From "The Wicklow Mountains High" by Jim McGonigle.

One of the things I'm always on the alert for while driving along the roads of Ireland is any sort of roadside historical marker. The Irish have populated their cities…

Mary Eileen "Mims" Murphy Walsh was born in County Longford in 1881. She was college educated and worked in Dublin. She married Patrick "Paddy" Walsh on July 29, 1913. They immigrated to the United States in 1915. To Mims, it was an exile that she…

After fellow Wild Geese member Oisen O'Connell had generously taken me on my last Wexford tour via Ballyhack Castle,…

It takes less than two hours to drive from Nenagh to the Burren in Co. Clare. At a recent launch for the Cliffs of Moher Geopark  (www.burrengeopark.ie) in Lisdoonvarna, I was reminded just how much this region has to…

Dunmore Cave

Ballyfoyle, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland



History and geology blend at Dunmore Cave to give an interesting and unique situation. Consisting of a series of chambers formed over millions of years, the cave contains some of the finest calcite formations found in any Irish cave. The case has been known to man for many centuries…

When a "family detective" starts researching  “Royalty” connected to one’s family, there arises  women known as “Mistresses” and “Concubines”.  Most Kings had them. Do you know the difference in these terms or “titles”?

A concubine can be part of a harem, or a…

In Tombstone, Arizona, the town too tough to die, Nellie Cashman, the Miners’ Angel, is legendary for her business skills, her philanthropy and her Irish grit. Her biographer once said, when asked to describe her, “Pretty as a…

We arrived at Dublin Airport to some fairly typical Irish summer weather, i.e. cloudy with off-and-on showers and temperatures of about 18 (about 65 back in the…

... a trip to Ireland helped.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (1837- 30 November 1930) was an Irish-American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World. Mary…

The Wild Geese gained a spotlight on 'Communications Corner,' on Queens Public Television (QPTV), the Queens, NYC, public television network. During the broadcast, co-founder Gerry Regan shares his personal background while discussing the ever-growing and very passionate membership of the world's leading social network…

In "Machine Made: Tammany Hall and The Creation of Modern American Politics," author Terry Golway doesn’t sugar-coat the negative aspects of a New York institution that flourished for about 100 years. What he does is swing the pendulum back from a crazy imbalance caused by…

It is a source of great pain and frustration to genealogists that most 19th Irish census returns have been destroyed. The destruction is generally blamed on the fire at the Public Records Office in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. While the 1922 fire did consume a great deal of…

Back before there were affordable and reliable alarm clocks, the occupation of a knocker-up made a few pence a week in England and Ireland by using a long, lightweight stick, often bamboo, to tap on their clients’ upper floor windows and wake them up so they could get to…

In 2006, British director, Ken Loach won the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or award with his portrayal of the 1919-23 Irish War of Independence and Civil War in “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”. There is a scene in that film where a wealthy landowner who is about to…