I was first brought to a thatched cottage situated near Tuam in County Galway in 1965 at the age of 11. Enchanted with Ireland, over the next 10 years I became increasingly embedded in Irish culture, finding a way to return every summer, working as a waitress at a Galway…

I have been asked many times about Galway, a city in the west of Ireland that I once called home, but I say nothing, not knowing where to begin. But the passing of a dear friend shed some light on my dilemma, and I now know just where to start this love story.

(Left: The Spanish Arch in Galway…

Trading Fate

Fourteen-year-old Patricia Walsh, her mother, father, and six siblings, scratched out a living in the stone fields of County Galway, Ireland. Colum Walsh supported the family as a stonemason building estate structures and repairing the fences of an…

This poem was penned after the death of King Charles I, who was beheaded outside Whitehall Palace in London on the afternoon of January 30th, 1649, exactly 368 years ago, today. 

"He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene:

But with his keener eye

The axe’s…

When St. Brendan got back from his travels discovering America in a small wooden and leather boat around 564 AD, he wrote a book in Latin, 'Navigatio Brendani' or 'The Voyage of Brendan', which, some 900 years later (1477) convinced Christopher Columbus that there might just be something out there beyond the western…

'You look like the wreck of the Hesperus' was a much-used phrase in our house in Loughrea, 20 miles from the sea at Galway Bay. Boys, well you know boys, they never comb their hair, never wash their hands, wear the same clothes forever. . . . You know the type, and obstinately oblivious of their appearance. In Ireland,…

His name was Eoghan, and I never did catch his last name. A solid year spent with the desultory coming and going of this enigmatic man through the door of The Galway Music Center, and I came to accept him as Kieran’s friend from Derry. Kieran rarely explained himself, much less anyone attendant, and because he was the…

Even on the best of days, when the weather is temperate and the sky soft and cloudless, Galway City has a worn, secondhand feel to it: an historic, pensive, erudite quality everywhere you roam down its serpentine streets. But there’s also an energetic undercurrent to Galway that seems to thrive on the idea of opposites,…

I did not eat out very much on my 2015 visit to Ireland. For most of the time I had cooking facilities available for my exclusive use. It was practical as I was being fiscally prudent. I spent some time at the home of my sister, Bernie, and her husband,…

Once St. Brigid's Day has passed, our thoughts turn to the arrival of Spring . . .

I was reminded of what little credit I give sometimes Ireland's forgotten writers and poets, especially those who wrote in Irish, 'as Gaeilge'. This struck home when I read again Galway's blind…

Cuireadh do Mhuire was composed by Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910 – 1988), the great Irish language poet from the village of Sruthán, on Inis Mór (Inishmore), the largest of the Aran Islands, in Galway Bay.

Ó Direáin penned this beautiful and delicate verse at Christmas 1942, when the whole world was at war and his…

After more years than I care to count, Kieran has resurfaced. The last time I saw him, it was raining; it was one of those gray Galway days on New Castle Road, and I’d sleuthed Kieran out, after swearing to Adrian I’d never tell who had told me where I…

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, has just published four new folios of research into the period of The Irish Famine under the collective title Famine Folios.

These compelling essays take a fresh and…

O! farmer, strong farmer!

You can spend at the fair

But your face you must turn

To your crops and your care.

And the crowds at the fair,

The herds loosened and blind,

Loud words and dark…

The Irish, while extremely fond of their horses, tended to walk everywhere, most of them not having the means nor the land to support a horse. Public transport was inefficient, to say the least. The railways had only just arrived in Ireland but were confined to short…

Well, you just have to listen to Davy Spillane's music before you answer my question. Here's a short video that I created of my recent solo exhibition in Áras Éanna on…

Ireland's "Wild Atlantic Way" usually refers to the rugged conflux of seacoast and mountains to be found in the western counties. But in the city of Galway, "The Wild West" takes on a different connotation.

Galway, known throughout history as a trading center, has…

Tell us why YOU want to experience the ‘Wild West’ of Ireland, and you might win a free 9-day trip there, courtesy of Wild West Irish Tours and WOW Air. Get the details!…

Every couple of years this man would come to Loughrea, County Galway and set up shop on the footpath outside Molloy's Harp Bar on Main Street. He was an itinerant blade grinder, or knife sharpener.

Folks would get wind he was in town and quickly a queue would…

If one is travelling through Connemara, one of the more compelling tourist destinations is Kylemore Abbey, a Benedictine monastery since 1920, which sits majestically surrounded by wooded acres behind a tranquil lake. The…