Irish Examiner 12th March, 1923 p4.
Kinvara
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Mr Frank Fahy’s paper on “ould Kinvarra” at the Irish literary Society last night was one of the most delightful things the Society has had for many a long day. It was an authentic picture of Irish life in a little country town in the sixties and seventies. It was real because the memories were Mr. Fahy’s own memories, and yet as he truly said, other things being equal, it might have stood for a picture of life in any other little Irish town in the same period.
Those of us who heard the paper saw the people of Kinvarra and heard their familiar talk in their homes and out of them, took part in their joys and sorrows, and were one with them in their passionate love of the scenes among which they moved, a love which years of exile from them and leagues of sea and land now lying between the exiles and them only seem to increase.
The success of Mr. Fahy’s paper lay not only in the sympathetic chords it touched in the hearts of his audience but in the artistry with which he drew his picture, and the inimitable way in which he made every word tell. Every inflection in his voice was full of meaning. No one else could have written the paper. No one else could have read it so well. It was little wonder that in the subsequent discussion there were appeals to Mr. Fahy to have “Ould Kinvarra” printed – and along with it the other lecture which he gave not so long ago before the Society in which he described the work of the Southwark Irish Literary Society in London in the eighties. The only drawback to the evening was that its attractiveness demonstrated severely how inadequate is the space in the Society’s room for such an occasion
William Boyle.
The Burren and Beyond 