A descendant of Famine immigrants recounts her trip home. It was our first trip to Ireland. And it was a trip my mother, Mary Lanigan Schmidt, always yearned to make, but never did. Now dead these 12 years, she left behind so much, including her First Communion veil from 1926, now yellow with age. I took two snippets of the delicate lace and brought them with me, a part of her, … [Read more...] about Beyond the Veil
Travel Story
In Pursuit of Irish Culture
What is Irish culture, anyway? My name is Owen O'Toole. I'm 18, and while I proudly identify as Irish-American, I need to know more about my ancestral homeland. As my high school, Regis, prepares a trip next year to Ireland ("a pilgrimage," as we members of Regis' Gaelic society affectionately call it), I want to understand what Irish culture is all about. Here's what I do … [Read more...] about In Pursuit of Irish Culture
A Sacred Place: Skellig Michael
Photographer and writer Chris Ryan visited the larger of the two Skellig Islands off the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, where an early-medieval monastery survives at the edge of the material world.Start at the Dublin offices of Google or Facebook, drive to the southwest tip of Ireland, hop a boat, journey seven miles out to sea, and climb 600 steps clinging to the edge of a … [Read more...] about A Sacred Place: Skellig Michael