Hi @tommo.
Declan is a phenomenal player, a great musician and an excellent teacher. I was very fortunate to be able to take lessons from him.
Declan places a lot of emphasis on his students developing good time and good picking technique. He advocates strict alternate picking, primarily because it tends to help beginners develop their time.
Declan has a fairly concrete understanding of his mechanics. I derived the ideas of single escape and double escape strokes explicitly for myself as a teenager. Declan hadn’t explained the ideas to me before I discovered them. I discussed these concepts with him in lessons after I’d discovered them and they weren’t new or surpising to him.
I believe he even made the pendulum analogy in reference to his picking movements. Maybe he would have shared those insights with me in time had I not discovered them for myself.
Declan was always willing to discuss to minutia of technique to the best of his understanding. He was also willing to demonstrate from a variety of angles, face on, down the strings, over his shoulder, etc.
Having regular access to a real virtuoso, and having the opportunity to observe and study his movements up close was of tremendous value to me.