Happy days in Listowel’s ‘Cinema Paradiso’

SIR, Allow me to use your letters page to give a big shout out to all at Listowel’s Classic Movieplex, which celebrates 30 years in business this month.

Reopened by the late Kieran Gleeson in 1987 who saw an opportunity for this old, closed down building, nestled between a humpback bridge and a creamery, the cinema continues to flourish thanks to Kiieran’s wife Teresa and her loyal staff.

The old railway bridge is long gone and the creamery no longer makes cream but somehow the old and the new continue to be seen at one of the few remaining independent cinemas left in the country. And despite losing Kieran to motor neuron disease on February 15 last year, the dream that he inherited from his grandfather and father before him, to ‘make people happy’ continues unabated every week in this little theatre of dreams that serves the people of North Kerry and West Limerick.

The Film Club which started in 2005 to show smaller, independent productions continues on Thursday nights from October to May and if the numbers attending recently and the reaction afterwards to the screenings is anything to go by, then Teresa is showing herself to be more than adept to catering for her customer’s varying tastes. And the complimentary tea and coffee is always welcome on a cold, winter’s night.

At a time when most small businesses are struggling to survive and when technological change has disrupted people’s lives enormously, it is nothing short of a small wonder that an independent, family owned, cinema can survive in today’s world of almost instant gratification.

As Teresa along with her young son Ciarán and daughter Alice remember Kieran this month and 30 years of cinema in Listowel, they can take great pride in how they have overcome life’s ultimate challenge and continued the Gleeson legacy that dates all the way back to the 1930s in Cappamore in East Limerick.

The soft, genial voice that greeted us may no longer be heard in the foyer but as he lays his head eternally on a grassy knoll beside his father in St. Fintan’s cemetery in Doon, close to where he grew up in Cappamore, Kieran can rest forever knowing that his short 58 years on this earth were not without achievement and success.

The people of Listowel and its environs can and should be immensely proud of 30 years of local cinema seven days a week; new releases, blockbusters, animated delights, classics and vintage, film noir and of course Thursday night’s independent Film Club. Sincerely, Tom McElligott, Tournageehy, Listowel.