The Kilmorna Collection

04/06/2026

01/06/2026

We stock Luke Kelly.

You will notice from the photograph that this announcement is being handled by someone far more suitable for social media than me.

This was not an accident.

My social media consultants have advised me that, while I may have some limited value behind the counter, appearing in promotional photography is not where the business should be taking unnecessary risks.

The facts were stated.

We moved on.

Anyway, Luke Kelly.

Luke Kelly Best Of is now in the shop, and it is probably the best place to start if you want to understand why his voice still carries so much weight.

Born in Dublin, raised around Sheriff Street, and later one of the defining voices of The Dubliners, Luke Kelly did not just sing Irish songs. He made them sound necessary.

The Dubliners could be wild, funny, political, sentimental, rough around the edges and entirely unsuitable for a quiet dinner with people who say “gosh”. Luke Kelly was at the centre of that. His voice had force, but it also had intelligence. He could sound furious, tender, wounded, amused and completely certain, often before the song had reached the second verse.

That is why Best Of works so well.

It gives you the range.

Raglan Road for the poetry.
The Auld Triangle for the theatre.
The Rocky Road to Dublin for the fire.
The Town I Loved So Well for the history.
Scorn Not His Simplicity for the quiet devastation.

It is not just a collection of well known songs.

It is the argument for Luke Kelly in one record.

The voice.
The bite.
The sadness.
The humour.
The Dublinness.

Luke Kelly Best Of available now at The Kilmorna Collection, instore and online.

31/05/2026

Kerry Writers Museum, Listowel.

Many museums begin with objects.

This one begins with people who saw, remembered and told.

Listowel did not build a museum around artefacts. It built one around witnesses.

The Kerry Writers’ Museum sits in a restored Georgian house at 24 The Square, beside Listowel Castle. The building itself dates from 1820, when it was built by John Fitzgerald, land agent for Lord Listowel, for his daughter Elizabeth. Later it became known as Castle House, partly because of its position beside the castle, and over the years it passed through the hands of solicitors, doctors, families and soldiers. During the War of Independence, Dr Michael O’Connor, one of its longest residents, was interned for thirteen months, while the house was taken over by the British military because it looked directly onto the Square.

So before a visitor even enters the exhibition rooms, the building has already made its point.

In Listowel, history does not sit politely in the background.

It leans over your shoulder.

Some details of the museum’s story are well documented, while others are repeated in local histories and museum materials and may be difficult to verify independently. The broad outline, however, is clear: the museum uses a historic building and the lives of local writers to explore how memory, storytelling and place have shaped North Kerry’s cultural identity.

The museum began in 1994 with the North Kerry Literary Task Force, whose ambition was to create a cultural centre for the county’s literary figures. Refurbishment began in 1997 and the museum officially opened in April 2001. This was a deliberate act of cultural memory: a recognition that North Kerry’s writers were not merely local celebrities but part of the town’s identity.

The museum is built around the writers’ rooms of John B. Keane, Bryan MacMahon, Brendan Kennelly, Maurice Walsh and George Fitzmaurice. Each room recreates something of the world that shaped the writer.

John B. Keane is met through the public house, which is exactly right. Keane was not a remote literary figure observing life from a safe distance. He stood behind a bar in Listowel and watched humanity arrive in instalments: the bore, the chancer, the wounded, the comic, the proud and the desperate. It is impossible to understand Keane without understanding the pub as theatre. Sive and The Field emerged from a writer who understood power, land, family and the strange performance of ordinary conversation.

Bryan MacMahon is encountered through the classroom. Again, the museum understands the man. MacMahon was known in Listowel as The Master, a teacher, folklorist and writer whose work drew deeply from language, children, landscape and local character. His room reminds us that education here was never just the delivery of information. It was part of a living oral tradition.

Maurice Walsh is placed in his summer house, the quiet working space of a writer whose story The Quiet Man travelled much further than its author’s name. Walsh was born in Ballydonoghue, near Listowel, in 1879, into a world of farms, horses, books and talk. The film made his story internationally famous, but the museum usefully pulls visitors back before Hollywood to the North Kerry world that formed him.

George Fitzmaurice may be the most intriguing presence because he refuses to behave like a comfortable heritage figure. Born in County Kerry in 1877 and closely associated with the Listowel area, he became one of the more original voices linked to the Abbey Theatre. His work moved between realism, fantasy and dark comedy. The Country Dressmaker was produced at the Abbey in 1907, while later plays unsettled critics who did not always know what to do with him. He was ahead of his time, which is often another way of saying that his own time found him inconvenient.

Then there is Brendan Kennelly, whose presence gives the museum a different emotional register. Kennelly understood place as more than geography. It was voice, family, grief, humour and the music of remembered speech. He reminds visitors that literature is not only about plot but about cadence and the way language carries the character of a community.

What makes the Kerry Writers’ Museum work is that it does not treat literature as decoration.

It treats writing as evidence.

Evidence of a town that listened carefully and a countryside where folklore, gossip, politics, religion, land, poverty, ambition and wit entered the bloodstream of language.

The museum’s use of the Seanchaí tradition is important here. The Seanchaí was not simply a teller of charming stories but a carrier of communal knowledge. The museum places its writers within that longer tradition, suggesting that Keane, MacMahon, Kennelly, Walsh and Fitzmaurice inherited a culture in which words had weight and storytelling preserved memory, entertained, warned and explained.

This is why the museum is essential during Writers’ Week.

Writers’ Week is not an event imposed on Listowel from the outside. It grew from the same soil. Without the museum, a visitor might see it as a successful festival in a pretty town. With the museum, they understand something deeper: Writers’ Week is the public expression of a literary culture that already existed.

There is also a civic seriousness to the place. The museum is not merely preserving the past. It runs events, exhibitions, school programmes and cultural activities. It has been accredited under the Museum Standards Programme for Ireland and continues to operate as a community organisation rather than a static shrine. A shrine asks people to admire what is dead. A cultural centre asks people to continue the work.

And that, perhaps, is the real achievement of the Kerry Writers’ Museum.

It does not simply say: these writers were great.

It asks a better question.

What kind of town makes writers?

The answer is all around you.

In the Square.

In the castle.

In the pubs.

In the schools.

In the old houses.

In the habit of conversation.

In the fact that, in Listowel, a story is still understood as a serious thing, even when it begins with someone saying they will only keep you a minute.

They will not keep you a minute.

This is North Kerry.

You may wish to sit down.

30/05/2026

Boru playing live at The Kilmorna Collection

30/05/2026

Boru are back.

At 3pm today, we are delighted to welcome Boru from St John’s back to The Kilmorna Collection for their second performance in The Listening Room.

The first time they played here, it was one of those lovely unexpected afternoons where the shop suddenly became much better than it had any right to be.

Young local musicians.

Live music.

People stopping what they were doing and actually listening.

A dangerous development in modern society.

There is something very special about hearing young musicians perform in an intimate space. No big stage. No fuss. Just music, confidence, nerves, talent, and the quiet horror of realising that people younger than you are already far more accomplished than you will ever be.

This is exactly what The Listening Room was set up for.

Community.

Culture.

Music.

And the occasional reminder that Listowel continues to produce talented people at a frankly unreasonable rate.

Boru from St John’s will be playing today at 3pm.

Come in, have a coffee, listen properly, and pretend you had planned to be this cultured all along.

30/05/2026

Listowel is a magical place all year round.

We are North Kerry people.

We do not generally go around declaring things magical unless there is strong evidence, preferably witnessed by someone reliable and discussed later over Barry's tea.

But Listowel has it.

Whatever it is.

You can feel it in the streets.

In the cafés.

In the pubs.

In the way a simple conversation can begin with the weather, pass briefly through a cousin in Australia, touch on the state of your ones fashion sense, revisit a grievance from 1994, and end with someone saying, “Anyway, I must fly,” despite having shown no urgency for the previous twenty seven minutes.

This is oral tradition.

We've had an unusual decade.

Because something changed during Covid.

People stayed home.

We got used to distance.

We got used to silence.

We got used to cancelling things, avoiding things, postponing things, and telling ourselves that we were perfectly happy not going anywhere because we had tea, broadband, and a concerning interest in banana bread.

Then life came back.

Sort of.

The doors opened.

The streets filled again.

But a lot of people had forgotten the habit of being social.

Habits are strange things.

You stop meeting people for long enough and suddenly a simple conversation with a stranger begins to feel like an extreme sport.

And now, everywhere you look, people talk about loneliness.

The loneliness epidemic.

The quiet ache of people being surrounded by phones, noise, information, and still somehow not having enough ordinary human contact.

This is where Listowel becomes important.

Because Listowel is a place where social interaction still happens naturally.

Effortlessly.

Accidentally.

You leave the house for ten minutes and come back forty minutes later with news, gossip, a book recommendation, a small disagreement, and a full knowledge of someone’s cousin’s operation.

You meet people at counters.

In cafés.

Outside pubs.

Inside pubs.

At events you only half meant to attend.

A stranger is rarely a stranger for long here.

Because Listowel has always understood something simple.

People need people.

They need the casual chat.

The unexpected conversation.

The person who remembers your name.

The person who does not remember your name but remembers how you like milk heated in your Americano.

Listowel was never just a town with writers.

It was a town that made writers effortlessly.

The stories were already here.

At counters.

At kitchen tables.

Outside churches.

Beside tills.

In pubs where a man could go in for one quiet drink and come out with a full understanding of human nature and a messed up version of local history.

So when Writers’ Week arrives, it does not feel like an event being placed on top of the town.

It feels like the town given a licence to speak at its natural volume.

And it is wonderful.

Absolutely wonderful.

The streets fill with readers, writers, visitors, locals, wanderers, listeners, talkers, people carrying tote bags, people looking for venues, people pretending they know exactly where they are going, and people who have just come out of an event and now need to stand very still for a moment because someone said something beautiful about loss.

For a few days, Listowel becomes even more itself.

You meet strangers.

You hear stories.

You bump into people you know.

You bump into people you were hoping to avoid, but that is also culture.

That is the beauty of Writers’ Week.

Not just the books.

Not just the writers.

Not just the events.

But the feeling that a town can still bring people out of themselves.

That conversation is still alive.

That community is not an abstract idea.

That the simple act of standing on a street, talking to another person, laughing at something ridiculous, and feeling part of a place is still one of the great pleasures of being alive.

Listowel is magical all year.

Writers’ Week just turns the light up.

And when the whole thing becomes too moving, too literary, or dangerously close to meaningful, someone will open a packet of Tayto crisps and bring the country safely back to itself.

29/05/2026

Buy a spoken word vinyl.

Get a free tea or coffee.

No plot twist.

28/05/2026

Writers’ Week special.

Coffee.
Sandwich.
€9.

We have decided this is enough marketing now.