The Judges...

Tim O Sullivan: Tim is a long standing member of the chef organisation Euro-toques and is also the head chef of the local and nationally renowned Renvyle house hotel for many years. He is a previous winner of the Mussel cookery competition and was a judge for the competition last year. Tim is also a member of the Mussel festival organising committee.

Mairin Ui Chomain: Mairin is a native of Connemara and chairperson of the Irish Food writers Guild as well as being a renowned TV and radio presenter of cookery shows, contributor to newspapers and magazines and author of numerous cookbooks for many years. This is her third year as a judge for the mussel festival cookery competitions.

Gerry Meade: Gerry is an Irish Euro-toques chef with over 25 years experience both at home and abroad, with a special interest in seafood. He is now a catering industry consultant as well as a cookery instructor and food critic. This is his third year as a judge for the mussel cookery competition as well as an advisor to the festival.

The Patrick Walton Trophy

The Connemara Mussel Festival celebrates the delicious mussels harvested in adjacent Killary Harbour, the wonderful landscape of north Connemara, the Irish traditions of the locality in arts, music and literature and the warm welcome from the people of Connacht. The peoples of the west of Ireland have long been resourceful and imaginative in their work and this is not demonstrated better then in one of their most famous ancestors Patrick Walton who upon leaving Galway and sailing to La Rochelle in the 13th century(1290) is accredited with the origin of mussel farming in the world as we know it today. It has been long recorded in French annals that this brave and ingenious Gaeltacht man after arriving in the the western French seaport when his vessel ran aground in a storm, decided the next day with help from some locals, to pitch long wooden poles across the bay to catch birds in nets for food and as well as catching birds he inadvertently discovered how to breed mussels. They clung and grew on the posts and this became the first place in the world to harvest mussels using this technique which is now used world wide. It is called the “Bouchot” method, basically growing the mussels on posts. For the next twenty years French fishermen made their way to La Rochelle to learn the technique from him and he became celebrated all down the west coast of France. For several centuries then the west of France was synonymous with mussel farming, so much so that they never forgot the name of the man who started it, hence the many accurate accounts of the story in local historical records there. To this day Mussels play a vital part in French gastronomy and are still harvested all over the Atlantic coastline.

As a tribute to this famous Connacht man the award for the Mussel cookery competition is named in his honour, The Patrick Walton Trophy. It is so appropriate that Ireland now recognises the legend that is Patrick Walton by having such a tribute in his name. He left Connemara, never to return himself but his reputation has returned and his name as one of our own will be remembered here now as fondly as it has and still is remembered in France.