Belfast native David Ashe retired to Normandy, France, and became a champion for visiting GIs who had liberated his adopted homeland during World War II.
In September 2011, Guy Whidden, a World War II veteran from Frederick, Maryland, peeled off his 101st Airborne Division jump jacket in the men’s room of the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville, France. Whidden next … [Read more...] about “Irish Dave” and the Yanks
Who Liberated Normandy
2015
“Irish Dave” and the Yanks
Mama Tina:
The Story of Christina Noble
The story of Christina Noble, whose memories of her poverty-ridden childhood in Dublin inspired her to help thousands of children in Vietnam, is now the subject of a major movie.
Christina Noble isn’t quite what I expected. I had anticipated someone akin to Mother Teresa dressed in a simple cotton sari, but the woman who greets me in the foyer of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel is … [Read more...] about Mama Tina:
The Story of Christina Noble
150 Years of Yeats’s Sligo
On the 150th anniversary of W.B. Yeats’s birth we look at some of the places in Sligo that inspired his best-loved poems. 1. BENBULBEN and DRUMCLIFFE CHURCHYARD: At his request, Yeats’s body was laid to rest in France and later removed to the churchyard in Drumcliffe, under Ben Bulben mountain, where his great-grand- father had served as rector. St. Columba founded a … [Read more...] about 150 Years of Yeats’s Sligo
The Rebel Countess
Rosemary Rogers, continuing her series on Irish women of note, profiles Constance Georgine Gore-Booth, the social agitator and revolutionary who took part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Revolutionaries are, almost by definition, romantic – what else could explain the fact that the iconic image of Che Guevara (whose Grandma Lynch, incidentally, was from Galway’s Lynch tribe) is … [Read more...] about The Rebel Countess
The Willis Family
The Willis Clan have carved out quite the reputation for their musical skills and now have a new reality TV show on TLC. There is a moment during a Willis Clan performance when the stage lights seem to go away and you’re swept into that ancient time and place where Irish music and dance were born as rituals that could bind a community together, banish fear and lift sorrow by … [Read more...] about The Willis Family