Writing home
Patrick Kelly explores the wealth of museums dedicated to Irish writers and poets
Bellaghy is a small place: just a few streets, a couple of pubs and a handful of shops. But the local authority expects 35,000 tourists here next year. Why? Because it was home to the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.
Mid Ulster District Council has invested a hefty slice of its modest budget in a museum and arts centre dedicated to the memory of the poet, who died in 2013. The hope is that the £4.25m that has been spent on the project will be enough to help bring tourism and a level of prosperity that has so far eluded this forgotten corner of Northern Ireland, which has yet to benefit from the peace dividend.
Built on the site of the former RUC police station that once dominated the village during the Troubles, the Seamus Heaney HomePlace is a light and airy building, with an elevated viewing platform that appears to launch visitors into the surrounding countryside. Heaney’s voice resonates throughout the two floors of the exhibition in the form of recordings he made during his lifetime and in the displays of memorabilia, from family photos and personal items to his extensive collection of books.
There is a re-creation of his Dublin study, complete with fax machine spilling out news of his Nobel Prize, which went unnoticed by him because he was on holiday in Greece. There is also a performance space, backed by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Called the Helicon, after one of Heaney’s poems, the space will host a clutch of international names, including actors Fiona Shaw and Stephen Rea, musicians Paul Brady and Ralph Mclean and writers Michel Faber and James Kelman. Programme manager Sean Doran says the idea is to do justice to what is “the first purpose-built literature centre in Ireland”.
HomePlace is also the centre of a network of Heaney trails that take visitors to places that feature in the poet’s work. And there is an education programme for schools and community groups based on his poetry.
“We are looking to attract tourism,” says Anne-Marie Campbell, the director of leisure and culture for Mid Ulster District Council. “We see HomePlace as an important driver of culture and the arts in an area that has not had a cultural hub.”
The joy of text
The Heaney centre is not the only venue in Ireland devoted to one of the nation’s greatest men of letters. There are visitor attractions dedicated to WB Yeats in Sligo and Patrick Kavanagh in Monaghan, while Dublin is bursting with offers for literary tourists, including Oscar Wilde’s former Dublin residence, George Bernard Shaw’s birthplace, the Dublin Writers Museum and no less than two museums dedicated to James Joyce.
Earlier this year, University College Dublin (UCD) and the National Library of Ireland announced that they would be creating the Ulysses Centre, “a dynamic visitor centre for students of literature and tourists alike”, named after Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses. Fáilte Ireland, the Irish tourism authority, has provided a €2.5m grant for the centre, which it hopes will be a major draw to the city.
Public spaces will include the university’s Aula Maxima (great hall) and some of the original rooms where Joyce attended classes, while the National Library of Ireland will showcase the first copy of Ulysses and Yeats’s Nobel medal as part of its remarkable literary archives. The centre will open in summer 2018.
“We have an extraordinary literary past, present and future,” says Margaret Kelleher, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD. “Not only will the centre be an exhibition space devoted to 20th- and 21st-century Irish writing, we will also be supporting research and scholarship.”
Kelleher adds that one of the questions she is often asked is how a small island has had such an impact on the development of English literature. She hopes that the Ulysses Centre will provide some answers. As well as the historical aspects of Joyce and other writers, the centre will host exhibitions highlighting the links between Irish writers and other major literary cities, such as Paris, Shanghai and Buenos Aires.
“We hope this will be an inspirational place for the next generation of writers and readers by getting visitors fired up to try, for instance, the work of great Latin American writers,” says Kelleher.
Some fear the new centre could lead to over-capacity in the Joycean world. Dublin has two Joyce museums – the James Joyce Centre, which is housed in a Georgian townhouse in the city centre, and the James Joyce Tower and Museum situated 11 miles away in the Martello Tower made famous in the opening lines of Ulysses. Joyce also features prominently at the Dublin Writers Museum, which boasts, among other memorabilia, a first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, letters from Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett’s phone (complete with button for blocking incoming calls, a model that became fashionable in the late 1980s).
There is also the annual extravaganza of Bloomsday, when Dublin erupts in straw boaters and Edwardian frocks to celebrate 16 June 1904, the day that the central character in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, journeys through the city streets.
Robert Nicholson, the curator of the James Joyce Tower and Museum, suggests that each of the venues devoted to Joyce will have to find different roles if they are to avoid over-supply. The venue has been attracting dyed-in-the-wool Joyceans, daytripping families and Japanese PhD students since 1962, says Nicholson, who points out that when it was established, Joyce was “still a cloven-hoofed figure in Irish society” unlike the tourist draw that he is today.
The small museum has had its economic ups and downs and at one time looked set for closure. Staffed by volunteers, it attracts up to 200 visitors a day and is now owned by Fáilte Ireland, though discussions are ongoing about a possible transfer to the jurisdiction of the local authority.
Kelleher believes there isn’t a danger of reaching “peak Joyce” as the Ulysses Centre is not a museum but a centre that will include scholarship, research and outreach. “I see it as part of the continuing story of Irish literature.”
Literary tourism
The tribulations of the James Joyce Tower and Museum illustrate that institutional support is vital for these literary shrines to thrive. Like the tower, the Patrick Kavanagh Resource Centre in rural Monaghan was set up and is run by volunteers. The Inniskeen Enterprise Development Group wanted to commemorate the life and work of the poet in his birthplace and bring economic development to a region hit hard by recession in the 1980s.
The centre, which opened in 1994, features many of Kavanagh’s books and first editions of a weekly magazine he published in the 1950s, as well as his death mask and other memorabilia. There are specially commissioned paintings inspired by Kavanagh’s most famous work, The Great Hunger, tours of the countryside and an annual weekend event centred on the prestigious Kavanagh Poetry Prize. The development association was backed by EU grants and other international funds, but has struggled since the 2008 financial crisis.
The centre’s administrator, Rosaleen Kearney, says the benefits to the local economy can be seen in a revamped town centre, thriving bed and breakfasts and hotels, quad bike centres and mini-golf courses. But visitor numbers have dropped since 2008. “It’s not easy to make ends meet,” says Kearney. “A small organisation like us has to keep on fundraising to keep going.”
Mary McGuckin, a lecturer at Sligo’s Institute of Technology, points out that literary attractions have been part of the tourist fabric in Ireland since Trinity College Dublin opened its permanent exhibition on the Book of Kells, which includes the medieval manuscript, in the mid-19th century. It now attracts up to 600,000 visitors every year.
“Literary tourism has grown into a commercially significant phenomenon and positive images of destinations connected to literature are being promoted accordingly,” says McGuckin. “The concept of literary tourism has been identified by local authorities, destination management organisations and entrepreneurs as an opportunity to develop a destination to attract literary enthusiasts as well as general visitors.”
Indeed, tourist authorities such as Fáilte Ireland class this market segment as “culturally curious”. Surprisingly, it is little examined in academic research so no one is sure exactly what it is that motivates a visitor from Ireland or Japan to seek out a venue that features Heaney’s duffle coat, or one that displays Behan’s union membership card.
Further research is required on visitors’ motivations and expectations, says McGuckin, but she suggests that “some visitors are attracted to literary destinations because they are motivated by nostalgia or a wish to connect with the past. Other factors include a quest for cultural or spiritual enrichment, a desire to escape, or wanting to find aesthetic pleasure.”
The desire for some sort of learning experience can be a factor too, McGuckin adds. But there is a coda to all this, in her opinion. “What is important in literary tourism is preserving the legacy of the writer while offering an authentic experience,” McGuckin says.
So while there may be a limit to cultural curiosity, it may not yet have been reached, which is good news for the Patrick Kavanagh Resource Centre and the wealth of other literary centres in Ireland.
Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist
Mid Ulster District Council has invested a hefty slice of its modest budget in a museum and arts centre dedicated to the memory of the poet, who died in 2013. The hope is that the £4.25m that has been spent on the project will be enough to help bring tourism and a level of prosperity that has so far eluded this forgotten corner of Northern Ireland, which has yet to benefit from the peace dividend.
Built on the site of the former RUC police station that once dominated the village during the Troubles, the Seamus Heaney HomePlace is a light and airy building, with an elevated viewing platform that appears to launch visitors into the surrounding countryside. Heaney’s voice resonates throughout the two floors of the exhibition in the form of recordings he made during his lifetime and in the displays of memorabilia, from family photos and personal items to his extensive collection of books.
There is a re-creation of his Dublin study, complete with fax machine spilling out news of his Nobel Prize, which went unnoticed by him because he was on holiday in Greece. There is also a performance space, backed by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Called the Helicon, after one of Heaney’s poems, the space will host a clutch of international names, including actors Fiona Shaw and Stephen Rea, musicians Paul Brady and Ralph Mclean and writers Michel Faber and James Kelman. Programme manager Sean Doran says the idea is to do justice to what is “the first purpose-built literature centre in Ireland”.
HomePlace is also the centre of a network of Heaney trails that take visitors to places that feature in the poet’s work. And there is an education programme for schools and community groups based on his poetry.
“We are looking to attract tourism,” says Anne-Marie Campbell, the director of leisure and culture for Mid Ulster District Council. “We see HomePlace as an important driver of culture and the arts in an area that has not had a cultural hub.”
The joy of text
The Heaney centre is not the only venue in Ireland devoted to one of the nation’s greatest men of letters. There are visitor attractions dedicated to WB Yeats in Sligo and Patrick Kavanagh in Monaghan, while Dublin is bursting with offers for literary tourists, including Oscar Wilde’s former Dublin residence, George Bernard Shaw’s birthplace, the Dublin Writers Museum and no less than two museums dedicated to James Joyce.
Earlier this year, University College Dublin (UCD) and the National Library of Ireland announced that they would be creating the Ulysses Centre, “a dynamic visitor centre for students of literature and tourists alike”, named after Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses. Fáilte Ireland, the Irish tourism authority, has provided a €2.5m grant for the centre, which it hopes will be a major draw to the city.
Public spaces will include the university’s Aula Maxima (great hall) and some of the original rooms where Joyce attended classes, while the National Library of Ireland will showcase the first copy of Ulysses and Yeats’s Nobel medal as part of its remarkable literary archives. The centre will open in summer 2018.
“We have an extraordinary literary past, present and future,” says Margaret Kelleher, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD. “Not only will the centre be an exhibition space devoted to 20th- and 21st-century Irish writing, we will also be supporting research and scholarship.”
Kelleher adds that one of the questions she is often asked is how a small island has had such an impact on the development of English literature. She hopes that the Ulysses Centre will provide some answers. As well as the historical aspects of Joyce and other writers, the centre will host exhibitions highlighting the links between Irish writers and other major literary cities, such as Paris, Shanghai and Buenos Aires.
“We hope this will be an inspirational place for the next generation of writers and readers by getting visitors fired up to try, for instance, the work of great Latin American writers,” says Kelleher.
Some fear the new centre could lead to over-capacity in the Joycean world. Dublin has two Joyce museums – the James Joyce Centre, which is housed in a Georgian townhouse in the city centre, and the James Joyce Tower and Museum situated 11 miles away in the Martello Tower made famous in the opening lines of Ulysses. Joyce also features prominently at the Dublin Writers Museum, which boasts, among other memorabilia, a first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, letters from Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett’s phone (complete with button for blocking incoming calls, a model that became fashionable in the late 1980s).
There is also the annual extravaganza of Bloomsday, when Dublin erupts in straw boaters and Edwardian frocks to celebrate 16 June 1904, the day that the central character in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, journeys through the city streets.
Robert Nicholson, the curator of the James Joyce Tower and Museum, suggests that each of the venues devoted to Joyce will have to find different roles if they are to avoid over-supply. The venue has been attracting dyed-in-the-wool Joyceans, daytripping families and Japanese PhD students since 1962, says Nicholson, who points out that when it was established, Joyce was “still a cloven-hoofed figure in Irish society” unlike the tourist draw that he is today.
The small museum has had its economic ups and downs and at one time looked set for closure. Staffed by volunteers, it attracts up to 200 visitors a day and is now owned by Fáilte Ireland, though discussions are ongoing about a possible transfer to the jurisdiction of the local authority.
Kelleher believes there isn’t a danger of reaching “peak Joyce” as the Ulysses Centre is not a museum but a centre that will include scholarship, research and outreach. “I see it as part of the continuing story of Irish literature.”
It is important that a centre like this stays fresh and responds to the changes in Irish writing"
Literary tourism
The tribulations of the James Joyce Tower and Museum illustrate that institutional support is vital for these literary shrines to thrive. Like the tower, the Patrick Kavanagh Resource Centre in rural Monaghan was set up and is run by volunteers. The Inniskeen Enterprise Development Group wanted to commemorate the life and work of the poet in his birthplace and bring economic development to a region hit hard by recession in the 1980s.
The centre, which opened in 1994, features many of Kavanagh’s books and first editions of a weekly magazine he published in the 1950s, as well as his death mask and other memorabilia. There are specially commissioned paintings inspired by Kavanagh’s most famous work, The Great Hunger, tours of the countryside and an annual weekend event centred on the prestigious Kavanagh Poetry Prize. The development association was backed by EU grants and other international funds, but has struggled since the 2008 financial crisis.
The centre’s administrator, Rosaleen Kearney, says the benefits to the local economy can be seen in a revamped town centre, thriving bed and breakfasts and hotels, quad bike centres and mini-golf courses. But visitor numbers have dropped since 2008. “It’s not easy to make ends meet,” says Kearney. “A small organisation like us has to keep on fundraising to keep going.”
Mary McGuckin, a lecturer at Sligo’s Institute of Technology, points out that literary attractions have been part of the tourist fabric in Ireland since Trinity College Dublin opened its permanent exhibition on the Book of Kells, which includes the medieval manuscript, in the mid-19th century. It now attracts up to 600,000 visitors every year.
“Literary tourism has grown into a commercially significant phenomenon and positive images of destinations connected to literature are being promoted accordingly,” says McGuckin. “The concept of literary tourism has been identified by local authorities, destination management organisations and entrepreneurs as an opportunity to develop a destination to attract literary enthusiasts as well as general visitors.”
Indeed, tourist authorities such as Fáilte Ireland class this market segment as “culturally curious”. Surprisingly, it is little examined in academic research so no one is sure exactly what it is that motivates a visitor from Ireland or Japan to seek out a venue that features Heaney’s duffle coat, or one that displays Behan’s union membership card.
Further research is required on visitors’ motivations and expectations, says McGuckin, but she suggests that “some visitors are attracted to literary destinations because they are motivated by nostalgia or a wish to connect with the past. Other factors include a quest for cultural or spiritual enrichment, a desire to escape, or wanting to find aesthetic pleasure.”
The desire for some sort of learning experience can be a factor too, McGuckin adds. But there is a coda to all this, in her opinion. “What is important in literary tourism is preserving the legacy of the writer while offering an authentic experience,” McGuckin says.
So while there may be a limit to cultural curiosity, it may not yet have been reached, which is good news for the Patrick Kavanagh Resource Centre and the wealth of other literary centres in Ireland.
Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist