Sir, – I enjoyed your positive coverage of Limerick City of Culture but I would like to augment it, if I may, by paying tribute to a small group of Limerick-based readers who, on a very limited budget, programmed and delivered a highly successful series of literary events throughout the year.
Working long and thankless hours, Caroline Graham, Sheila Quealey, Vivienne McKechnie and James Lawlor brought Colin Barrett, Kevin Barry, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Paul Lynch, Paula Meehan, Claire Keegan and American poet Richard Blanco to Limerick, where those authors gave readings, workshops and talks in the city’s beautiful library, in different places throughout the county and at the University of Limerick.
These volunteers organised the venues, distributed the flyers, wrote press releases and adverts, set up the chairs, were the first to arrive and the last to leave, for no reason other than a passion for our literature and the belief that someone had to do it, otherwise it wouldn’t get done.
Colum McCann addressed a packed audience, including many local schoolchildren, at the college. Donal Ryan, our incoming Arts Council Writer in Residence, gave ceaselessly of his time and his talents. The contribution of these volunteers, writers and readers was immense. It establishes an important legacy that is already being built upon.
JP McManus’s educational trust funded a short story competition for Limerick schoolchildren and third-level students. Thousands of people in Limerick enjoyed cultural events of impressive range and ambition.
Were there imperfections? Yes. How could there not have been? But what happened this year in Limerick was amazing and inspiring and might serve as an example to the rest of the country – citizens taking charge, delivering excellence, destroying stereotypes. Local businesses getting involved. Third-level institutions reaching out. Local media promoting the arts as a source of dignity and pride.
Faced with the well-documented early adversities that were sometimes rather gleefully remarked upon by certain cosmopolitan geniuses based in the capital, Limerick City of Culture failed to get the memo and lie down to defeat.
Too often it used to be the case that everything cultural that happened outside the Pale was seen as unworthy except as a pretext for self-amused condescension. The volunteers who saved Limerick City of Culture and made it a success have played a hugely important part in consigning all of that to the rubbish heap where it always belonged. – Yours, etc,
JOSEPH O’CONNOR,
Professor and
Frank McCourt
Chair of Creative Writing,
School of Culture
and Communications,
University of Limerick.