Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau host the South African Tag rugby team for a weekend in Limerick

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Jul 17

Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau host the South African Tag rugby team for a weekend in Limerick

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 Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau host the South African Tag rugby team for a weekend in Limerick

https://www.facebook.com/ilovelimerick/videos/2252348361545600/

The South African Tag rugby team were in Limerick recently, to explore the City and play tag rugby ahead of the 2021 Tag Rugby World Cup. The University of Limerick is set to host the 2021 World Cup, with the South African team making an early trip to have a chance to experience the world-class facilities. The visit was organised by the Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau, who joined the visiting team on their tour around Limerick City.

International Tag Federation (ITF) representatives, who travelled with the South African tag rugby team, paid a flying visit to Limerick to get a real taste of what the city will have to offer as hosts of the Tag World Cup in August 2021.

The Board of the ITF, together with South African TAG representatives, paid a site visit to University of Limerick and other attractions around Limerick on the city’s special ‘tag’ weekend, the Pig’n’Porter festival, to get a feel for what the host city will offer in 2021.

The visitors stayed on campus at UL and were given guided tours of the state-of-the-art facilities and playing fields which will be made available to them during the World Cup.

On their tour, the team got to visit the Treaty City Brewery on Nicholas Street, along with some iconic landmarks, such as the Treaty Stone and King John’s Castle. The South African tag rugby team also got the chance to participate in the Pig ‘n’ Porter Festival, which took place on Saturday, July 13.

Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau and UL met the group along with local and national tag rugby representatives at the Strand Hotel on Thursday, July 11, where the group began their tour of Limerick City.

Karen Brosnahan, of the Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau, said that last week’s visit whet the appetite of the groups for what awaits 2021 in Limerick.

“Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau were delighted to welcome both the ITF board and the South African Tag team to Limerick ahead of the Tag World Cup in 2021. The purpose of the promotional site visit was to give them an insight into what they can expect when they visit Limerick in 2021,” Karen added.

Acclaimed local chef Tom Flavin, gave a talk about the local organic food movement.

Later Dan Murphy, from Global Village Tours and band member of Hermitage Green, brought the group for a walking tour about the history of Limerick, before on to King John’s Castle for an interactive tour. The group later toured Treaty City Brewery where they were treated to a beer tasting.

south african tag rugby team

Pictured at the Limerick Strand Hotel are Dan Murphy, Global Village Tours, Tom Flavin, Executive Chef of the Strand hotel, Stuart McConnell, Chairman International Tag Federation, Stephen O’Connor, General Manager of The Limerick Strand Hotel, Karen Brosnahan, General Manager of Shannon Region Conference & Sports Bureau, and Holly English, Shannon Region Conference & Sports Bureau. Picture: Conor Owens/ilovelimerick.

A joint bid led by the UL Conference and Sports Campus and the Irish Tag Rugby Association supported by Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau, Failté Ireland and Limerick City and County Council was successful in winning the event for Limerick, which will see 3,000 plus tag rugby players from well over 20 countries and their entourage travel to the Treaty City in August 2021.

The event is expected to deliver a minimum €5m boost for the Limerick economy and 20,000 bed nights over its four days, with many participants travelling from the Southern Hemisphere and teams expected to travel to Ireland for up to three weeks in advance of the competition.

David Ward, Sports Business Development Manager, University of Limerick Conference & Sports Campus, said, “They really enjoyed their stay, got a sense of the excellent range of facilities we will have here but also the sense of fun around the city as well for those in the wider entourage.  The teams, of course, will be focused on the World Cup itself but they also know that they can join their supporters in enjoying the city and wider region after the event.”

Tag rugby has grown enormously in popularity over the past decade, particularly in Australia and New Zealand but also in Ireland and Great Britain. The three previous International Tag Federation World Cups were held in New Zealand (2012) and Australia (2015,2018) but organisers decided to take the next edition to the northern hemisphere and have been won over by the Limerick bid.

For more information about the Shannon Region Conference and Sports Bureau, go here.

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Jul 17

Limerick Pride 2019 Shines with the Largest Parade in History

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 Limerick Pride 2019 Shines with the Largest Parade in History

Limerick Pride 2019 took place last Saturday, July 13 and was proved to be Limerick’s biggest Pride parade ever! Thousands of people of all ages lined the streets for Limerick’s most splendid and colourful day celebrating lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender culture. People travelled as far as the USA to celebrate this year’s Festival which marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York and the birth of the LGBT Pride movement.

This year’s Grand Marshall was Moninne Griffith, Executive Director of BeLonG To Youth Services, a national organisation supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI+) young people in Ireland.

Moninne told ilovelimerick what Limerick Pride 2019 means to her, “It is all about, visibility of the LGBT community, being proud and celebrating who we are, reminding everybody in the city and county that everyone has a sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. We have come a long way in terms of LGBT rights but there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure that LGBT people feel visible, valued and included and that we achieve the Ireland we voted for in 2015.”

The annual parade celebrated its 13th year with an estimated 3,000 people and several corporate, voluntary and political organisations taking part. Among those marching were the Limerick county GAA board – the first county GAA group to take part.

Richard Lynch, founder of ilovelimerick and PRO of Limerick Pride 2019 told ilovelimerick what the Parade means to him, “We’re not marching for ourselves, we’re so blessed and fortunate in this country, we’re marching for other people, we’re fighting for other people all around the world that need equal rights. This is not about LGBT rights, this is about human rights for all.”

After the parade, Pridefest 2019 kicked off at the Hunt Museum, which was a free family-friendly event with a free bouncing castle for kids, cone van, cafe and bar on site. There was live music from Cork due, ‘Sparkle’, with plenty of entertainment. Myles Breen also performed the annual Tea Dance, where Mr and Ms Gay Limerick, Lorcan McAuliffe and Amanda Boland joined in.

However, Limerick Pride 2019 did not finish there. On Saturday evening, Dolan’s held the Limerick Pride annual Climax Party, a sold-out event. Performances on the night included Eurovision sensation Sarah McTernan, Limerick singer-songwriter Michelle Grimes and RuPaul’s Drag Race star Jujubee. 

Richard Lynch said, “The parade keeps on getting bigger every year and is the culmination of a week of Pride events in the city. The parades over the years have marked a number of campaigning milestones, including marriage equality in 2015 and the continued pursuit of equal rights for all LGBT groups including the rights to have children and inheritance rights. Our theme this year was Limerick World Pride, as we were marching not just for people in Ireland, but for people all around the world who don’t have the rights that we do in Ireland. We wanted to highlight human rights for all, in particular for the rights of LGBT individuals who continue to be persecuted in some countries throughout the world for their beliefs and sexual orientation. This is about equal human rights for everybody as we are a global LGBT family.”

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Jul 11

The Leader Column 10 July 2019

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Jul 04

Become a Volunteer at the Hunt Museum and Join the Docent Programme

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Become a Volunteer at the Hunt Museum and Join the Docent Programme

If you are interested in art and history and have some free time, the Hunt Museum would be delighted to invite you to join the Docent Programme. Docents are the front line ambassadors of the museum and are active members of the community, who volunteer their time to engage visitors in learning primarily about the museum’s collection.

Mairead Donlevy, one of the first directors/curators of the museum, started the Docent programme at the Hunt Museum. Mairead took the idea from museums doing it in the USA. The word docent means teaching from the Latin language. Docents are volunteer teachers and learners. The Hunt Museum Docents are a dynamic and motivated group and host lunchtime talks and highlighters to the public about the Hunt Museum’s three main collections – the John & Gertrude Hunt Collection, the Irish Contemporary Ceramics Collection and the Sybil Connolly Collection.

The Original Collection includes pieces from Greco- Roman to Medieval Times. The Modern Ceramics Collection is partially supplied by a ceramics exhibition every year and lastly, the Sybil Connolly Collection. Sybil was an Irish designer in the 50s and 60s. She designed clothes for many well-known people such as Jackie Kennedy. Sybil would export Irish materials, including handkerchief linens, all around the world.

Jill Cousins, Hunt Museum Director, told ilovelimerick, “We have an amazing docent programme at the Hunt Museum. We want to encourage more people to become a docent, and volunteer in the museum. As a docent, you learn about the objects, take tours and workshops, undertake research, write blogs, and inform people but you are also a part of a group of people who support and make the Hunt Museum function the way it does.”

The Docent Programme is a great way to meet a new group of people with similar interests and it is very rewarding. The Docents get involved in many activities including the Dementia outreach programme, the Kids arts and crafts programme and School Tours. Moira Dwyer, one of the Volunteer Docents, spoke about the Dementia Outreach Programme: “My particular favourite activity is the dementia programme, where we visit nursing homes and dementia villages with replicas of the collections. It is wonderful work and very rewarding.”

The Docents also invigilate at exhibitions held at the Hunt Museum, for example, the Lavery & Osborne: Observing Life exhibition. The exhibition will be on display at The Hunt Museum until Monday, 30 September 2019. A total of sixty-two pieces are currently exhibited featuring Irish artists, Sir John Lavery and Walter Frederick Osborne, both born in the mid-nineteenth century.

You are sure to fall in love with the Hunt Museum Collection and you also might find a new interest and passion. Margaret Walsh, Volunteer Docent found her passion, “I became a volunteer because I fell in love with the ceramics in the Hunt collection back in 1995. I loved ceramics so much that I went on to do a degree in Ceramics in LSAD. I used the objects in the Hunt collection as inspiration for my own work. There is an immense amount of things to do and to fall in love with as a docent. I hope you will volunteer and come pay us a visit at the Hunt Museum.”

The Docent programme enables these people to become experts in different things, including their own specific interests. For example, they get the opportunity to write blogs about what they are learning. These blogs can be found on the museum website.

Jill concluded, “Without the docents, this museum would not be as good as it is. We very much encourage new people to come in and become volunteers for the museum and help us make it work even better.”

What are you waiting for? To get involved in the Docent Programme contact Joni Roche, Volunteer Coordinator on 061 490083 / 061 312833 or email [email protected]

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Jul 03

The Leader Column 3 July 2019

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Jun 26

Social Media Influencers support Lavery and Osborne: Observing Life exhibition at the Hunt Museum

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Social Media Influencers support Lavery and Osborne: Observing Life exhibition at the Hunt Museum

 

https://www.facebook.com/ilovelimerick/videos/341471859879928/

 

Social media influencers in Limerick have come together to support the ‘Lavery and Osborne: Observing Life’ exhibition which runs at the Hunt Museum throughout the summer until Monday, September 30, by selecting their favourite piece of art from the collection.

Amongst the social influencers who were involved were Richard Lynch, Celia Holman Lee, Meghann Scully, Patrick McLoughney, Leanne Moore and Sinead O’Brien. The six social influencers split into pairs, with each pair selecting a piece of the Lavery and Osborne collection that they admired the most.

Members of the I Love Limerick team were on location at the Hunt Museum to film short promotional videos of the social media influencers speaking in detail about their favourite pieces of the exhibition and why everyone should make sure to visit the exhibition before it departs the museum on Monday, September 30.

Richard Lynch, founder of I Love Limerick, said, “I really wanted to get involved in supporting the exhibition at the Hunt. The Hunt Museum is the cultural gem of Limerick city and so I want everyone in Limerick to visit and support the exhibition, and more importantly the Hunt Museum.”

The ‘Lavery and Osborne: Observing Life’ exhibition features Irish artists, Sir John Lavery and Walter Frederick Osborne. Both born in the mid-nineteenth century, these renowned artists lived parallel lives as Irish painters who travelled overseas to develop their artistic talent. The exhibition places the two artists side by side for the first time. It is said that they never met, but both were offered knighthoods and both were subject to the same artistic influences including that of James McNeill Whistler.

A total of sixty-two pieces are being exhibited and the majority of them are from private collections travelling from the United Kingdom and the United States, with a few from other Irish galleries including the Crawford Art Gallery, Ulster Museum, and Limerick City Gallery of Art.

social media influencers

Pictured at the Hunt Museum visiting the Lavery and Osborne Exhibition are Naomi O’Nolan, Hunt Museum Head of Exhibitions and Collection, Jill Cousins, CEO Hunt Museum and Celia Holman Lee. Picture: Conor Owens/ilovelimerick.

Richard and Celia previously took part in a photoshoot project called VanGoYourself to promote the ‘Lavery and Osborne: Observing Life’ exhibition. They re-enacted Lavery’s painting, with Starsky, owned by Sinead Hutchison, ‘Stars in Sunlight,’ which depicts Maureen O’Sullivan and Loretta Young relaxing between scenes in Hollywood.

VanGoYourself is a European project which was co-founded by the European Commission to enable and promote the greater re-use by creative industries of cultural heritage resources.

VanGoYourself allows visitors to discover and enjoy art in a whole new way …Visitors to Exhibition can re-enact the painting for themselves. They can become the painting using their own visually creative take on the artist’s work. People visiting the exhibition can recreate an Osborne or Lavery painting, by taking a snap of their version of the painting, uploading it to VanGoYourself, which twins their image with the original artwork for sharing on social media, immortalising their artistic talent for all to see!

Meghann Scully, social media influencer and presenter, said, “This Lavery and Osborne exhibition is amazing and it’s only here until September 30, so whether you are around Limerick city or county, or even further afield, make sure to get here to the Hunt Museum and check it out, as this once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Share your experience at the ‘Lavery and Osborne: Observing life’ exhibition on social media by using the hashtag #vangoyourself and tagging the @huntmuseum.

Tickets for the ‘Lavery and Osborne: Observing life’ exhibition can be purchased here.

For more stories on the Lavery and Osborne exhibition, go here.

For more information on the Hunt Museum, go here.

For more Richard Knows News, go here.

Jun 26

The Leader Column 26 June 2019

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Jun 20

The Leader Column 19 June 2019

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