Bear in mind these dead: I can find no plainer words. - John Hewitt, "Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto" The New Year brings good tidings to a young couple I know, the birth of a baby boy, a welcome addition to their ever expanding family. Unlike his mother, a Belfast native, this boy will grow up outside the danger zone of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Other children … [Read more...] about What the Future Holds
Immigration
A Visit Home
By Betty O'Connor Wald
January / February 1998
Betty Wald visits Ireland for the first time in search of her grandmother's home in Kilmacillogue, County Kerry In all the long years of Sunday visits to my grandmother's apartment in the Bronx, she never talked about Ireland. There were no tales of a far-off land for a child's imagination to grab hold of, to elaborate over the years, making family myths to pass on to future … [Read more...] about A Visit Home
The First Word: No Immigrants Need Apply
Franklin Delano Roosevelt once told an uncomfortable audience of the Daughters of the American Revolution that "we are all immigrants." It is something that we should remember now when the scapegoating of immigrants is reaching a new height in this country. California is leading the way in states that are proposing initatives that would deny public education and medical care to … [Read more...] about The First Word: No Immigrants Need Apply
Out of Ireland: The Story Of Irish Emigration To America
From the book 'Out of Ireland' with permission from Elliott & Clark
July/August 1994
Out of Ireland, a documentary film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner, had its first public showing at the New York Lincoln Center Irish Film Festival in June, and will air on PBS television stations sometime this fall or next spring. Using as its primary source the remarkable memoirs and letters written by and to Irish immigrants in America, from Kerby Miller's … [Read more...] about Out of Ireland: The Story Of Irish Emigration To America
An American Wake
Compiled by Irish America Staff October 1992
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