I wonder if we are, as novelist Salman Rushdie has written, at the deepest level of our nature, “frontier-crossing beings.” Is it part of an innate desire to step across borders, and by doing so enter into places that can be disorienting or even dangerous? If that is so, are we not wall-builders as well, determined to keep at bay the foreign, the invader, and the … [Read more...] about Good Friday and Us
Against the Tide
Sean Granahan is determined to keep The Floating Hospital afloat It’s been nearly 20 years since Sean Granahan found himself in a diner on the West Side of Manhattan, staring at a piece of paper. “The numbers weren’t pretty,” Granahan recalls. “In fact, they were un-pretty.” A lawyer, Granahan had spent the previous several years doing work on behalf of a New York-based … [Read more...] about Against the Tide
Filming Ireland’s Pagan Underbelly
One of the many positive effects of the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland has been a deepening complexity in recent films about the Irish. With former adversaries talking peace, it's no longer possible for Hollywood simply to sentimentalize or demonize Irish characters, as it did just a few years ago in such films as Far and Away and Patriot Games. Some of the movies' … [Read more...] about Filming Ireland’s Pagan Underbelly
The Bard of Ireland
Collin Lacey interviewed author Morgan Llywelyn, who has created an entire body of work chronicling the Celts, and Ireland, from the earliest times to the present day. Brown eyes glinting in the low afternoon light, best-selling Irish author Morgan Llywelyn draws herself up straight in an armchair in her rural North Dublin home, and turns several shades of indignant. You get … [Read more...] about The Bard of Ireland
Flyfishing? Golf? Both!
A vacation at any of a number of golf/angling resorts in Ireland can enable the sporting couple to enjoy two favorite daytime activities together – or apart. Some visitors to Ireland are surprised that the meadows really are as green as those pictured in the Birnbaum Guide. Others are surprised that the stout really is fresher than in Boston, New York, or Chicago. As a … [Read more...] about Flyfishing? Golf? Both!