Search Results for 'America'

My mother, who religiously listened to the Gay Byrne Show, operated a kind of censorship. There were certain topics she did not want me to hear. For two hours, five days a week, she would shut the kitchen door, and listen to Gay with the volume turned down. On one occasion I came into the room. She asked: “What do you want?” Nobody needs an excuse to go into one’s kitchen, so I’d rather indignantly replied: “Nothin’.” “Well,” she said, “I’m busy.” And that meant scram.

In what must be the ultimate irony in the compelling story of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and their brief, but significant visit to Connemara in September 1962, it was Hughes who returned to find solace and peace there. Sylvia had planned to return that autumn, instead she found, what she thought was a refuge in the former home of WB Yeats in London, and despite the onset of severe depression, remained there to write her best poems. It would probably have saved her life if she had taken up the rented cottage she had paid a deposit for, between Cleggan and Moyard. Instead in London she battled against a bitter cold winter, ‘flu, frozen pipes, and minding her two small children while writing furiously most of the night.

"Christmas comes every year, but to play in an All-Ireland semi-final for your club, more than likely will only happen once in your life. This is the chance of a lifetime," says a buoyant Tommy Finnerty, Oughterard intermediate football manager.

Noel Grealish is "in no position to tell any person who has earned income, inside or outside this country, how they should spend it", and Galway needs to "stand up" against the kind of "ill thought rhetoric" the TD uttered in the Dáil this week.

It is that time of year again. The Christmas season is fast approaching and with only 40 days left before the big day, the last few weeks are usually spent dashing around shops, making lists (and checking them twice), making a mess wrapping gifts, buying the most ridiculous Christmas jumpers and, most importantly, enjoying some well-deserved time off. Buying the perfect gift can be stressful, to say the least, with phones, gift vouchers, and laptops grazing the top of the list. But what do you buy someone who has everything, or someone who is not interested in the latest gadgets and gizmos? The travel specialists at 2 Bridge Street know just the thing.

On the Saturday afternoon, September 15 1962, before that fateful dinner with her husband Ted Hughes, and the poet and publisher Tom Kinsella, Richard Murphy, their host, had taken Sylvia Plath house hunting. She realised that her marriage to Ted was over, and however painful that was for her to accept, she believed that in Connemara with her two children, Frieda and Nicholas, she would be ‘safe from Ted’ and ‘get the first months of separation under way in a fresh setting.’

I

If Sylvia Plath was hoping for some kind of rapprochement between herself and her husband Ted Hughes during their brief stay with the late Richard Murphy at Cleggan, Co Galway, in September 1962, she was to be quickly disillusioned. In fact she would be abandoned, and plunged into despair. Yet following a visit to Coole Park, and Thoor Ballylee, Sylvia was to take away a spiritual connection with the poet WB Yeats, and a feeling of peace in the tragic build up to her suicide some five months later.

Have you ever thought of exploring Dallas? It would not be the first place that comes to mind when thinking of an American holiday, however as Fahy Travel travel specialist Caroline O’Toole found out recently, it really should be.