In 1991, Irish America magazine published one of the first interviews with Gerry Adams. (As far as we can tell, Playboy magazine was the only other American magazine to interview Adams before that. (In the Republic of Ireland, N. Ireland and the UK, broadcasting bans were in place that prevented media outlets from airing interviews with Sinn Féin members). In March, of that … [Read more...] about Gerry Adams The Road to Peace
The Troubles
Gerry Adams
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
Seamus Heaney Poetic Champion
A native of Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The following excerpts are taken from interviews conducted with him in 1986 and shortly after he won the Nobel in 1996. Poetry summons you. That's been my own experience. The real difficulty about being a poet is not in the writing. It's surviving the silence, surviving lack of … [Read more...] about Seamus Heaney Poetic Champion
The First Word: A Little Boy’s Cry
On a plane to San Francisco a young couple sit across from me with two boys. The younger one is kicking up a ruckus. As I reach for my ear-plugs I hear the wife say something to her husband, a trendy fellow with glasses and an earring. "Big Ian" she calls him. Belfast, I think to myself. The accent is that of my sister-in-law Elaine. That this family is from Northern Ireland … [Read more...] about The First Word: A Little Boy’s Cry
The First Word: Living Up to The Nobel Prize
Ireland is no stranger to the Nobel Prize. Indeed the prize awarded each year in memory of Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite) has gone to citizens of the island a total of seven times. W.B. Yeats (1923), G.B. Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969) and Seamus Heaney (1995) all won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But good writers aside, the Nobel Committee has also focused on … [Read more...] about The First Word: Living Up to The Nobel Prize