Joe Cahill, former I.R.A. chief of staff, died on July 23 at his Andersonstown home in Belfast after a short illness. The 84-year-old was buried after a huge funeral cortege carried his remains to the Republican plot at Milltown Cemetery. Cahill was honorary vice-president of Sinn Féin, and the party's current president Gerry Adams paid homage to his friend at the … [Read more...] about News: Joe Cahill Laid to Rest
I.R.A.
Gerry Adams
The Leader
Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin, is the most well-known Irish politician outside the island of Ireland. As a civil rights activist in Northern Ireland in the late sixties, a victim of Britain's oppressive internment policy in the seventies, and a purported I.R.A. member, Adams' life story reflects the evolution of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. The following excerpt is … [Read more...] about Gerry Adams The Leader
English or Irish?
My south London schoolmates and I struggled with our Irishness during the 1970s. Nearly all of us had Irish parents who had settled in England in the 1940s and 1950s, but we had been born and raised in London. Did that make us English or Irish? Most of us made regular summer trips to Ireland, looked Irish, even knew a few Irish words. Some of us just felt Irish – all our … [Read more...] about English or Irish?
The Bearing of the Green
Some thoughts on being Irish-American. As a proud Irish-American, I begin with a simple assumption: there is no way to precisely define that elusive, complex human category called the Irish-American. The tools of sociology are as inadequate to the task as the forms of the Census Bureau, and the jeweler's art of the lexicographer can't come close to an answer. This should … [Read more...] about The Bearing of the Green