The inland waterways will be celebrated at Killaloe next month, the quintessential waterways town on the River Shannon in Co.Clare.

Called ‘LUA’, it will be “a celebration of wild water at the ancient settlement of Killaloe, which is a gift of the Shannon, ” says Rev.Paul Fitzpatrick, Dean’s Vicar at St.Flannan’s Cathedral in Killaloe, who has designed the event “to explore our evolving engagement with wild water and how best to individually and collectively irrigate a more beneficial relationship with it, both culturally and environmentally.”

Rev Paul Fitzpatrick and members of his Killaloe congregation

It will take place from Friday, September 16, through Saturday and Sunday, September 17 and 18, with an exhibition on the theme of waterways and the environment and a presentation by the Director of the AK ILEN project, Gary McMahon, about the restoration of Ireland’s last sailing schooner.

"Called ‘LUA’, it will be “a celebration of wild water at the ancient settlement of Killaloe"

Killaloe is “incredible with maritime history, rooted in the ancient and contemporary, revolving around the life and times of what is the treasure of the maritime and the inland waterways,” says Rev. Fitzpatrick, an enthusiastic boater on the Shannon himself.

Listen to him on the Podcast here