Irish America
For over 100 years, nationalists in Northern Ireland were considered by their unionist rulers to be the barbarians at the gate, to be prevented at all costs from ever gaining power. Unionism stood still for 100 years, continuously trumpeting support for the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland’s role in it. However, in a cataclysmic event, those same unionist leaders have found, … [Read more...] about All Has Changed
Maud Gonne is frequently remembered as the unrequited love interest of the poet, W.B. Yeats, while her accomplishments as a nationalist, artist, actor, lecturer, polemist, writer and social activist are often marginalized. In particular, Maud’s role in engaging with the perennial poverty and intermittent subsistence crises that dogged Ireland in the final decade of the 19th … [Read more...] about Maud Gonne and Famines in the 1890s
John Gilmary Shea preserved much of the existing knowledge of the beginnings of American Catholicism. Considering the Irish-American influence on U.S. Catholicism, it makes sense that someone of Irish descent – John Gilmary Shea – undertook to preserve much of the existing knowledge of the beginnings of American Catholicism. A prolific writer and dogged rescuer of rare … [Read more...] about Window on the Past: A Savior of History
After many false starts, the Jeanie Johnston famine ship replica is on its way to the United States. If there is a symbol of the trials and tribulations of getting the Irish replica famine ship Jeanie Johnston to sea on its homage to history, Tom Kindre is the poster boy. When Tom McCarthy, the captain of the ship, quizzed him on crewing across the Atlantic, the member of the … [Read more...] about Jeanie Sets Sail for New World
The Irish Diaspora is the outworking of two forms of colonialism, those of Mother England and Mother Church. I have been interested since boyhood in what was then known not as the Diaspora, but as emigration. Like nearly every other Irish person of my generation, some of my closest relatives were forced into unwilling emigration. I have always lived near Dun Laoghaire, where … [Read more...] about The Story of the Irish Diaspora Wherever Green Is Worn
