Kieran Beville

  From Limerick to Alexandra The Global Vision of Desmond O’Grady By Kieran Beville Portrait of Desmond O'Grady by Kieran Beville Limerick has produced its share of poets, but few have carried the city’s spirit as far across the world as Desmond O’Grady (1935–2014). Born in Limerick, he grew up near the Shannon in a city that was, in the 1930s and ’40s, still shadowed by poverty but alive with stories, song, and faith. From those modest beginnings, O’Grady became one of Ireland’s most widely travelled and cosmopolitan poets — a man whose work bridged continents and civilisations. Though he is less celebrated than contemporaries such as Seamus Heaney or Derek Mahon, O’Grady’s poetry remains among the most intellectually adventurous of the modern Irish canon. A teacher, translator, and scholar fluent in multiple languages, he wrote from Cairo to Rome, Istanbul to Boston — yet his imagination was never far from Limerick. As he once put it, “I plant my words in borrowed soil, a...

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...

  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...

  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...