the picture: a new chapter helping homeless

In association with Kilkenny County Council there will be a free screening of Writing Home, a documentary about creative engagement developed by poet Colm Keegan for homeless service users, on Monday next February 20 at 6.30pm in e Set eatre, Kilkenny. e programme was supported by Kilkenny County Council, Creative Ireland and Poetry Ireland. e initiative was developed to improve understanding around issues of homelessness while supporting social integration and aims to inform policy decisions around the use of the arts within state funded services.

Colm Keegan worked with several service providers across the country, developing and delivering a programme of workshops to engage with homeless service users in Kilkenny, Dublin, and Waterford with each location working towards a public celebration of the creativity of participants. e poet worked with selected groups over six weeks. ese groups explored multiple means of written self-expression and re ection, like rap and spoken word as well as looking at structure, character and storytelling. Each participant created a small body of work, based on their own life experiences. e process was far more successful than envisaged, with real engagement from homeless service users, a marginalised group who can be di cult to reach using established Arts project delivery. e Kilkenny 44-minute screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Colm Keegan, Director of Housing Services in Kilkenny Mary Mulholland and representatives from local emergency service providers in Kilkenny. omas Butler and his wife Annabel, from Bennettsbridge, were the over-all winners for their diversi ed farming operation which includes tillage, grassland and woodlands. e family farm includes 250ac of tillage, 120ac of grassland and 60ac of woodland. e Butler family operate a varied rotation of crops and they have a passion for heritage wheat varieties.

A Kilkenny green feed wheat-grower husband and wife team has beaten sti competition from across the country to win the Tirlán Quality Grain Supplier of the Year Award for 2022.

Tirlán’s Chair John Murphy said choosing an overall winner from among the “13 high calibre” 2022 nalists was “extremely di cult” in a bumper harvest year that delivered on “price, weather and yields”.

He said: “ e excellence of our suppliers is something we in Tirlán never take for granted. We’re passionate about what we do and it shows in the highquality produce that comes from our family farms.

“In harvest 2022, we took in our highest ever volume of premium grains and delivered an additional €3 million in bonus payments to growers of these premium crops. We remain rmly focused on adding value to our premium grains portfolio through our investment in innovation,” the Tirlán Chair said at the recent awards ceremony in Kilkenny. e winning crop averaged a speci c weight of 80.8km/h and 11% protein at a moisture of 14.1% across 310t.

But what made omas and Annabel Butler stand out in a very competitive eld was the wide range of break crops grown on the farm which in turn helped them deliver a top-of-itsclass crop of green feed wheat.

Congrats to the Butlers!