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, 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 Tuesday 7 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. The site's custodian for nearly fifty years, painter Ramie Leahy, is seriously ill.
We are appealing urgently for help. The Leahy family will discharge the debt to prevent this week's sale — but the crisis has made clear that Dysart's future needs a partner. We are looking, in particular, for a co-owner willing to work alongside Ramie to save the castle and realise its future as a Berkeley study centre. 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 excavation by Ben Murtagh has documented what is still there and what is being lost.
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.
Every euro goes into structural stabilisation. We're a small operation with no overheads.
Donate now →Painting exhibitions, garden events at Dysart, lectures on Berkeley — join us for one.
See upcoming events →Sign up for updates on the campaign, and get in touch if you or your institution can help with funding, partnership, or expertise.
Get campaign updates →Interested in a partnership on behalf of a university, a foundation or a private trust? Please reach out to Ramie directly through the enquiry form with "Dysart" in the message.
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.