With Mary Immaculate College’s long history of educating teachers setting an appropriate atmosphere, the fourth SMI annual conference sought to bring together the increasing number of music researchers in Ireland. While the emphasis was on delegates from the island itself, a healthy number of countries and universities were represented. Over one hundred delegates from twenty-five universities in Canada, England, France, Germany, Spain, the USA, and all over Ireland presented papers on a broad range of topics: from liturgy and chant to the structures, politics and aesthetics of twentieth century music, from musical analysis to explorations of music as performance, and opening up from individual Irish musical personalities and social values to the use of music in public broadcasting and wider national and ethnic identities. As Dr Gareth Cox, the conference organiser, noted, in the three years since the inaugural SMI conference the number of papers presented has doubled. With this expansion, the SMI has continued in its quest to be ‘a forum for the practice of musicology, reflecting the gamut of musical research in Ireland.’1 The seventy papers given utilized a wide range of sources, from the academic to the anecdotal and from original manuscripts to archival recordings, and the varied approaches to these presentations reflected the diversity of approaches to musicology in general in Ireland today. The 2006 SMI Conference was a celebration of the growth, diversity and good standing of research in music throughout the country. But, considering that these official gatherings of Irish musicologists are still in their infancy, what can one envision for their future?