A concert featuring some of Galway’s top musicians will take place in the Róisín Dubh next week with the proceeds going towards the Celia Griffin Children’s Park in Galway.

The event called A Night for Celia and will feature Tuam’s Séamus Ruttledge who has co-ordinated an eclectic mix of guests, including fellow musicians, a newspaper columnist, a photographer and artists along with classical vocalists.

The concert will take place on Thursday night, July 26 and comes only weeks after the unveiling of the Galway Famine Ship Memorial, which will also benefit from the proceeds.

Up to 100 people attended the unveiling of the Famine Ship Memorial at Grattan Road Beach in a simple but poignant ceremony two weeks ago. It is apt that the two sandstone monuments flank an existing piece of limestone which is a memorial to a six-year-old girl, Celia Griffin, who died of hunger on the streets of Galway during the Great Famine.

Both the Famine Ship Memorial and the Celia Griffin projects were the brainchild of Mark Kennedy, who at 75, has already embarked on his next project – trying to get the Jeanie Johnston ship to Galway.
The concert on July 26 will be opened by writer Charlie Adley who arrived in Ireland 20 years ago and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Irish Post and currently has a long running column in The Galway City Tribune.

The three short pieces he will read on the night concern the time he was incarcerated with thousands of cream cakes; drunken wretches who suffer memory loss the morning after and, to coin his own phrase, ‘Getting Galwayed’.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.