The Museum That Joe Built - Documentary Film Screening at Clonmel Library

What to Expect

Clonmel Library is hosting a free lunchtime screening of the independently produced documentary The Museum That Joe Built. The film tells the story of Joe Whelan of Kilrush, County Clare, who has spent years building a personal collection of agricultural tools, everyday household artefacts and the stories attached to them into what became the Museum of Rural Irish Life. The documentary follows how the collection documents rural life across the agricultural and industrial changes of the twentieth century, capturing traditions and everyday routines that are otherwise fading from memory, from farm work to domestic life before mechanisation and electrification reshaped the countryside. It is a short, one-hour screening built around themes of heritage, custodianship and how ordinary people preserve local history, and is being shown as one of the library’s National Heritage Week events.

National Heritage Week is Ireland’s annual celebration of the country’s natural, built and cultural heritage, and Tipperary’s libraries mark it every August with a run of free talks, exhibitions and screenings across their branches, of which this documentary is one. The Clonmel showing gives an insight into the kind of grassroots heritage work the week is built to highlight, told through one man’s decades-long project rather than a formal institutional history, and it fits alongside the library’s other Heritage Week programming that week.

Good to Know

• Date and time: Saturday 15 August 2026, 12:00pm to 1:00pm.
• Venue: Clonmel Library, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary.
• Admission is free, no booking mentioned on the listing.
• Runs under the library’s National Heritage Week programme of events.
• For further information, contact Clonmel Library on 052 616 6130.
• This is a one-off screening; check Tipperary Libraries’ What’s On page for other Heritage Week film and talk events across the county’s branches during the same week.
• The running time is around an hour, matching the library’s lunchtime slot, making it easy to fit around a working day or errands in town.

Getting There

Clonmel Library is in Clonmel town centre, within walking distance of the main shopping streets and close to public car parks serving the town centre.