A letter from our Editor: My image of the South and the Civil War was formed in part by the movie Gone With the Wind. RTÉ, our one channel when I was growing up in Ireland, ran movie classics on Sunday afternoons. It was one of the features I enjoyed watching with my mother. My desire to come to America was fueled by those movies, by the glamour of Fred Astaire … [Read more...] about The First Word: Imagining America
The First Word
The First Word: Let the Irish Apply
A letter from our Editor... After all these years in America, I still feel like an immigrant. Though I proudly hold American citizenship, it is other immigrants that I most readily identify with. “Where are you from?” I ask waiters and cab drivers, even a woman on the subway (we were so caught up in our chat about how “there is no place in the world like New York … [Read more...] about The First Word: Let the Irish Apply
The First Word: Imagine Ireland
By Patricia Harty, Editor-In-Chief
“An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination.” – George Bernard Shaw (John Bull’s Other Island) Gabriel Byrne says that the line between reality and imagination is very thin. I concur. Perhaps it’s because my father filled my head with stories of banshees and haunted fields with gates that never stayed shut. Perhaps it’s simply the beauty of the Irish countryside – … [Read more...] about The First Word: Imagine Ireland
The First Word: Putting the Fight Back in the Irish
Niall O’Dowd returned from interviewing Coach Brian Kelly with a story of a cab driver he met – an immigrant from Africa who had seen little of America outside of South Bend, Indiana. When the cabbie learned that Niall was Irish, he exclaimed with admiration, “You Irish, you own everything over here!” Watching the televised game between Notre Dame and Utah and witnessing the … [Read more...] about The First Word: Putting the Fight Back in the Irish
The First Word: From Famine to Finance
It was an interesting experience, to say the least, following up on our issue commemorating the Great Hunger with one in which we profile Irish-American titans of Wall Street. In a way, those two words “Famine” & “Finance” could be seen as the bookends of the story of the Irish in America. Not that we claim that success in the financial world is the only … [Read more...] about The First Word: From Famine to Finance