Arts and Entertainment

Historical stories concerning music, theatre, cinema, literature, dance, broadcasting, festivals and popular entertainment in Limerick and Ireland between 1900 and 2000, including performers, venues, writers, artists and changing cultural tastes.

Showing 1–10 of 241 records: 13 articles and 228 images

Archive Records

Student Honoured

Article By Oisín 24 June 2026

Dublin art student Eileen Elizabeth Janet Barnes received a prize on 10 January, presented by Countess Beatrix Cadogan, wife of the lord lieutenant of Ireland. The award recognised Barnes’s developing artistic ability during her studies at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, one of the country’s principal centres for formal instruction in drawing, painting, design and applied art. Such ceremonies linked student achievement with the highest levels of the administration at Dublin Castle, while providing young artists with public recognition. For Barnes, the presentation marked an early distinction in a career later devoted to exceptionally detailed scientific and botanical illustration.

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Abbey Regatta

Image 3 August 2026

This image captures the Abbey Regatta on the Abbey River in Limerick City in 1977. The celebrated event brought colour, excitement and community pride to the riverside, drawing crowds to watch local fishermen, sandmen and river families compete in traditional races. Events included rowing contests, paddle races and the famous Veteran Pole, demanding balance, strength and remarkable skill. Families such as the Clancys, McNamaras, Shannys and Hayeses were closely associated with the river and its traditions. Although old occupations gradually declined, the regatta remained a cherished expression of neighbourhood identity, friendship, local spirit and Limerick’s enduring maritime heritage and legacy.

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Nua Ruins

Image 16 July 2026

The old church near Holycross, County Limerick, was recorded as a ruin by 1642. In 1679, Rachael Bourchier, Countess of Bath, restored the building, just one year before her death. Thereafter it became known as the New Church, or Teampall Nua in Irish, and served local Church of Ireland parishioners. A belfry was added during the restoration, giving the structure a distinctive profile. Although the church later fell out of use and returned to ruin, its surviving walls, arched openings and graveyard remain important reminders of seventeenth-century religious life and the long history of worship at this historic site today.

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Vanished Junction

Image 5 August 2026

This 1975 view captures the junction of Lower Henry Street and Sarsfield Street before the creation of Liddy Street transformed the surrounding cityscape. The photograph preserves a moment when traffic, shopfronts and older buildings still defined this busy corner of central Limerick. Lower Henry Street connected the commercial heart of the city with the Shannon quays, while Sarsfield Street formed an important route towards Sarsfield Bridge. The later development of Liddy Street altered movement through the area and removed part of the earlier streetscape. Today, the image offers a valuable record of a vanished junction and changing daily urban life.

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Vanished Junction

Image 5 August 2026

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Stone Church

Image 8 August 2026

This adapted image is based on Thomas Newenham’s 1830 engraving of Kilmallock Dominican Priory, one of County Limerick’s most important medieval monuments. Founded in 1291 by the Fitzgerald family, the priory, also known as St Saviour’s, stands beside the River Loobagh within historic Kilmallock. Newenham’s original view appeared in Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of Ireland and recorded the ruins during the nineteenth century. This modern adaptation respectfully reimagines that historic scene while preserving the character, architecture and atmosphere of the original composition. The priory’s tower, east window and weathered stonework remain enduring symbols of Kilmallock’s rich medieval heritage today.

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Ed Jpeg

Image 3 August 2026

Barringtons Hospital, overlooking George’s Quay in Limerick, was founded in 1829 by Sir Joseph Barrington and his sons to provide free medical care to the poor, regardless of background or religion. Designed by architect Frederick Darley, the imposing Georgian building featured a raised podium, arcaded portico and commanding riverside presence. It opened to patients on 5 November 1831 and served generations as a charitable public infirmary. After closing as a state hospital in 1988, the landmark was purchased by surgeon Paul O’Byrne in 1991, restored and reopened as a modern private acute hospital serving Limerick and the wider Mid-West region.

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Coastline Jpeg

Image 3 August 2026

Gerald Griffin, born in Limerick in 1803, became one of Ireland’s most admired nineteenth-century novelists, poets and dramatists. Raised in a prosperous brewing family, he later moved to London, where he pursued journalism and literature. His best-known novel, The Collegians, drew upon the notorious murder of Ellen Hanley, remembered as the Colleen Bawn. In 1838, Griffin abandoned literary life, destroyed many unpublished manuscripts and joined the Christian Brothers in Cork. He died of typhus in 1840, aged thirty-six. Limerick proudly continues to honour him through prominent street names, schools, literary awards and the Gerald Griffins GAA club in west Limerick.

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O’Dwyer Bridge

Image 31 July 2026

This rare 1932 photograph shows the newly completed Bishop O’Dwyer Bridge linking Limerick city with Corbally. Constructed between 1929 and 1931 at a cost of £21,308, the concrete structure replaced the older Park Bridge, which had served the district since 1798. It was named in honour of Dr Edward Thomas O’Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick from 1886 to 1917. The bridge represented a new era of engineering, transport and urban development, while maintaining a crossing essential to local life for generations. Nearly a century later, it remains a familiar landmark, practical route and enduring part of Limerick’s architectural and social history.

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Shortest Street

Image 16 July 2026

Quinlan Street is one of the shortest principal streets in Limerick City, measuring approximately eighty-five feet at its centre. Located within the historic Georgian Quarter, it forms an important connection between the Crescent, at the southern end of O’Connell Street, and O’Connell Avenue. Developed between the 1820s and 1840s, the street is lined with distinctive multi-storey red-brick Georgian townhouses built over basements. Its unusual layout means that one side is longer than the other. The street was named after Thomas Quinlan, the builder responsible for the original houses at numbers 1 and 2, preserving his contribution to Limerick’s urban development.

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Books Supporting the Archive

Every Book Purchased Helps Support The Continuing Work Of Limerick Archives.

Ashes

The Ashes Trilogy, Book One

Ashes begins the story of a group of children growing up in the streets and lanes of Limerick, where poverty and hardship are balanced by humour, imagination and fierce friendship. Their city is more than a setting: it watches, remembers and gives voice to lives often absent from official history. As the children explore their neighbourhood, they encounter family pressures, faith, hunger, danger and the first signs of a changing world. Through their adventures and loyalties, the novel captures the resilience of ordinary people and introduces the characters whose lives will unfold across the three volumes of The Ashes Trilogy.

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Gurriers

The Ashes Trilogy, Book Two

Gurriers continues the lives of the Limerick children introduced in Ashes as childhood freedom begins to give way to work, responsibility and harsher choices. Their friendships remain strong, but poverty, family expectations, faith and the pressures of growing older test loyalties once taken for granted. The streets and lanes still offer humour, adventure and belonging, yet the wider world increasingly intrudes upon their lives. Through vivid dialogue, memorable characters and the watchful voice of Limerick itself, the novel explores resilience, identity and change while showing how even the closest companions can be drawn towards futures by circumstances beyond their control.

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Scattered

The Ashes Trilogy, Book Three

Scattered concludes The Ashes Trilogy as the friends who once shared Limerick’s streets and lanes face adulthood, work, hunger, faith, family duty and emigration. Time has altered their ambitions, tested their loyalties and carried some beyond the city that formed them. Yet memory continues to bind Louie, Seamus, Joe, Sean, Peter, Tony, Bardy, Maura, Eileen, Nora, Lingo and the mysterious Gleamer. Narrated through the enduring presence of Limerick itself, the novel explores separation, sacrifice and survival while recognising the humour and affection that remain. Together, their scattered lives complete a moving portrait of friendship, community and change across changing generations.

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Threshold

The Troubles Trilogy, Book One

Threshold opens in Belfast in 1968, where the Catholic Devlins and Protestant Morrows confront a city divided by religion, memory and fear. Civil rights marches, police violence, riots and internment transform ordinary streets into dangerous frontiers while political conflict enters homes, workplaces and schools. At the centre are Aileen Devlin and Thomas Morrow, whose relationship challenges the boundaries their families regard as essential to survival. As loyalty hardens into suspicion, both must decide whether inherited allegiance excuses injustice. Through family arguments, upheaval and private courage, the novel explores love, conscience, division and survival during the opening years of the Troubles.

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Hunger

The Troubles Trilogy, Book Two

Hunger is Book Two of The Troubles Trilogy, set in Belfast during the 1980s. Aileen Devlin and Thomas Morrow have built a fragile life across the city’s sectarian divide, but the conflict threatens the home they created for their daughter, Claire. As hunger strikes, the Anglo Irish Agreement and violence reshape Northern Ireland, republican Declan and loyalist Billy exploit fear, grief and vulnerable young men. Against them stand Aileen, Kathleen and Elsie, whose quiet strength keeps their families human. This is a story of love, survival and the courage to place people before causes in a divided society under pressure.

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Crossing

The Troubles Trilogy, Book Three

Crossing concludes The Troubles Trilogy during the decade from 1990 to 2000, as Belfast moves from violence towards negotiation, ceasefires and uncertain peace. The Devlin and Morrow families face political change alongside grief, ageing, divided loyalties and the consequences of choices made across three decades. Relationships once threatened by religious boundaries are tested by memory, mistrust and the fear that compromise may betray the dead. As the peace process gathers momentum, ordinary people must decide whether reconciliation is possible. The trilogy closes with a story of endurance, forgiveness, loss and hope beyond inherited division, proving that peace begins with courage.

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Severance

Historical Novel

Severance is a historical novel set in Ballingarry, County Limerick, during Ireland’s struggle for independence. A torn and bloodied dispatch passes through fields, kitchens, lofts and hidden routes, placing everyone who handles it in danger. Michael Enright carries the burden of trust, while Mary, Molly and their neighbours struggle to preserve the message and protect one another. Against them, Captain Edward Harcourt studies every delay, wound and fragment for clues. As loyalty, fear and betrayal tighten around the hidden network, ordinary people must decide what they are willing to risk when history enters their homes and silence itself becomes dangerous.

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Limerick Generations: 1900 to 1909

Limerick Decalogy, Book One

Limerick Generations: 1900 to 1909 opens the decade by documenting a city and county entering the twentieth century amid political debate, commercial activity, poverty, faith and technological change. Month by month, the book connects major Irish developments with local events, institutions, streets and communities. Public meetings, labour, transport, education, sport, business and everyday life reveal how national questions were experienced in Limerick. Historical reports and carefully reconstructed narratives bring forgotten moments and ordinary people into focus. As Book One of Limerick Decalogy, it establishes the foundation for a ten volume journey through one hundred years of local history and memory.

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Limerick Generations: 1910 to 1919

Limerick Decalogy, Book Two

Limerick Generations: 1910 to 1919 traces a decade of political transformation, labour conflict, war, revolution and social change across Limerick city and county. Home Rule, unionist resistance, trade union organisation and the First World War entered streets, farms, schools, workplaces and family life. The Easter Rising, conscription crisis, influenza pandemic and general election altered public loyalties and expectations. The decade culminated in the Limerick Soviet of 1919, when workers challenged military restrictions through organised collective action. As Book Two of Limerick Decalogy, the volume preserves local experiences of hardship, courage, grief, endurance and change during years of intense historic upheaval.

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Restoring History

Limerick Archives preserves, enhances, restores and colourises historic photographs, sometimes presenting fresh angles on familiar scenes. When no suitable public-domain image exists, we create carefully researched AI illustrations for archive articles. We also invite the public to submit photographs for restoration and possible publication, with ownership always remaining entirely theirs.