Patricia’s Blog
Iris Galloway, in her guide to the The Great Western Greenway – ‘the longest off-road walking and cycling trail in Ireland’ – expresses the hope that her book will enhance the experience of this unique trail for walkers and cyclists. She succeeds admirably in her aim by welding together history, folklore, rich information on the…
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Achill Island 1912: A Microcosm of Swirling Political Movements.
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Literary readings, three book launches, an illustrated lecture on ‘Women Artists on Achill’ by Catherine Marshall, and a guided walk on the nearby Clare Island, all feature in this year’s Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend on the May bank-holiday weekend. The book launches include Gisela Holfter’s Heinrich Böll and Ireland, which charts the Nobel Prize winning author’s connections…
Read MoreOutrage on Achill. Delighted to get this review of The Veiled Woman of Achill by Aine Ryan in the Mayo News:
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You can walk in the footsteps of the artist Paul Henry, following the shoreline from Dooagh to Keel, as part of the May bank-holiday Achill Walks Festival. There are a half-dozen walks, some on the island, some on the north-west Mayo mainland in Ballycroy National Park and the Nephin mountain range. A century ago Paul…
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Laundry by Anu Productions has won The Irish Times best production award for 2011 Irish Theatre. The pity is that so few people got to experience this exceptional piece of drama as the audience entered the former Magdalene Laundry in Sean MacDermot Street, Dublin, in groups of just three people during the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival. When I…
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I have belatedly been reading More Lives Than One by Gerard Hanberry from the Collins Press. It tells the fascinating story of Oscar Wilde, his ancestors and descendants, and the massive contradictions at the heart of the family. It is also an intriguing mapping of the Wilde west of Ireland lineage from Castlerea, Co Roscommon, through the Ballymagibbon estate at Cong, to Moytura House at…
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I have been absent from this blog while getting the book over the finish line. The Veiled Woman of Achill will be published by the Collins Press in April. There will be a launch in my home city of Limerick in late April and a launch / reading at the Valley House, Achill in early May.
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It bucketed rain in Dublin’s Sean MacDermott street on Saturday as we waited to be let in. Then we noticed a pair of eyes staring out at us through the grid as the door was unbolted. There was no time to shake the rain from the umbrella before being handed what smelled like a bucket of Jeyes Fluid by…
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I was back on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork recently after an absence of over a decade. I had forgotten the shock of seeing the tall remnants of the nineteenth-century copper mine at Allihies astride the rocks and the Atlantic Ocean everywhere I looked. If my words were inadequate to describe the experience of the physical landscape…
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