Tinteán Tréigthe no.19, oil on canvas, 2016

Now if you’re searching for your great grandmother’s cottage in the country, you can follow the map to a certain extent, but, in the end, you just have to ask someone. So, after driving a crooked mile up a crooked mucky roadeen, searching for the dot beside the ‘S’ of…

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Introducing the amazing Tracy Gilbert, contemporary Dublin-based jewellery designer, whose work we now…

 By Joseph E. Gannon

The following is a transcript of the LIVE members' chat hosted here at TheWildGeese.com on Monday with Producer and Director Valerie Lapin Ganley.  Some editing has been applied for clarity.…

Do you know where you’ll be on April 24? Maybe not, but chances are you might just find yourself huddled over a form, answering innumerable questions about your personal life. Filling in the census may not be the most exciting of pastimes, but it sure is important. Without all those statistics…

Dublin Castle was the seat of British rule in Ireland for over 700 years.  On top of the gate to the courtyard of the castle is a statue depicting Justice.  The statue is unusual for several reasons. The figure of Justice faces inward not outward as would be usual. This results in Justice facing the rulers of the castle and the…

In 1997, during the 150th anniversary of "Black '47," the worst year of the Great Hunger, many commemorations were held all around Ireland and the Irish Diaspora. I attended one of them on Grosse île and wrote the following about that experience.…

With the approach of the 1916 Irish Easter Rising Centennial, there’s been renewed interest in "Shalom Ireland," a documentary film I made about Ireland’s remarkable, yet little known, Jewish community (www.ShalomIreland.com).  So I picked up my copy of "For the Life of Me," the…

Nellie was able to fool the doctors at Bellevue into believing she was mentally incompetent and was transported out to Blackwell’s Island (in a 19th century illustration, above). After ten harrowing days there, the paper managed to get her out, but she admitted to feeling a lot of anxiety waiting for it to happen.…

The very subtlest eloquence

That injured men can show,

Is the pathos of a pike-head,

And the logic of a blow.

Hopes built upon fine talking

Are like castles built on sand

But the pleading of cold iron

Not a tyrant can withstand.

In antebellum America, many former…

When I entered the University of Notre Dame in 1965, the first thing I had to do was make some close friends. Notre Dame has no social fraternities and in 1965 no women. So one had to fish around your residence halls and classes to find some friends with mutual interests.

During the…

Carmel, California -- Before I get to the acclaimed Irish traditional musicians from Donegal who comprise the band, Altan, I’m going to editorialize to put the show I saw the other night into context. When I lived on the western coast of Ireland, it fascinated me to realize that in the…

“Have you ever been to Mars?” I was asked one morning at 2am as I made my way up east 81st. street in Manhattan. I was returning home from a night out at Manny’s Car Wash, a favorite blues bar on 2nd avenue. I stopped and heard it again, louder this time, “Have you ever been to Mars?” Looking around I couldn’t see anyone and…

(Scroll down to read the English translation of this post.)

Bhuel, bhí sé go h-iontach a bheith i láthair i Ros Muc i mbliana le hÉirí amach na Cásca a chomóradh, céad bhliain níos déanaí.  Bhí brat na hÉireann ag foluain i ngach gáirdín agus cuma álainn ar an cheantar ar fad.  Bhí gach sórt…

Speech by John Bruton, former Taoiseach, at 11 a.m., Monday 28^th March, in Iveagh House, Dublin, as part of RTE's “Reflecting the Rising” series.

President John Kennedy once said that a “nation reveals itself “ by the events and people it chooses to commemorate.

This state is a rule of law based, parliamentary democracy, which has…

My friends kid me about one of the websites I frequent, a place called Banjo Hangout (dot Org). It’s a place where banjo geeks like me go and talk about strings and rings, and pots and picks, and necks and woods and, well, banjo makers! And occasionally I receive messages from those fellow Banjo geeks – so I wasn’t too…

The GPO, Mount Street Bridge, The South Dublin Union -- these are names that resonate when it comes to Easter 1916 as the battlegrounds for what became Padraig Pearse’s ‘glorious failure.’ However, for some quirk of history, the success that took place in the sleepy town of Ashbourne, County Meath, during the Rising has…

Mayo born singer songwriter Seamus Ruttledge has recorded a new version of 'James Connolly' to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter rising.

Ruttledge has adapted, arranged, and written new verses for this 2016 interpretation of the famous…

Although the first census of the United Kingdom was held in 1801, it was not until the 1841 census that respondents were asked to state their country of birth, thereby enabling us to see the size of the Irish population in Britain. We cannot, therefore, accurately judge how many Irish refugees had flooded into England, Scotland…