Paddy, Tom and Bobby Clancy had hit the ground running in America, and after a stint acting on and off Broadway, they were becoming a fixture on the burgeoning folk scene on the east coast.

It was in New York in the middle years of the 1950s that they first attracted the attention of Diane Guggenheim. The mining heiress was passionate about the preservation of traditional songs and she immediately connected with the Clancys and the way their singing brought ancient compositions to life.

Guggenheim was so struck by their story that she travelled to Ireland to capture a sense of their origins. There, on the banks of the Suir, she met their mother, Johanna, and their younger brother William — the 11th of 11 children — and it was on her recommendation that he made the trip to America to try his hand at show business. The actor Cyril Cusack urged him to dispense with William, because it sounded too English, and to use his Irish name, Liam, instead. His passage across the Atlantic was made possible by the fact that Bobby had returned home to look after the family business.

Back to Dylan. Seeing the Clancys play in a famous old Manhattan pub would have a profound effect on a man who had just dropped the Zimmerman name. The Clancys were playing the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village when he dropped in one evening and he was stunned by the quality of the brothers’ balladry. For a fledgling troubadour hoping to find his way in a city of poets and singer-songwriters, this was just the gateway he needed.

He was so enthralled by the old Irish rebel songs and, in particular, Liam’s heartfelt delivery, that he followed them from club to club in lower Manhattan to listen and learn.

“I’d never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever,” Dylan recalled in the 1984 documentary, The Story of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. “He was just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life — still is, probably.”

Later, in the first (and as yet only) volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, he recounted the effect that Liam Clancy had on him: “I got to be friends with Liam and began going after-hours to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, which was mainly an Irish bar frequented mostly by guys from the old country,” he said. “All through the night, they would sing drinking songs, country ballads and rousing rebel songs that would lift the roof.”

Inspired by what he was hearing, he started to write rebellious songs, but rooted in the American experience. He even borrowed an old tune regularly performed by the Clancy Brothers and reworked it to suit his own ends. Brennan on the Moor, which was inspired by the Cork highwayman Willie Brennan, became Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie. He subsequently sought Liam’s feedback on his version. It wound up on early and now rare pressings of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Around the time that Dylan was beginning work on what would be his first album (the simply titled Bob Dylan) and the start of one of the most extraordinary careers in music history, the fortunes of the Clancy Brothers — and their compadre, Armagh musician Tommy Makem — were beginning to rise significantly. And it was thanks to The Ed Sullivan Show, the massively popular prime time chat-show that had introduced Elvis to the world and would later help the Beatles to break America.

The previous winter had been brutally cold and Johanna had sent them white Aran jumpers. They wore the knitwear on their big TV performance and it would not just become their trademark, but it also jump-started an export business for the traditional garb worn by fishermen in the west of Ireland.

They achieved a level of fame on both sides of the Atlantic that had not been experienced by Irish people up to that point. Gay Byrne, already on the road to his own sort of immortality in this country, once said of Liam that he was “one of the four most famous Irish men in the world”. The other three were Paddy and Tom and Tommy Makem.

Tom Clancy would play his own part in the Dylan story. It was he who recommended Dylan to a Columbia Records executive who was on the hunt for a great harmonica player. Dylan, of course, would go on to sign with Columbia in what was one of the most significant record label-artist partnerships ever.

He doffed his hat in their direction on that very first album. “There was one song on it that was an old song I’d heard on an old banjo record some place,” he said in the 1984 documentary on the Clancys. “I did that song the way I thought the Clancy Brothers would have done it — you know, in their style.”

In 1992, Dylan invited the Clancy Brothers to perform at his 30th anniversary concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden. This time, the band took inspiration from Dylan’s work and sang When the Ship Comes In, from his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’. They would record their version of the song, along with Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie, for their final album, 1995’s Older But No Wiser.

For Liam Clancy, the Greenwich Village folk scene he first encountered in the late 1950s would have as important an impact as it did on Dylan a few years later. “People who were trying to escape oppressed backgrounds like mine and Bob Dylan’s, were congregating in Greenwich Village,” he said. “It was a place you could be yourself.”

Pivotal as the Clancys are to the Bob Dylan story, they’re far from the only Irish influences on his career. Bono played a significant part too and at a time, in the 1980s, were Dylan’s stock had fallen in the eyes of some. He first met the U2 frontman in 1984 when he headlined Slane Castle — Hot Press carried an interview conducted by a gauche Bono with Dylan — and they kept in touch. It was Bono who encouraged Dylan to employ Daniel Lanois as a producer having been impressed with how Lanois — with Brian Eno — had developed the U2 sound on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. Lanois went on to produce Dylan’s 1989 album, Oh Mercy, now seen as an artistic comeback.

Paul Brady was another influence. Dylan had been enraptured by how the ex-Planxty man had recorded the old American folk song The Lakes of Pontchartrain, on his debut solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, and asked him to show him the distinctive guitar technique he had used. Brady, who had grown up worshipping Dylan’s roll-call of celebrated albums from the 1960s, found himself literally arranging his hero’s fingers on the fretboard of his guitar.

Dylan’s most recent album, last year’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, contains a reference to the small Irish village of Ballinalee. Quite what motivated him to namecheck a place in Co Longford will keep the army of Dylanophiles busy, but some believe it emerged after a boozy night with Shane MacGowan in the Intercontinental Hotel, Ballsbridge, some years ago. The Pogues man seemingly mentioned The Lass of Ballynalee by the Irish language poet Antoine Ó Raifteirí and Dylan’s imagination was fired. Or so the story goes — with Dylan, you never can be quite sure.