News

The Dingle Bookshop is looking very much as it did, when Mike and Camilla were in charge. They are now having a deserved rest while the new owners settle in.

The new owners of the bookshop are Nuala Cassidy and her husband, Martin Bealin, formerly of the multi award-winning Global Village restaurant. Nuala stepped back from the restaurant business a few years ago to devote time to their young family and last August Martin shut up shop at the Global Village, also to have more family time but mindful as well that it was getting harder to make a living out of fine dining.

Liberation from the demands of the restaurant business freed them to look at new possibilities and when Camila Dinkel and Mike Venner put the Dingle Bookshop up for sale after 15 years behind the counter it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Exiled From Ireland by Marie T. Mullan is a fascinating new book on the extraordinary Geneva Window, a masterpiece by Harry Clarke, Ireland's most famous stained glass artist. Here in Dingle, we are all privileged to have his beautiful work to gaze upon in the Díseart Chapel. The Geneva Window's story is extraordinary.

The Geneva Window, renowned for its superb artistry and craftsmanship, celebrates the novels, poems and plays of the Irish Literary Revival.

Commissioned by the Irish government as a gift to the International Labour office in Geneva, the window was initially accepted  on its completion in 1930, but rejected a few days later as ‘unrepresentative’ of the Irish people and even labelled ‘indecent’. This had serious emotional consequences for Harry, who died a few months later.

A  Dark Day on the Blaskets by Mícheál Ó Dubhshláine, was re-published last week by Tigh Áine. It is  a fascinating portrait of a young woman and her times. As well as a page-turner, it is an engrossing description of a place at a turning point in its cultural history, a place celebrated in the remarkable classics of the ‘Blasket Library’.

 

In the summer of 1909 Eibhlin Nic Niocaill  arrives on the Dingle Peninsula in the extreme south-west of Ireland. One of the finest scholars in the new national movement, she had come from Dublin to study the West Kerry dialect of Irish. Here she explored the countryside and travelled to the Great Blasket, spending an intense, mystical month on the island, meeting the inhabitants, whose lifestyle had changed little in 200 years. But on 13 August she and 17-year-old Donal O Criomhthain both drowned.

"A must read, a story of redemption, from a life of pugilism and violence to the peace and tranquility of the Great Blasket Island"  Denis Ryan, author of Short Tales from High Stools.

Congratulations to Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin, on winning this year's Michael Hartnett Poetry Award.

“I am nothing less than stunned,” Ms Ní Bheildiúin said in response to her success in winning this year’s award which was for a second or later collection of poems in Irish.

A long-time admirer of Michael Hartnett’s own poetry she continued: “I always get a great hit out of reading Michael Hartnett’s poetry. I became aware of him, his poems and his life story shortly after I started to compose pieces of Irish language verse. I felt an immediate affinity to him that he had toiled in the same mistiness of Gaeilge as a second language as I was doing. I find his poetry in both Irish and English powerful.”

In this homage to the mountain, Ní Bheildiúin demonstrates her own deep appreciation of Mount Brandon. Nature poetry and a sense of place are central to the Gaelic tradition and Agallamh sa Cheo should be considered among the most significant works of this era that contemplates our relationship with the natural world.”