Ms Josephine Vahey:

Fós, yes. I have some Irish but not enough to speak here. Galway's Great Read, Léamh Mór na Gaillimhe, is an annual event where we put on a programme of events. We do this in both English and Irish. We try to foster and promote our literary heritage and our culture. We look predominantly at writers from Ireland and particularly from the west and consider historical events such as the suffragette movement. We create a programme around something like that and have events in our libraries. We cannot do the full 29, but we always have some events in the Gaeltacht. These are run through the medium of Irish and will involve speakers who will speak in Irish. We have held events on the Aran Islands as part of the campaign. It is not great because the weather is usually inclement in November and there can be many sick bodies coming back. Over the years, we have looked at writers like Pádraic Ó Conaire, Walter Macken and Eilís Dillon. We have travelling bilingual exhibition boards that go around the county so, even if we do not have an event in a branch, the exhibition will go there.

In recent years, because of the pandemic, we had to change our whole tack, especially in 2020. We could not have live events so we went virtual. This presented a steep learning curve for us all even with regard to learning the language of speaking to recorders and media people. However, it was very successful. It was on Eilís Dillon, a fascinating and prolific writer from Galway. We looked at all aspects of her life. Everything is on our YouTube channel. When we do Léamh Mór na Gaillimhe, we look at the collections we have in the library and promote them. Last year's theme was "Westward Ho! A ramble through Galway, 1840-1950". We looked at a lot of our travel writers. As part of that we did a travel documentary with two archaeologists, Dr. Jim Higgins and Michael Gibbons. We did a publication of essays and we had talks. We are going to continue this theme this year but we will be doing it in south Connemara. This will be predominantly in Irish or bilingual.

When we started this originally, we had a lot of events for children and did not really have anything for adults, so we decided this would be for adults only. However, when we were doing Pádraic Ó Conaire, we realised that a lot of children in County Galway did not know about him or about Walter Macken, so we introduced a children's educational part to the programme. We did visual interpretations of M'asal Beag Dubh. With Eilís Dillon, we took two of her stories and ran a programme called "One Author; Five Islands". We went to the Aran Islands, Inishbofin and Mweenish Island. Even though it is called Mweenish Island, it is part of the county. That was really successful and was done through the medium of Irish.

Léamh Mór na Gaillimhe is looked for during the year. Everybody wonders what the topic for next year will be. That is one of the ways we promote our collections and activities and events for older people to get them into the libraries.