Kieran Beville

  Anticipation Rising Launch of Limerick Literary Festival Programme By Kieran Beville Councillor Maria Donoghue The Limerick Literary Festival in Honour of Kate O’Brien returns in 2026 with renewed confidence, ambition and warmth. Taking place from 27 February to 1 March at the Belltable on O’Connell Street, the Festival promises three days that celebrate literature not as an abstract pursuit, but as a living conversation between writers, readers and the city that inspired one of Ireland’s most distinctive literary voices. The official programme launch took place on Monday, 12 January, when Councillor Maria Donoghue unveiled the 2026 schedule at O’Mahony’s Bookshop. The choice of venue is fitting. Independent bookshops have long acted as informal salons for literary communities, and O’Mahony’s has been a steadfast supporter of reading culture in Limerick for decades. From this modest but symbolic beginning, the Festival once again sets out to place Limerick firmly on the i...

  Echoes of Curragh Chase The Life and Legacy of Aubrey de Vere By Kieran Beville Aubrey de Vere In the grand procession of nineteenth-century poets, a few names stride in shining armour — Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning — while others walk in softer light, their footsteps nearly lost amid the noise of empire and revival. Among those gentler figures stands Aubrey de Vere (1814-1902) of Limerick, a poet who never sought the spotlight but whose work glows with spiritual depth, moral clarity, and an unwavering sense of Ireland’s historical soul. Born into privilege yet drawn to humility, de Vere spent his long life trying to reconcile faith and imagination, reason and reverence, Ireland and England — the very contradictions that defined his age. His poetry is not the cry of revolution but the murmur of conscience: measured, luminous, and profoundly humane. The House at Curragh Chase Aubrey de Vere was born in 1814 at Curragh Chase, County Limerick — a manor wrapped in woodl...

  Listening to the Frontline New Limerick Anthology Brings Social Inclusion Into Sharp Focus By Kieran Beville On a winter morning in January, the echoing corridors of Limerick City Hall will carry voices that are rarely amplified in such grand civic surroundings. They will be the voices of frontline workers, carers, community builders, Gardaí, nurses, social workers, poets and witnesses — people who spend their days navigating the complex terrain of social inclusion, often out of sight and out of mind. On Thursday, 15 January 2026, the Limerick Writers’ Centre, in partnership with the Mid-West Regional Drugs & Alcohol Forum, will launch Frontline Voices , a new anthology of uncut prose and poetic reflections that brings lived experience from the margins into the public square. Edited by writer Kieran Beville, the collection is a rare and uncompromising testament to the realities of frontline social care and community work in contemporary Ireland. The launch (by inv...

  New Voyage for Limerick Artist - Eric Duhan  By Kieran Beville In a quiet studio somewhere between the Atlantic winds of Brittany and the remembered streets of Wolfe Tone Street, Limerick-born artist and author Eric J. Duhan paints both with brush and with pen. His latest creation, The Irish Girl II – The Journey to Brittany, the second volume in his acclaimed historical saga, has just set sail into the world — carrying with it the spirit of home, exile, and endurance that has long shaped his life and art. The novel, now available on Amazon, continues the journey of Lucy O’Brien of Askeaton, the heroine of Duhan’s first book The Irish Girl. As political turmoil shakes Henry VIII’s Ireland, Lucy and her family flee from the familiar fields of Limerick and Adare to the storm-swept shores of Brittany. What follows is a story of faith, courage, and discovery — one that resonates with the experience of leaving and belonging, of carrying one’s homeland in the heart even when...