Back to the old country for the November check-in, and the Irish winter is filling up nicely: a Limerick band marking 15 years with a Cork mini-residency, Tyrone’s finest booking the Ulster Hall, Hothouse Flowers lining up a spring run, and a 20-plus-strong collective releasing a double album about crime and punishment in 19th-century Ireland.

Limerick’s Hermitage Green are 15 years on the go and are seeing the year out with a Winter Tour that leans hard on Cork: four shows at St Luke’s (December 18, 19 and two on the 20th, one of them an all-ages matinee). Either side of that come the Spiegeltent Pavilion in Limerick (December 11) and the Set Theatre in Kilkenny (December 28). Judging by the poster, dressing gowns are optional but encouraged.

Tyrone’s The Whistlin’ Donkeys put out the single “All I Need” in September and have two big nights in the 2027 diary: the Ulster Hall in Belfast on February 13 and the TF Royal Theatre in Castlebar on April 10. Expect “Bees Wing” and “South Australia” to take the roof off both.

Four decades after they started out busking on Grafton Street, Hothouse Flowers have a seven-date Irish run for spring 2027, mixing full-band nights with acoustic sets: the Keadeen in Newbridge (March 19, acoustic), Tullamore Court (April 2, acoustic), the National Opera House in Wexford (April 3), the Landmark in Carrick-on-Shannon (April 10), the Talbot Hotel in Clonmel (April 16, acoustic), glór in Ennis (April 17) and the Arklow Bay Hotel (April 24, acoustic).

Not punk, but right up our street: Bring Your Own Hammer, the history-minded collective behind My Grief on the Sea, release their second album From the Tombs on November 13. It’s a 21-track double album on crime, law and order in Ireland and among the Irish diaspora in the long 19th century, with more than 20 musicians on board, The Undertones’ Damian O’Neill, The Cranberries’ Fergal Lawler, Fatima Mansions’ Hugh Bunker and Bernard Butler among them. The title track follows an Irish servant committed to New York’s Tombs in 1881, then lost from the historical record.

Coming through town

• The Pogues bring the Greatest Hits Tour to the 3Arena in Dublin (December 9), the Telegraph Building in Belfast (December 10) and the Gleneagle Arena in Killarney (December 12), with The Wran and Maicín as special guests. Spider Stacy, Jem Finer and James Fearnley have a cast that includes Lankum’s Darragh Lynch, John Francis Flynn and Lisa O’Neill.