Dolly Parton’s Irish legacy, from a Kerry pub to 200,000 free books

How Dolly Parton quietly changed Irish childhoods

Dolly Parton never made a fuss about it, she just took the county jersey she was given that night home to Tennessee.

She put it in a frame, and hung it on the wall of her recreation room, where it stayed for the rest of her life.

Parton died on Tuesday at the age of 80 at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, surrounded by her family.

She had been facing "a brief battle with cancer", her publicist Marcel Pariseau confirmed in a statement, adding that "Dolly departed her Earthly life today". The type of cancer was not disclosed.

Her death was announced late on Tuesday night in an Instagram video by her nephew and long-time head of security, Bryan Seaver.

Jane Fonda called her 9 to 5 co-star "so present, so powerful, so generous and playful that she is woven into all our lives and hearts forever."

The global tributes have been enormous as flags are lowered across America for a week on the orders Trump, and the Empire State Building lit in pink sparkle.

In Ireland, though, the mourning is more personal than a tribute reel, because Dolly Parton kept turning up here, and kept giving something back when she did.

That night in Páidí Ó Sé's pub

Parton told the story herself on RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline in 2023, speaking to Katie Hannon from Dollywood.

She had come to Ireland in 1990 with her Irish friend Walter Hagan as they stopped into the late Páidí Ó Sé's pub.

"I remember that very well. We just had a ball that night, and they asked me if I'd sing, and of course I did," said the late country singer.

She was accompanied by musicians Steve Cooney and the late Séamus Begley.

Ó Sé gave her a Kerry jersey, and it clearly meant something.

Parton was quoted saying she had "that jersey in a frame, hanging in my basement, which is my recreation room. I'm very, very proud of that."

In the same interview she spoke about Sinéad O'Connor, who had died months earlier.

"I always felt connected to her," Parton said, calling O'Connor "very, very sweet" and a singer whose life could be "heard in her voice".

"Sometimes that makes the best singers, people that live what they are singing about."

Parton's family have asked that instead of flowers, donations be made to her Imagination Library, so that is where her Irish legacy sits.

She founded the children's literacy programme in her native Sevier County, Tennessee in 1995, inspired by her father Robert Lee Parton, who could not read or write.

"He felt crippled by the fact that he couldn't read and write," she told Ryan Tubridy on The Late Late Show in 2022, calling him one of the smartest people she had ever known.

Ireland became the fifth country in the world to run the scheme when it launched here in 2019, starting in Dublin 24 and coordinated by the Tallaght-based Childhood Development Initiative with support from An Post, Dublin Rotary Club and Shamrock Rovers.

Registered children get a free, age-appropriate book posted to them, addressed personally, every month from birth until they turn five.

By March 2022, more than 200,000 books had been gifted to Irish pre-schoolers. The last one they receive, at the age of five, is Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant.

"You can never get enough books into the hands of young children," she said when the Irish scheme launched, adding that she knew children here had their own dreams.

Whether it was a doctor, inventor, teacher, writer, singer, she believed the seeds of those dreams are usually found in a book.

Thirty-six years on from that singsong in Kerry, there are Irish twenty-somethings who learned to read from books with Dolly Parton's name on them, and a Kerry jersey on a wall in Tennessee that she never took down.