It's Christmas Eve and the Brew and Burger on 47th Street where I work is crowded with last-minute shoppers and tired children brought in from the boroughs and New Jersey to see the tree at Rockefeller Center by irritated parents and young nannies with short skirts who look at their watches anxiously. I'm 21 years old, just out from Ireland a couple of months and homesick. For … [Read more...] about The First Word: At Home in America
Gerry Adams
Why Biden Should Appoint a
U.S. Envoy to Northern Ireland
By Niall O'Dowd, Publisher
Irish America and President Joe Biden urgently need to reach out to unionism and loyalism in Northern Ireland to help bring political stability and repeat the success of the Clinton/Irish-America axis from the early 1990s.
In the throes of the Brexit crisis, Biden is the one outside player who could make a profound difference, just as Bill Clinton … [Read more...] about Why Biden Should Appoint a
U.S. Envoy to Northern Ireland
Irish Power, U.S. Politics U.S. Rep. Richie Neal Talks to Niall O’Dowd
Richie Neal’s extraordinary journey from a working-class neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., and one of the most powerful jobs in American politics as the chairman of the Ways & Means Committee. On November 7, 1960, Mary Garvey Neal, who had roots in Ventry, County Kerry, took her son to the Springfield, Massachusetts, town hall. It was very … [Read more...] about Irish Power, U.S. Politics U.S. Rep. Richie Neal Talks to Niall O’Dowd
Wild Irish Women: A Most Sorrowful Mystery
Oh! star of Erin, queen of tears, Black clouds have beset thy birth, And your people die like morning stars, That your light may grace the earth. – "Stars of Freedom," 1981 By IRA volunteer Bobby Sands, M.P. H-Block, Long Kesh Prison Camp Watching Bobby Sands die in 1981, much of the world realized, finally, that the young IRA soldier and hunger striker was a freedom fighter, … [Read more...] about Wild Irish Women: A Most Sorrowful Mystery
Reflections on the Good Friday Agreement
Signed on April 10, 1998, the landmark Good Friday Agreement helped to bring to an end the 30 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Twenty years on, Deaglán de Bréadún looks at how the agreement came about, the American role, and the current state of play. In the early 1990s, the blood-soaked contest between the Irish Republican Army … [Read more...] about Reflections on the Good Friday Agreement