A showcase of film and photography from rural Ireland’s literary heartland
Community Cinema kicks off part 2 of Heritage Council film project in Kerry
Kerry Writers’ Museum has just received €47,750 from the Heritage Council to continue recovering and archiving films shot in rural north Kerry. It brings total investment by the Heritage Council in this project – developed by Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie – to almost €100,000 over two years. The screening of Leo Finucane’s film Father And Son at Clounmacon Community Centre is a continuation of the community cinema programme and the first act of the second phase of this groundbreaking project.
The 2025 grant allows Kerry Writers’ Museum to complete its acquisition of two very important collections. The first is Jimmy Deenihan’s remarkable library of North Kerry Literary Trust recordings of Kerry writers and their associates. The second is the Tony Fitmaurice collection of photographs, which his niece Kathy Reynolds has given back to the people of Listowel and Ballybunion.
Heritage Council funding will also enable the museum to develop a viewing library with trained staff to provide free, public access to these and other collections as they are archived and digitized. That places Kerry Writers’ Museum at the forefront of a strategic drive to manage public engagement with archives like this at a local level. The partnership with Leo Finucane and Clounmacon Community Centre is an important part of that project.
IARSMAÍ | Decolonisation of historical collections in Ireland | TG4 9/10 @ 21:30
Museums and institutions in Ireland and abroad are actively decolonizing their collections and practices – partly because of Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter campaigns, and partly because of the emergence of a more progressive approach to dealing with problematic histories.
Iarsmaí (Remnants) looks at Ireland’s role as a colony, and as a colonising influence in turn, through the issue of stolen skulls in TCD, and the presence of looted indigenous material from Australia in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, and from Benin City in the National Museum in Dublin. The film features the return of 13 stolen skulls from TCD to the island of Inishbofin, off the Galway coast.
Ciarán Walsh curates a home movie fest for Heritage Week 2024
Kerry Writers’ Museum have put together a home movie mini festival for Heritage Week 2024. It’s an exciting programme of workshops, screenings and talks by Harry Moore, Lisa Fingleton, Laura Fitzgerald, Michael Mulcahy and John Lynch (aka The Bolex Boys), Dick Carmody, Mary and Mike Kissane, Leo Finucane, Tom Dillon, Ted Sweeney, Sarah Arnold, Carolannn Madden and Michael Guerin.