THE Fitzgerald family has successfully mastered an evolving tourism market for over 30 years in North Clare. In the centre of Doolin, the family-run Village Crafts Shop has quietly grown into a longstanding fixture of the local landscape, offering visitors a thoughtfully curated collection of authentic Irish goods alongside a traditional welcome.
Owned and operated by Maeve Fitzgerald, the business is rooted in family tradition. “We started it up 30 years ago,” Maeve says. “It’s a family-run shop.” Working alongside her daughter and her husband—who still occasionally steps in to manage the till despite being retired—Maeve has built an enterprise that serves global tourists while remaining true to its community foundations.
The shop began as a grocery store near the family home before the Fitzgeralds identified an opportunity to pivot on a derelict site in the heart of the village. “There was two small cottages on it, derelict, and we knocked them and we built a summer grocery shop down here for tourists in the summer,” Maeve recalls. “Then it just got harder to run a grocery shop, and we decided maybe there’d be an opening for a craft shop.”
That decision proved correct, and today the shop is well-known for its extensive inventory of high-quality Irish merchandise. “We have everything that the tourists could look for,” Maeve explains. “We have souvenirs, sweaters, knits, lovely hand-knit baby wear, Guinness products… we’d be one of the only people in this area that would have them, other than the Cliffs of Moher.”
Beyond the retail offering, it is a dedicated and recurring customer base that has se- cured the shop’s longevity. “We welcome a lot of tourists into the shop from all countries,” says Maeve. “We find now that people who were here 15, 20 years ago, they’re coming
back again… and they send their friends.”
As the busy summer season gets underway, the doors are open daily from 10am to 7pm. For Maeve, the appeal of the locality relies entirely on the collaborative spirit of its inhabitants. “Doolin itself has a great name… and what made that great name was the people of Doolin and the business people of Doolin,” she concludes. “It’s an Irish welcome we wanted, and that’s really the basis.”
