that’s what I’m about."

Last weekend, Tánaiste Micheál Martin reiterated his belief that the guitar was a significant cultural artefact, hinting to the Irish Times that one of the State’s cultural institutions might buy it.

“There are processes and approaches that have to be pursued here and it’s not all done by megaphone either,” he said.

The auction is currently ongoing.

More to follow…