Q & A with the Irish singer-songwriter While selling her tapes door to door in her hometown of Dundalk, County Louth at the age of 12, Cathy Maguire could not have imagined that one day she would perform for multiple U.S. Presidents, including at an inauguration, and collaborating with multi-platinum artists Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Now splitting her time between … [Read more...] about What Are You Like? Cathy Maguire
Issues
Senator George Mitchell
Reflections on the Good Friday Agreement, 25 Years On Q&A with Kelly Candaele KC: Perspectives sometimes change with time. Looking back from 25 years, are there any perspectives about your experience or the Good Friday Agreement that have changed for you during that period? GM: On the day the Agreement was reached I praised the men and women … [Read more...] about Senator George Mitchell
Time for Peace
The year was 1981, and Irish American elected officials – including the junior U.S. Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden – had plenty of reasons to be concerned. Yes, another festive St. Patrick’s Day in Washington D.C., was approaching. But so were some of the darkest days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Amidst rising clashes on the streets of Belfast, an Irish Republican … [Read more...] about Time for Peace
Wild Irish Women: Bernadette
After 800 years of colonial rule, Ireland finally got conditional freedom and fell victim to the British Empire’s deadliest legacy, partition. In the six northern counties, bigotry and resentment simmered over the years until it broke wide open in 1968. Then along came Bernadette. In the beginning, there was a single face that symbolized the conflict, a passionate college … [Read more...] about Wild Irish Women: Bernadette
Good Friday and Us
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