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The Spirit of the Maigue Poets Lives On

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The Spirit of the Maigue Poets Lives On By Kieran Beville Desmond Castle, Adare In the heart of County Limerick, where the River Maigue meanders past fertile meadows and quiet limestone villages, poetry once spoke as fluently as water. The Maigue Poets — or Filí na Máighe — were not figures of distant myth but living, breathing men of the eighteenth century (c.1730-1790): farmers, teachers, tavern keepers, and local scholars who made the Irish language their banner in an age when its survival seemed uncertain. Their stage was not a grand hall or a university lecture room but the parlours and inns of Croom, Bruree, and Kilmallock — small Limerick towns that have since earned a special place in Ireland’s literary geography. Long before Yeats made Sligo shimmer in verse, or Heaney dug meaning from Derry clay, the Maigue Poets turned their patch of Limerick soil into a republic of rhyme. A River and a Community To understand the Maigue Poets, one must begin with the land itself...
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Limerick’s Long Road to Making Peace with Frank McCourt

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  Revisiting Angela’s Ashes Limerick’s Long Road to Making Peace with Frank McCourt By Kieran Beville When Angela’s Ashes was published in 1996, few could have predicted that a memoir about a poor boy’s Limerick childhood would set off such an international sensation—nor that it would reopen wounds still tender beneath the city’s proud surface. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, sold millions of copies, and became a cultural touchstone. Yet here in Limerick, it was met as much with defensiveness as delight. Almost thirty years later, the anger has cooled. The Limerick of 2025 bears little resemblance to the grim tenements of McCourt’s 1930s memories. Cafés now stand where outside toilets once overflowed, and tourists snap photos of lanes once whispered about with embarrassment. But the question remains: what exactly was Angela’s Ashes telling us—and was Frank McCourt’s version of Limerick fair? A Story that Spoke the Unspeakable At its simplest, Angela’s Ashes is the sto...
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  Michael Hogan (1832-1899) Poet of the People By Kieran Beville On a quiet corner of New Road, Thomondgate where the Shannon breeze tugs at peeling paint, the once-bustling Whelan’s Pub stands silent now — its doors bolted, its windows dulled by time. Yet on its weathered wall, a small plaque bears the words that keep memory alive: “Michael Hogan, The Bard of Thomond, lived here.” To most who pass by, it is a ghost of a building. But to those who knew it — those who drank there, sang there, or grew up hearing their fathers talk of the poet who once called it home — Whelan’s remains sacred ground. I count myself among them. I was born and raised in Thomondgate where my father and grandfather lived and I became a poet. So, in a sense I am part of that lineage. I remember sitting at that bar with my father on Sunday afternoons, when the talk turned to Hogan — our own local legend. Even then, before I’d written a word worth keeping, I understood that in Thomondgate, poetry didn...
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  Eoin Devereux Limerick Professor Steps into the Poetic Spotlight by Kieran Beville                           Eoin Devereux, Professor of Sociology at the University of Limerick   Eoin Devereux occupies an unusual and, in many ways, quietly radical position in contemporary Irish cultural life. Widely recognised as a cultural sociologist—known for his work on popular music, media and the everyday textures of social life—he is now also the author of Gardening Leave , a debut poetry collection that brings those same concerns into sharply focused lyric form. The book is less a departure from his academic career than a continuation of it by other means: an attempt to attend closely to lives, voices and experiences that rarely command sustained public attention. Gardening Leave is rooted in work and its absence, in care and neglect, in the emotional and social residue left by systems that fail quietly and r...
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Anticipation Rising - Launch of Limerick Literary Festival Programme

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  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...
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