Ramie Leahy is one of Ireland's foremost Colourist painters — UNESCO-trained at the Uffizi, co-founder of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and a lifelong, cheerful thorn in the side of the powerful.
Five decades of landscape, pilgrimage and protest — from the Hill of Tara to Tuscan vineyards, from Kerry haycocks to the streets of Havana. Click any painting to view full-size.
Museum-grade giclée prints, hand-framed and shipped worldwide by our fine-art fulfilment partner. Originals available on request below.
Ramie Leahy (b. 1950) is an Irish painter best known for his watercolours and oils in the tradition of the Kilkenny Colourists — a movement he co-founded in 1996 alongside Tony and Jane O'Malley, Francis Tansey, Elizabeth Cope, Paula Minchin and Mick Mulcahy.
A UNESCO scholar at Trinity College, he was sent to the International University of Art in Florence, where his personal tutor was the director of the Uffizi Gallery and where he worked on the slow restoration of paintings damaged in the great 1966 flood of the Arno.
He has exhibited extensively in Ireland and abroad. His work hangs in the OPW collection, the Berkeley Court in Dublin, the Butler Gallery, Oisín Gallery, and in private collections on five continents.
A career studded with moments that go beyond the studio — from restoring drowned Renaissance masterpieces to founding Ireland's first multidisciplinary arts festival to safeguarding a castle that produced the man who gave his name to Berkeley, California.
As a UNESCO scholar at the International University of Art, Ramie trained under the director of the Uffizi Gallery — and contributed to the decades-long restoration of artworks submerged in the catastrophic 1966 flood of the Arno, working alongside the volunteers the city came to call the angeli del fango — the mud angels.
Read the story →Ireland had no multidisciplinary arts festival. The Arts Council offered to underwrite losses up to £50. Ramie and a small committee — George Vaughan, Trish Langton, Virginia Begley, Patricia Burke, Jim Furlong, Mary White, Jim King — founded what is now Ireland's most-respected arts festival. Seamus Heaney read at the first one. It's still going. "It was built to last," Ramie says.
Read the story →There is a third project — one that has run for nearly fifty years and is still going. It has its own section next.
Dysart Castle — George Berkeley's childhood home — is being forced to a distressed-debt auction on Wednesday 8 July 2026, less than 48 hours from now. A fund has resurrected an old debt the family had understood to be closed and has refused to negotiate with us, despite our best efforts. The site's custodian for nearly fifty years, painter Ramie Leahy, is seriously ill.
The family intends to register and bid at Wednesday's auction — but without urgent help, we cannot guarantee raising the funds in the receiver's accelerated timeframe. We are seeking a partner willing to bid alongside us, and welcome any suggestion on the appropriate financial vehicle, safeguards, or ownership structure. To be clear, we are open to immediate co-ownership of the castle with a shared-vision partner alongside Ramie, and are the only party that can facilitate the access required to achieve it. This is not a request for a bailout — this is a request for partners in a cultural venture to fulfil a long-held dream to save the castle for future generations; one that has been precipitated by an aggressive debt fund which will not negotiate. Any conversation, introduction, or commitment is urgent and welcome.
Just outside Thomastown in County Kilkenny, a ruined tower-house stands where the philosopher George Berkeley grew up — the man whose name is carried today by the city of Berkeley, California, and by the University of California at Berkeley. Ramie has been the custodian of Dysart Castle since 1977. This is the story of the fight to save it, and — this week — of the fight for its survival.
George Berkeley was born in 1685 and raised on the grounds of Dysart, in the shadow of the tower-house. He would grow up to become one of the great philosophers of the English language — Bishop of Cloyne, author of the doctrine of immaterialism, and, at a certain point, a man who bought farmland in Rhode Island convinced that the future of learning belonged in the New World.
In 1866 the trustees of what was then the College of California picked his name for their new university at the invitation of his verses on "Planting Arts and Learning in America." The city that grew up around the campus took the same name. A thread from a Kilkenny childhood runs directly through the heart of American higher education.
Ramie bought Dysart Castle and its surrounding farm in 1977, when he was a young art teacher. In the decades since he has become one of the country's leading amateur Berkeley scholars — lecturing with the International Berkeley Society at Rhode Island, where the philosopher lived in America.
Dysart Castle is a private property, and the private resources of a working painter only go so far. In April 2003 The Irish Times reported that Berkeley's childhood home was "near collapse" — that new cracks had opened in the walls and that structural failure was imminent without urgent intervention.
Conservation work has been ongoing, funded piecemeal by Kilkenny County Council (acting for the Department of the Environment), the Royal Irish Academy, and Ramie himself. Archaeological direction has been provided by Ben Murtagh — Ireland's leading Berkeley archaeologist, whose credits include the restoration of Kilkenny Castle and dozens of other historic Irish buildings that have survived as a result of his work.
But piecemeal isn't enough. The castle needs a proper long-term settlement — one that gives it a purpose beyond preservation, and gives the philosopher whose name it carries a proper monument at home.
On the 20th of May 1988, Professor R.W. Houghton of the International Berkeley Society at Trinity College Dublin wrote to the Department of An Taoiseach on Ramie's behalf, asking for £105,000 in Lottery funding to save the childhood home of the philosopher who named half of California.
The letter names five universities that had by then already expressed interest in developing Dysart into an international study centre, and points out — beautifully — that this need was known to Éamon de Valera in the 1930s. The campaign is older than you might think.
"Dysart Castle, near Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, has been in need of help since before the late President Éamon de Valera suggested such assistance back in the 1930s." Opening paragraph, 20 May 1988
"Yale, Harvard, Pennsylvania, William and Mary and particularly the University of California Berkeley have been interested in the centre development." On international university support
"The sum for this work would not exceed £105,000." The ask, in 1988 pounds
The ambition is to restore the castle and the adjacent Berkeley House and turn the site into a library and study centre for the philosophy of George Berkeley — the natural European counterpart to the collections held at Yale (Berkeley left his books there), at Trinity College Dublin's Berkeley Library, and at UC Berkeley itself. A place where scholars, students and the merely curious can come to think, in the landscape that shaped the thinker.
Ramie has been pushing this vision quietly for nearly half a century — from a written appeal to the Taoiseach delivered by John McGuinness TD, to a direct fundraising overture to the City of Berkeley in California, to ongoing conversations with the Heritage Council, the OPW, and UC Berkeley itself.
If you, or an institution you can speak for, might be able to help — with bridge finance, a rapid commitment, an introduction, or the longer-term proposition of co-ownership alongside Ramie — please reach out through the enquiry form with "Dysart" in the message, or contact us directly at enda.leahy@gmail.com.
Every claim on this page is verifiable. Below are the primary documents — original correspondence, structural and archaeological reports, and press coverage — that back up what we say. If you're being asked to consider something serious, you should be able to check it. Here it is.
The original appeal from the International Berkeley Society at Trinity College Dublin, requesting £105,000 in Lottery funding for structural stabilisation. Names Yale, Harvard, Pennsylvania, William and Mary, and "particularly the University of California, Berkeley" as interested partners.
View the letterThe formal excavation paper from the Old Kilkenny Review, by Ireland's leading Berkeley archaeologist — whose conservation credits include the restoration of Kilkenny Castle and dozens of other historic Irish buildings saved through his work. Documents four periods of activity at Dysart including the early-medieval St Colman monastic settlement and the medieval tower-house. Funded by the Royal Irish Academy.
View the paper (PDF)National coverage of the campaign, reporting the castle's imminent structural collapse, John McGuinness TD's delivery of Ramie's appeal to the Taoiseach, and the state of the piecemeal conservation funding.
View the article (PDF)The consolidated campaign notes: excavation history since 1992 (UC Berkeley team, Mark Hall + Ben Murtagh); structural surveys by Phelim Manning (1999) and David Kelly (2000); Kilkenny County Council grants (2008); current engineer Ivor MacElveen.
View the timeline (PDF)Correspondence with the Thomastown Community Network re: the Heritage Council's Adopt-a-Monument scheme, confirming Dysart as a priority for future submission and evidencing continued local advocacy for the castle.
View the correspondence (PDF)Mention of Ramie's work at Dysart in the Irish Georgian Society's own newsletter — one of the country's foremost architectural-heritage organisations.
View the mention (PDF)Programme for the 2014 Berkeley Summer School in Thomastown — talks by Dr David Berman (TCD), Anthony McGrath, Brian Hamilton, and Tony Whittle of the Thomastown Berkeley Society, culminating in a visit to Dysart Castle.
View the programmeEmail correspondence between Ramie and Takaharu Oda, then a TCD PhD candidate in Philosophy, in the year following the May 2021 Berkeley, Colonialism, and Ireland webinar at Trinity Long Room Hub. Oda visits Dysart; Ramie shares local historical detail on Kilcrin, the Leabhar Breac, and "Colman of the pigs" that feeds into Oda's doctoral thesis.
View the correspondence (PDF)Takaharu Oda's Trinity College Dublin PhD thesis on Berkeley's theory of causation in De Motu. Acknowledgements (p. ix) thank Ramie: "in County Kilkenny, I thank Mr Leahy for Berkeleist talk in his immense wheat field, where the ruins of Dysart Castle, the bishop's birthplace, enthused me."
View the thesis (PDF)Additional documents available on request — including Kilkenny County Council grant applications, engineering assessments from David Kelly and Ivor MacElveen, the Ben Murtagh castle plans, the receiver's sale particulars, and the family's correspondence with the receiver. Please get in touch and we'll share them.
Three campaigns from a career of speaking up. One in watercolour. One at the courthouse. One at the ballot box.
Years before Ireland's planning-corruption scandals broke nationally, Ramie put Alice in Wonderland on the walls of Kilkenny — a watercolour series casting the county manager as the Jabberwocky and the local establishment as a ship of fools. It was not universally appreciated by those depicted.
Read →Two years earlier he'd paid a €270 parking fine with a cheque for €290 — and the courts, rather than accept the overpayment, let it lapse into a warrant. During the Arts Festival a passing garda spotted him in his pop-up gallery and led him away in cuffs. The state then bought his painting for €3,000, hung it in the garda station lobby, and quietly wrote off the fine. The last laugh, framed.
Read the coverage →After making a documentary on Brian Cowen and what he called the "political circus," Ramie ran for the Dáil as an independent in the 2011 general election. He didn't win a seat — but he made the establishment nervous, and the film is still on the internet for anyone who wants to see what the circus looked like.
Watch the film →From the Painting on Air series to Naked in Cuba — the documentary about Ramie leaving Kilkenny in March 2000 to paint nudes in Havana — selected clips below.
Selected coverage — from The Irish Times sounding the alarm on Dysart to Kilkenny People catching Ramie's parking-fine revenge to KCLR's Keep Well documentary. A picture of a career lived in public.
National coverage of the Dysart Castle campaign — new cracks in the walls, an urgent appeal for restoration funding, and Ramie's vision for a Berkeley library.
Read at irishtimes.com"The prodigiously energetic Ramie Leahy" — Arts Week review of two Kilkenny shows, including work from travels in the US and Cuba.
Read at irishtimes.comA column touching on Ramie, Kilkenny and the wider colourist tradition — the kind of piece that keeps a painter in the national conversation.
Read at irishtimes.comThe full story of the €290 cheque, the bench warrant, the hours in custody, the €3,000 OPW purchase and the framed painting now hanging in the garda-station foyer.
Read at kilkennypeople.ieReview of a career-retrospective exhibition celebrating half a century of watercolours devoted to the Marble City.
Read at kilkennypeople.ieOn Ramie's "Marble City" show at The Bridge House, Rivercourt Hotel — a body of work drawn from a lifetime of painting the same limestone streets in every weather.
Read at kilkennypeople.ieA KCLR documentary in which Ramie walks the ground at Dysart and tells the story of the philosopher who grew up there — and of the ancient saint who came before him.
Listen at kclr96fm.comEvery KCLR interview, feature and mention over the years — handily gathered in one tag page.
Browse the archivePrints are great for the sitting room. But if you're looking to live with an original — or talk about a commission, or book Ramie for an exhibition — drop a note here and we'll be in touch within a couple of days.
Prices for originals range from €300 for a small framed watercolour up to €4,000+ for large oils. Works can be viewed by appointment in Kilkenny or Dublin.