Jeanne Marie Flanagan was pottering around her beautiful home in Walden, New York, just before Thanksgiving in 1989 when she started to cry. "I thought at the time it was my hormones because I was pregnant, but in my spirit I guess I knew something terrible had happened," she remembered. She was right. Her seven-year-old son, Mark, was in the East Coldenham Elementary School … [Read more...] about The Gift of Life
Archive
(Un)lucky Strike
The Comstock Lode provided over half the silver ever mined in the United States but the Irishmen who discovered it weren't quite as lucky as one might think. By Jim Sullivan. Between 1850 and 1860 the numbers of Irish arriving on the shores of America rose from 206,041 to an incredible 1,611,304! Packed into the slums of New York City's East Side and Boston's North End, many … [Read more...] about (Un)lucky Strike
An American in Ireland
Denise Hall, an American journalist, gave up the fast-track for the briar paths in a remote corner of Ireland. I lived in Los Angeles for ten years. For three of those years, I worked for the legendary National Enquirer, and I was definitely ready for a change. It wasn't just the lurking behind palm trees in expensive Beverly Hills restaurants that eventually got to me. I … [Read more...] about An American in Ireland
Hibernia
The dream of Lewis and Loretta Brennan Glucksmat I finally became a reality in late April with the opening of their cultural center, Ireland House, at New York University, with Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds performing the official opening. The house was opened to the public when the ribbons fell, and various luminaries including poet Seamus Heaney, flautist James Galway, … [Read more...] about Hibernia
The Exile
A Story of Ireland Whenever Michael Walsh thought he was finished at last with Ireland, all of it would come flooding back, like a sudden wave on a glassy sea. He had tried to rid himself of that sad green country with cheap whiskey in too many bad bars in a city that was not his own. And now, on this perfect spring day in his eleventh year of New York exile, he could feel … [Read more...] about The Exile





