Listowel Connection

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

Tag: Paul Durcan

Carrigaline Pottery

By

On July 2, 2024

In History, Listowel, Listowel Writers Week, Poem

On the banks of The Feale in June 2024

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Paul Durcan, Micheál ÓMuircheartaigh and Poetry Ireland

A Listowel connection

Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh has a fan in Paul Durcan who heard him – mid commentary – send Greetings to our Friends in Brazil one summer Sunday. Here’s Paul’s poem from Poetry Ireland’s Everything to Play For anthology which Mícheál selected & read at our event at Listowel Writer’s Week 2015.

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Did you have this tableware?

Carrigaline crockery graced every table I knew in my youth. While I am not a collector, I enjoy being part of a Facebook group given over to the celebration and preservation of this Irish treasure.

Here are a few pieces from that Facebook page.

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Ard Churam Choir

On June 27 2024 I was in Ard Chúram day centre to hear a great performance by the Ard Churam Choir. I’d love to post a clip of the singing but I’m running out of space on my hosting platform and videos are very space hungry. Sorry. Take it from me, they were a treat.

Here are some of the lovely people I met there

This man entertained us while we were waiting for the choir to finish their performance in the Fuchsia Centre

Eleanor and Brenda

Aras Mhuire guests

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Fact Check

I was a bit dubious about yesterday’s “fact”. It said that babies at birth can only see in black and white.

Jeremy Gould fact checked it for us and here in a nutshell is what he found on Snopes…

What’s True

Babies are born with a visual acuity that is below the threshold for legal blindness …

What’s False

… but it isn’t true that newborns can only see in black and white. Instead, they are able to perceive some colors, in an extremely muted way.

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A Definition

from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

Architect, n. someone who drafts a plan of your house and plans a draft of your money

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A Fact

The toothbrush was invented in China in 1498. The brush was made of boar bristles.

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Writers Week 2015 continued

By

On June 2, 2015

In Uncategorized

More From Opening Night


Máire Logue was meeting and greeting the stars of the show. Here she is with a man who grew up within yards of my family home in Kanturk. Will Collins has gone on to great things as a scriptwriter. His Song of the Sea script will be hitting our screens soon. Well worth seeing. He was in Listowel as part of Listowel Writers’ Week’s Operation Education.

Poet, Paul Durcan was another participant in Operation Education.

This prizewinner and her parents got here in good time

Margaret and Jerry making their way to the Arms.

Máire with the winner of the Kerry Book of the Year Eoin McNamee.

Anne Enright and Paul Durcan have a quiet chat.

Carol and Dick are part of the welcoming committee.

These people had not too far to come to enjoy the opening of the 2015 event.


Others came a little farther and came prepared to stay.


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Closing Time






One of the very popular speakers on Sunday May 31 was Michael Murphy. Michael was a familiar face to us all when he read the news on RTE. He is now more famous as a psychotherapist and a writer. He also happens to be a gay man.

The past few weeks have been a very emotional time for him. He celebrated the vote of acceptance Irish people made on May 22 and a short week later he was mourning the death of his beloved mother.

It is a measure of the professionalism of the man that he kept his commitment to Listowel Writers’ Week a day after his mother’s funeral. He read some heartfelt and highly charged poems. He told us about the importance of the gaze and the voice. He told us a lot about love.

His mother suffered from Alzheimers disease and “in the end there was no word”. Michael himself has had prostate cancer which left him impotent and he has suffered all the rejection and abuse gay people felt in the past in the old Ireland. All of this story is well told in his poetry, but it is the lovely love poem to the love of his life on the occasion of their tying the knot that had us all in tears. He wrote of “a day in Dublin in June when I felt truly loved.”

The rawness of all the emotional trials he had been through so recently became too much for the consummate professional broadcaster and his voice cracked. As he regained his composure and finished his talk the audience, as one,  rose to their feet and we all put a metaphorical Listowel hand under Michael’s elbow and helped him over the line.

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Today’s Something Completely different


My friend Jos at Kiteman Photographs alerted me to a great blogpost by Colm Moriarty about the Listowel section of the National Archive’s folklore collection. It is all about piseogs and superstitions and includes the lovely old photos of the town from the National Library collection.

Irish Archeology

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