Listening to the Frontline - Limerick Anthology Brings Social Inclusion Into Sharp Focus

 

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 invitation) will takes place at 11am in the Istabraq Hall at City Hall and will feature readings from contributors, a conversation on the realities of social inclusion work, and a reception offering space for dialogue between writers, practitioners and members of the wider community. But organisers are keen to stress that this is not simply a literary event. It is, rather, an act of collective listening.

Beyond the Soundbite

At a time when public debate around homelessness, addiction, mental health and migration is often reduced to statistics, slogans or polarised arguments, Frontline Voices insists on slowing the conversation down. The anthology does not offer policy prescriptions or neat conclusions. Instead, it offers presence. “These are not stories shaped to make the reader comfortable,” says Beville. “They are honest accounts of what it means to work — and live — at the point where systems meet human vulnerability.”

The contributors write from hospital wards and psychiatric courtyards, from men’s sheds and Garda patrols, from hostels, council estates and community centres. Their pieces range from memoir and personal essay to poetry that distils moments of care, frustration, grief and fragile hope. What unites them is a refusal to simplify experience into tidy narratives of rescue or redemption.

Recovery, in these pages, is ongoing and uncertain. Survival leaves scars. Compassion can be both sustaining and exhausting. In foregrounding this complexity, the anthology pushes back against the idea that social inclusion can be understood through outcomes alone.

Building Community, Plank by Plank

One of the collection’s opening pieces comes from Sean Dalton, founder of the Dooradoyle/Raheen Men’s Shed, whose contribution traces how isolation in later life can be transformed — slowly and deliberately — into connection.

Dalton’s story begins not with a grand plan but with loneliness. From there, he charts how shared labour, conversation and simple rituals — a cup of tea, a woodworking project, a yoga class — created a space where men could reconnect with one another and with a sense of purpose. His writing reminds readers that community does not emerge by accident; it must be built, plank by plank, against the grain of modern isolation.

That theme reverberates throughout the anthology. Again and again, contributors describe how meaningful connection arises not from programmes or targets, but from sustained human presence.

The Long View of Social Care

Veteran social worker Mick Lacey offers a perspective shaped by decades of engagement with communities experiencing deep structural disadvantage. His reflections move between moments of cultural celebration, such as the Wren Boy tradition, and the stark realities of incarceration, poverty and inequality.

Lacey’s writing draws a clear line between childhood deprivation and adult vulnerability, challenging any attempt to treat social care as a peripheral concern. In his work, social inclusion emerges as a question of justice rather than charity — a reminder that the choices made by society echo across generations.

Nursing at the Edge

From the frontline of healthcare, nurse Theresa Tierney Bulger contributes pieces that are both intimate and unflinching. Her writing captures the quiet heroism — and hidden cost — of caregiving, where empathy is both a strength and a burden.

Walking Beside, Not Ahead

Poet and support worker Olamide Olatokunbo brings a transnational perspective to the collection. A Nigerian-born practitioner working in Ireland, his poetry reflects daily engagement with people navigating homelessness, addiction and mental health challenges. His work resists the language of “fixing” or “saving”. Instead, it emphasises accompaniment — walking alongside people through cycles of progress and setback. Healing, his poems suggest, is rarely linear, and inclusion is not an abstract value but a daily practice of showing up, again and again.

Masculinity Under the Microscope

In the essay Man Up!, Abdullateef Adeyemi Soyomi confronts toxic masculinity with striking candour. He traces the impact of childhood mockery, the pressure to self-censor difference, and the slow, difficult journey toward self-acceptance. Soyomi’s reflections illuminate how rigid ideas of masculinity can harm not only women and girls, but men themselves. His contribution broadens the scope of Frontline Voices, reminding readers that social inclusion also requires interrogating the cultural norms that shape identity and belonging.

Poetry from the Margins

Kelsey May Daly’s poetry emerges from her work in the homelessness sector. Her spare, precise lines capture the quiet violence of boarded-up estates, closed playgrounds and the silences that linger through childhood instability.

Daly’s poems do not plead for attention; they demand it. By naming what is often ignored, her work intervenes in the texture of neglect that can surround housing insecurity, insisting that these experiences be seen and remembered.

Other contributors deepen this tapestry. Veronica Keys draws connections between Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and contemporary injustices, challenging the notion that such histories are safely confined to the past. Madge O’Callaghan writes of stolen childhoods and the enduring impact of growing up without a secure home. Each voice adds urgency, insisting that silence is no longer an option.

The Garda Perspective

One of the most distinctive aspects of Frontline Voices is the inclusion of writing from members of An Garda Síochána. These contributions are presented as a discrete section within the anthology, honouring their particular vantage point while situating them within the broader ecosystem of care and justice.

The Garda pieces reveal a profession marked not only by authority and enforcement, but by uncertainty, empathy and moral complexity. Readers encounter the watchfulness of midnight patrols, the unexpected humour of roadside interactions, the devastation of addiction-related loss, and fleeting moments of hope.

Some pieces are written from the Garda perspective; others reflect on encounters from the opposite side of the uniform. Together, they humanise policing, challenging simplistic portrayals and opening space for dialogue about trust, responsibility and community safety.

Bearing Witness

Running through the anthology is a shared commitment to witness. To bear witness, as many contributors implicitly argue, is to refuse erasure — to say, “I saw this. I heard this. It mattered.” In a society that often prefers to look away from discomfort, witness becomes a form of resistance. When a parent writes of burying a child too young, they assert that life’s value. When a poet reclaims dignity from the language of madness, they resist reduction. When a refugee holds both sides of their history, they insist on complexity over caricature. Reading these pieces, the audience becomes part of that act of witness. The responsibility does not end with the final page.

Why It Matters Now

The launch of Frontline Voices comes at a moment when Ireland is grappling with deep social challenges: a housing crisis, stretched health services, ongoing debates around addiction, migration and policing. In such a context, the anthology offers neither easy answers nor comforting illusions. What it offers instead is nuance. It creates space for contradiction, ambivalence and unfinished stories. It reminds readers that behind every headline and policy discussion are lives shaped by those decisions. For organisers, that is precisely the point. “Empathy can’t be outsourced,” one contributor notes. “It has to be cultivated, one story at a time.”

An Invitation to Listen

The launch event on 15 January is framed as an invitation — not just to read, but to listen. To sit with stories that may unsettle or challenge. To notice the echoes between different lives: how the loneliness of retirement resonates with the isolation of addiction; how the grief of a parent mirrors the weariness of a carer; how laughter in a men’s shed shares kinship with poetry written in a bedsit.

As Frontline Voices enters the world, its editor and contributors hope it will travel beyond the walls of City Hall — into classrooms, book clubs, professional spaces and kitchen-table conversations. In doing so, it carries a quiet but defiant message, repeated in different forms across its pages: I am here. This happened. It matters.

On a January morning in Limerick, those words will be spoken aloud. The challenge — and the opportunity — will be what we do after hearing them.