This blog is a personal take on Listowel, Co. Kerry. I am writing for anyone anywhere with a Listowel connection but especially for sons and daughters of Listowel who find themselves far from home. Contact me at listowelconnection@gmail.com
On Friday July 7 2023, Tánaiste Micheál Martin was in town to officially open the new Fuchsia Centre at Árd Chúram.
This wonderful facility for older people who suffer from dementia will mean that more and more people are enabled to stay in their own homes for longer and the task of caring is eased for the family.
The committee who worked so hard to bring this project to fruition will leave an invaluable legacy to the area.
The celebration of the opening was planned for outdoors but poor weather forecast for the day meant that we were entertained indoors at the Árd Chúram Day Centre.
The HSE is a vital partner in the delivery of services to the older people in the community. Caroline Doyle of the HSE is here with Mike Moriarty of the Árd Chúram committee.
Caroline Doyle, HSE with Helen Moylan of Listowel Laundry for the Elderly and Marie Reen of Árd Chúram
Some of the friendly welcoming people who work in Árd Chúram.
Micheál Martin and Norma Foley enjoying the Cork/Kerry banter
(More photos tomorrow)
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Modern Celtic Art in Listowel
Stephen Rynne had no connection with Listowel until he began studying the work of Michael O’Connor, illuminator.
When he came to town and discovered the many many local artists working in the celtic genre, he fell in love with the town.
In Kerry Writers’ Museum on July 6th he made his first foray into opening our eyes to the treasures around us.
On the left is Stephen Rynne and on the right is a great friend of Listowel Connection, our super researcher, David O’Sullivan. Dave has uncovered many stories related to Listowel artists and their prestigious commissions.
The local connection; Fr. Brendan O’Connor, son of the artist, was delighted to meet up with his Kerry cousins on the evening.
This beautiful piece, Michael O’Connor’s alphabet, was handed over to Kerry Writers’ Museum. It is not clear to us which alphabet it is, certainly not English, maybe Irish or Latin. Any insight would be gratefully welcomed.
Cara Trant on behalf of Kerry Writers’ Museum, accepts the piece from Stephen.
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Forced Emigration
One of the dreadful results of the Famine was the devastation of the population due to deaths and emigration.
Worse was to follow in evictions and forced emigration.
Maybe your ancestors emigrated on The Nimrod or another of the ships that took so many of our fellowmen to the U.S and further afield.
Lisselton grotto in July 2023…Photo; David Kissane
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A Family Souvenir
Eleanor Belcher sent us this story;
“As you probably know Eamon Kelly was a wood work teacher at the Listowel tech before he went on to his famous role of seanachai and actor. My father was setting up as a GP and Eamon made his doctor’s plate.
Over 20 years ago I came over to Listowel and found that a funeral of an O’Sullivan had occurred ( Eamon’s wife was an O’Sullivan of Upper William Street) . I saw Eamon in the Listowel Arms and told him about Dad’s plate. He said that he had just passed what had been our house and that it was missing. I told him I had it and he told me in his sonorous Kerry accent that ‘it was a fine bit of mahongany wood! ‘. “
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A Poem
Lorraine Carey shared this on Facebook
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Writers’ Week 1974
Wolfgang and Anita Mertens in Listowel in May 2023
Wolfgang and Anita first visited Listowel in 1974 for a Writers’ Week short story writing workshop directed by Bryan MacMahon.
Wolfgang kept a folder of memorabilia from that visit. He promised to share it with us when he got back home. Here is the first look at his stuff.
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A Request for Help
My family is going to visit Listowel in August. We’re visiting Ireland for the first time to see where my husband’s dad was born out on the farm and visit the area where he lived until he was about 35.
A cousin told us Jeremiah Walsh has the farm and his daughter is Helen Nolan. My husband’s father was also a Jeremiah Walsh.
Turfshed in Ferbane, Co. Offaly Photo from the internet
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Should Old Acquaintance….
My friend, Phil and I, visited Boherbue. She now lives in Dublin and hadn’t visited her old home for some time. Phil has no family left in Boherbue now and has lost touch with her old school friends. My sister in law Breeda is from Boherbue so we planned to meet Breeda there to hear some of the old stories. In my photo, Maureen Ahern, her old neighbour, is next to Phil and Breeda and I are across the table.
Boherbue is much changed since the twentieth century. The lovely café where we met was one such welcome change serving delicious food and with super friendly staff.
Phil attended secondary school in Mrs. Kerrisk’s in Boherbue. There were 5 girls in her Leaving Cert class. The boys went to the tech in Kanturk. One of the 5 girls has passed away and almost incredibly the other 3 all turned up in the café while we were there. Above with Phil is Noreen OConnell, a lady full of local information and history.
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Listowel Arms Now and Then
Apart from the colour very little has changed in 20 years.
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Martin Chute, Master Signwriter
It’s done and it’s absolutely beautiful.
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Holidays 2023
My boys were at Longitude. They are very independent now that they each have a part time job for the summer.
The Kildare branch were at The Derby.
Darby family still fraternising with Olaf and other Disney characters in the sweltering 36 degrees in Orlando.
Opposite the school in Kiskeam they have a little history park with its own stone circle.
Fr. John J ÓRiordáin on Walsh
Ogham stones, the salmon of knowledge, history and myth remembered.
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Now that the Dust has Settled
Here is a piece that Stephen Connolly wrote for The Irish Times before Writers’ Week 2023.
It was still daylight on January 4th when I left Dublin on my way to Listowel, but dark by the time the budget flight arrived into Farranfore. Until I got the job as the first ever festival curator at Listowel Writers’ Week, I didn’t know that there was a flight from Dublin to Kerry. It was the first of many things I was going to learn.
It’s a bizarre thing to have a new job announced in the national press, more so if it comes with a tag to say that your appointment “follows controversy”: a controversy I knew nothing about when I sent in my application. It’s even more bizarre to then walk into a town where you know nobody at all, but for whatever reason I wasn’t nervous. My love for Listowel was immediate and the first thing I noticed was the intricate plasterwork on the lintels above the windows of the buildings around the town with the names of business owners past and present: O’Connor, Molyneaux, Carroll, Keane.
I was living a few miles out of town on a road where a bus runs twice a day: if you got the second bus into town you would have already missed the last one back out again, so I was making the most of my time in Listowel itself getting to know as many people and places as I could. Mike the Pies, the amazing pub and even better music venue, was recommended to me by my friend Paul Connolly from The Wood Burning Savages and it was one of my first stops.
What really caught my eye, though, was a framed old poster with ‘IMPORTANT AUCTION of a modern two storied LICENSED HOUSE’ in beautiful, eccentric wood type: the kind of thing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Paula Scher’s work for New York’s Public Theatre. It was marked with “Cuthbertson, Machine Printer, Listowel” at the top and the word Listowel itself appeared at least five times on the single poster. There was something about the various weights for the letterforms in the old wood type and the idiosyncratic syntax of it all that sparked something in me, and I knew immediately that it would influence the festival’s artwork.
I got talking about it to the owner, Aiden O’Connor, and before too long he told me about his uncle Michael O’Connor, a previous landlord and son of the eponymous Mike the Pies, who “collected posters, and made posters himself”. He told me that Michael had donated “quite a lot of them to a gallery in Limerick”. When I had a look online, I found that there was an archive of almost 3,000 posters from various cultural institutions across Europe spanning several decades that formed a permanent collection in the Limerick City Gallery of Art. “There’s more of them,” Aiden said. “Give me a minute and I’ll show you.”
I couldn’t believe what was hidden away above the pub, but it’s going to form an exhibition during Writers’ Week called The Uncollected Posters of Michael O’Connor. The singer-songwriter Jack O’Rourke had been amazed by Michael O’Connor’s story, too, and wrote Opera on the Top Floor about him: Jack will be playing at the opening night of Writers’ Week, when the winners of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Pigott Poetry Prize will be announced and the John B Keane Lifetime Achievement will be presented to Stephen Rea.
Mike the Pies was the first of many incredible discoveries during the first few weeks in the Kingdom and it was easy to see why this heritage town has been a cultural centre for decades. I’d read as much as I could about the history of Writers’ Week, particularly the ethos on which it was founded, and it resonated with what I’ve been trying to do since I was a teenager. I knew that if I was programming acclaimed best-sellers like Liz Nugent and Louise Kennedy, I’d have to be thoughtful in my approach to debut writers (there will be events with Michael Magee, Nithy Kasa and Fergus Cronin, to name a few). When I was inviting Paul Muldoon to read poems and have a conversation with Paul Brady, I knew that inviting emerging talents like William Keohane and Jess McKinney would be as important to the continuation of what the festival is all about.
In Kevin’s bar on William Street there’s another Cuthbertson poster, this one from 1937, advertising “the first all-night DANCE”: the dance was organised by local undertakers and the room used to store coffins became a cloakroom for the night (through to dawn, presumably). This kind of thing wasn’t a one-off, and I felt like it gave me a certain permission to make use of some slightly less-conventional spaces. Among the prestigious names in fiction and poetry, we’ll be putting on an event with the authors of Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women (a best-seller in the non-fiction charts) in the historic but working courthouse in the town; we’re putting on an event in Kevin’s bar where anyone called Kevin can turn up and do a turn (Kevins in Kevin’s: an Omnium Gatherum of Kevins); we’re putting on a performance of Minimal Human Contact, the play in Irish by Kneecap’s Naoise Ó Cairealláin, in Mike the Pies. I can’t wait to see all of this unfold in Listowel.
Stephen Connolly is Festival Curator of Listowel Writers’ Week, which runs from May 31st to June 4th
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Walkies
Molly and I visited the beautiful Pitch and Putt course.
