Irish America
Irish America
Three Irishmen have been remanded in custody in Antwerp, Belgium, in connection with the theft of four of the most important paintings from the Beit Collection, stolen from Russborough House in Wicklow in 1986. Works by Goya, Vermeer, Metsu and Vestier, which police said were valued between £30 and €40 million in total, were recovered from what was the biggest heist in the … [Read more...] about Blazes Boylan
As the rest of America celebrates the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World, Irish-Americans can boast that one of their own may have beat him by nearly 1,000 years. The idea that Irish monks in an ox-hide boat might have beaten the Conquistadors and the Vikings to America was largely relegated to Irish folklore before 1976. That year, British … [Read more...] about Goodbye Columbus, Hello St. Brendan
For the last 150 years poor mother Ireland has been casting out her young to the four corners of the world. The country, it could be said, is no more than a spawning pool, a place to be born but not a place to live a life through or die in. Over two million left between 1845 and 1855 leaving behind the Famine in which one million died. During the nineteenth and into the … [Read more...] about An American Wake
Thomas Keneally is widely-recognized for a wide body of work of a historical and political nature, including The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, which explores differences between the white and Aboriginal cultures. Confederates examined the consequences of the American Civil War on a group of individuals; Schindler's List looks at the Holocaust. And in To Asmara he focused on the … [Read more...] about The Irish Experience in Australia
More than half a century after his death, William Butler Yeats is still Ireland's foremost avant-garde playwright. We return to his theatre work, in all it diversity and contradictions, not because we are sure of its place in the repertoire of modern Irish theatre, but because we are not. Yeats' plays are unsettled and unsettling, radically incomplete until methods of … [Read more...] about 1992 Yeats International Theatre Festival
