Lifestyle
Wilde weekend to focus on Oscar’s lasting legacy
Arts Week with Judy Murphy – judymurphy@ctribune.ie
Playwright, poet and wit Oscar Wilde is the subject of a new festival kicking off in Galway city this weekend. The two-day event, taking place this Saturday and Sunday celebrates Wilde’s life and work and highlights his and his family’s strong links with the west of Ireland.
Wilde’s father, the celebrated surgeon, Sir William Wilde built a house near Cong, on the shores of Lough Corrib in the 1860s and wrote extensively about the area. As a young man, Oscar spent a great deal of time in the locality, fishing and boating on the lake with his siblings. Even after the family link with Moytura ended, he frequently returned to visit the Lough Corrib area.
As well as Wilde’s local links, this festival will present a performance of his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and will explore the writer’s sexuality in the context of his Irishness. It will conclude with a candlelit dinner theatre show at the Harbour Hotel.
The festival is the brainchild of Athenry woman Sandra Coffey, whose first introduction to Wilde was as a college student when she read his poem Requiescat. It was written for his sister Isola, who died in 1867, two months short of her tenth birthday. Wilde was very close to her and was left heartbroken by her death.
Sandra hopes that for lovers of Wilde, the festival will capture the essence of the man and his work, while it will be an introduction to those who are not familiar with his life and work.
The festival, which has been financially supported by the Gathering, has been welcomed by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland.
It will be launched officially at 4pm this Saturday upstairs in Busker Browne’s. The launch will be followed by a talk from poet and biographer Gerard Hanberry on Wilde’s strong connections with Galway and the west of Ireland. Gerard’s 2011 book, More Lives Than One, The Remarkable Wilde Family Through The Generations received much praise for its fresh information on Oscar’s time in prison, his father’s cover up of his illegitimate daughters’ deaths and his mother’s dire poverty in the years before her death.
Gerard’s talk is free.
Later on Saturday evening acclaimed storyteller Rab Fulton, who recently released his book, Galway Bay Folk Tales will perform Wilde’s most famous and poignant poem,The Ballad of Reading Gaol. This poignant and powerful work is based on Wilde’s two-year imprisonment from 1895-97 and offers an insight into its impact on him. That starts at 8.30pm in the Town Hall Theatre. Tickets are €5 and are available from the Town Hall.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Health, Beauty and Lifestyle with Denise McNamara
Patricia McGettigan grew up in a house in Inverin where flowers and herb would be used as remedies for common complaints. Once married, she moved first to Donegal and then to the UK and anywhere she set up home she would grow herbs and use those to create teas and tinctures.
These she would dole out to family and friends for complaints ranging from sore joints, constipation, stomach issues, sleep.
A trained beauty therapist, holistic masseur with training in aromatherapy and dealing with gut problems, it was during the pandemic that she decided to immerse herself in training in herbalism and get qualified with the Herbal Study Academy.
Accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, it is an online school founded by Tuam-based herbalist Patrick Murphy which allows people to pick and choose what aspects of herbal medicine they wish to learn about with a view to living healthier or to practice in the field.
“While I’ve always done it myself, I decided to get really deep into it because I love it, it’s an utter passion for me,” explains Patricia.
“The things is, everybody knows a bit about it, they just forget what they’ve learned when they were small when their granny or grandad would reach for the old-fashioned cure.”
Patricia practices from her home in Inverin where she does consultations with people before deciding which herbs and teas would suit them best. A consultation costs €50.
“They come in and have a chat as long as they want so we can try to get the cause of the problem. They might have a headache but it could be a stress headache, the problem could actually be coming from the gut as a result of die but it manifests itself as a headache.
“You have to start slow and give time to let herbs work. It’s better for the body to get to the root cause. It’s easy to treat a symptom, it’s harder to find out why the body is reacting the way it does.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Country Living with Francis Farragher
As one ‘shoves on’ in life, there tends to be an increasing attendance at anniversary masses of friends and family — at the back of the mind, there’s always the nagging feeling at such occasions, that you’ve moved up in the queue.
Regardless of the intensity of one’s religious fever though — or the lack of it — there is always something special about remembering the passing of a loved one: gone but not forgotten, is probably the best way to sum it.
The great and warming tradition of the chat with neighbours after the preacher has finishing his words still persists, and especially so across rural Ireland, and inevitably the conversation seems to switch to the weather.
Last Sunday morning as I walked out from Brooklodge Church in Ballyglunin — a lovely little prayer place nestled in one corner of the old Blake estate — I was reminded that I shouldn’t have praised February too much over recent weeks, as March was always waiting in the wings to deal with such buds of early spring optimism.
The theme of the advice was to never count your chickens before they hatch, because if we enjoyed a good spell of weather in the late-winter, early-spring period, nature’s scales would soon balance things out. There were also murmurs too about the price of bales of silage.
For those of you not of a rural hue, these are essentially big bales of grass wrapped up in plastic to preserve them, a commodity you couldn’t ‘give away’ in February as we all looked forward to an ‘early spring’.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
1923
Capital of Connacht
Retail shopkeepers in County Galway towns complain very justly that they have to go to Dublin and cross-Channel for their goods, whereas in the all too few instances in which they can purchase in the county town at wholesale rates, they find they can do much better as to price and quite as good as to quality.
Has Galway ever considered what it would mean to the town if the wholesale trade were developed to any extent within its walls?
It would mean that instead of crowded streets on Saturdays and occasionally on Wednesdays, we should have eager, active businessmen thronging our thoroughfares every day of the six; that we should have streams of vehicles coming to and going from the city; that business would be stimulated, employment increased and prices reduced.
It would mean that shipping in our harbour would grow and expand, slowly and, perhaps even painfully, at first, that coastwise traffic would be developed, and that Galway would in course of time become in fact, as well as in the name, the capital of Connacht.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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