MÁIRT -- On Sept. 17, 1860, units of the Irish Battalion of St. Patrick of the Papal army fought a Piedmontese army allied with Garibaldi at Spoleto. Spoleto was a walled city south of Florence with the fortress of Rocca on the side…

Chicago Times correspondent John Finerty wiped his brow, drying the sweat from the hot July 7^th afternoon, as he looked up to the top of the grassy knoll where scout Frank Grouard was scanning the horizon with his binoculars. They were near the valley of the Little Bighorn in what is…

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

In 1897, Mark Twain was reported to have made this famous statement upon being confronted with his obituary by a reporter in London.…

Driving around Ireland definitely makes you hungry — and sometimes forgetful — so after a day of touring around West Cork I arrived at The Fish Kitchen, a small-ish restaurant in Bantry situated, appropriately, above a fish market, withouta reservation. Call it the luck of the Irish, but…

This, the latest book by retired Lt Col Dan Harvey, represents an admirably huge amount of meticulous research and yet is highly readable. I had been aware that my own local regiment – The Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry – had long connections with Ireland and that they had been involved in the extraordinary military operation known…

This year marks an uneasy halfway for me—I have been in Australia for as long as I lived in Ireland. So where does that leave me? The truth, I have come to realise, is somewhere in between. In Australia, I am regarded as Irish. My accent, parlance, even my ‘writing voice’ are often differentiated as such.…

I will arise and go

(After William Butler Yeats)



My people are a migrant clan

Prospering not by hook or crook or craft

But by diligent labour and an easy charm

Flung from one small corner

Across every wind-tossed sea

Mountaintop to valley floor

To lay a thousand roadways

Or stand on…

Back in October of 2017, I wrote an article titled “From Dunkirk to Nagasaki: The Long War of Dr. Aidan MacCarthy,” about a hero of WWII who had one of…

At the Ould Lammas Fair boys were you ever there

Were you ever at the Fair In Ballycastle-O?

Did you treat your Mary Ann

To some Dulse and Yellow Man

At the…

'The only position for women in the civil rights movements is prone.' 

     -- Stokely Carmichael, African American civil rights leader (1968)

'I have often said when Hillary Clinton…