It doesn't seem like ten years since Sheila and I stood for the first time in the kitchen at No. 8 Bowling Green. We had been given the key by the estate agent to go and look around ourselves and we both knew within a few minutes of breathing in the atmosphere of this dusty, dilapidated, abandoned little house that it had to be saved.

We didn't know that James Joyce had stood in this very kitchen talking to the woman of the house, Annie Barnacle. We didn't know then that Lucia Joyce had slept in the upstairs tiny bedroom and looked out the window on to a much quieter Bowling Green many years before. We did know Nora Barnacle had once lived there. Hetty Mulvagh was a weekly visitor to my mother Mary Bohan, in Woodquay, and Hetty often mentioned how her brother Willie had once known Nora Barnacle who married a 'famous writer'.

Within a few weeks of first stepping inside, of what was to become for us simply "Nora's", Sheila and I were the proud owners of the Barnacle family home. Our goal was straightforward. We wanted to turn it into a museum in honour of Nora and James Joyce. We were determined to accomplish it with the minimum change to the house as we had found it on that day in December 1987.

To capture the authenticity of the period between 1890 and 1940 we journeyed to Cultra Folk and Transport Museum outside Belfast, where small terraced houses (like Nora's) had been relocated from the heart of Belfast City. These houses were beautifully restored, and the guides in each house were a mine of information. We returned to Galway full of ideas and enthusiasm. Our winding road to the little museum you see today had begun.

The running of Nora's has been an enriching experience for us and it has also brought a lot of excitement to our lives. Through Nora's, we have met most interesting people from all over the world. Their enthusiasm and gratitude for what we have done in tribute to James and Nora Joyce make all the years of hard work worthwhile.

A particularly exciting and rather anxious moment for use was meeting for the first time Stephen James Joyce and his wife Solange, in a Galway hotel in 1989, and wondering what they would think of our work on Mr Joyce's ancestral house. Another memorable event was our 1992 wonderfully successful Bloomsday theatre evening. Abbey actors Maire Ni Ghrainne and Pat Lillis read from Joyce, and Sonny Molly accompanied on the piano by Pat Lillis, sang the beautifully haunting songs that Joyce himself loved and sang. On this occasion too mr Stephen James Joyce read the 'Cat and the Devil', a children's story specially written for him by his grandfather. A spellbinding evening. Our visitors have come from as far away as Libya, Finland, and Tasmania, and increasingly we have the most appreciative of visitors from Japan.

There have been many distinguished visitors too, including: john McGahern, Edna O'Brien, Michael Déon, Anthony Cronin, Irish President Mary Robinson, US Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith. Actress Fionnula Flanagan read Molly Bloom for us on Bloomsday. We have also had the pleasure of showing the house to actor Barry McGovern. Mary Barnacle's granddaughter, Nancy Cottrell, walked into Nora's in 1995, bringing with her a wealth of information about Nora's eldest sister who had emigrated to America in 1900. This was another memorable moment for us.

What has helped us considerably during the past years has been the highly knowledgeable and dedicated staff. Thanks to their warm welcoming nature we are constantly getting a stream of correspondence from visitors, saying what a joy and a pleasure their visit to Nora's had been, a visit which very often had proved the highlight of their trip to Ireland. We have exceptional neighbours from both Woodquay and Bowling Green. They have constantly supported us and have become as enthusiastic about Nora's as we have ourselves.

Each year sees a considerable rise in the growing correspondence at the House. Constantly we are being asked for information pertaining to James and Nora, and also we receive materials and documents that our visitors feel would be of interest to us. Thanks to many of our friends and people with whom we have met during our summer seasons, we have built up a considerable collection of Joyce editions. It is not however the bright lustre jugs which enhance our mantle piece in the kitchen or the Russian edition of Ulysses that brought with it so much excitement (wonderful in themselves), that hold for us the true magic of Nora's: it is the fact that this little House listened as James and Nora Joyce and Annie Barnacle sat around the fire chatting in Bowling Green on a summer's evening of a long ago Autumn.