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The question “Where do you come from?” can be a funny one for poet Hollie McNish. As her name indicates her roots are firmly in Scotland, but her accent is clearly English, highlighting a geographical proximity to London.

You might think that those at the core of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, were one big happy family beavering away in their rooms at Lady Gregory's home at Coole, Co Galway. In those early days it was a house full of voices and sounds. Sometimes you heard WB Yeats humming the rhythm of a poem he was cobbling together; or the click-clacking of Lady Gregory's typewriter as she worked on another play for the Abbey. There was the sound of the Gregory grandchildren playing in the garden; the booming voice of George Bernard Shaw, as he complains that he is only allowed to have either butter or jam on his bread, but not both to comply with war rations (He cheated by the way. He put butter on one side of his bread, and when he thought no one was looking, piled jam on the other!); or the voices of the artist Jack Yeats and JM Synge returning from a day messing about on a boat calling out to a shy Sean O'Casey to come out of the library for God's sake and enjoy the summer afternoon.

Mayo will become the only county in Ireland to claim a day all of its own tomorrow (May 2), when the first ever Mayo Day celebrations kick off in earnest across the globe.

The Mayo hurlers are hitting the long road to Owenbeg to face Derry this Saturday and get their Christy Ring Cup campaign off to a start for another year.

I remember about a decade or more ago sticking my notebook under the nose of the then Health Minister Michael Noonan, when he was in Castlebar opening the hospital or something and asking him a question about something health related for the Galway area. And in the way he had about him back then, in the days before he was canonised, he cocked an eye and said to me “Right sonny, you're here from a Goll-way paper. This is not a day for Goll-way. Today is Mayo's day, not Goll-way's day.”

The sinking of the Lusitania on May 7 1915, off the Cork coast, by a German submarine electrified Ireland, Britain and America. In Ireland, the fact that German submarines were lurking so close to the Irish shore, added fuel to the propaganda that Germany was planning to invade the country. It spurred recruitment into the armed forces. In Britain, the shameful practice of using passenger liners to carry munitions across the Atlantic without telling the passengers they were in effect travelling on a British war ship, was to come to an end.

TERRY ALDERTON, the astonishingly original British comedian with seemingly multiple personalities, and an off-beat brain that unleashed lets loose comedy gold every time, is coming back to Galway.

Annie Kelly was just 19 when all her dreams appeared to be coming true. Annie was one of 11 children living with her widowed mother at Newgrove, Mountbellew, Co Galway. Her boyfriend, William Murphy, and her brother Thomas had earlier emigrated to Boston. Annie and William were pledged to be married just as soon as Annie got the money to follow him there. Full of excitement the young woman later sailed from Liverpool on the Cunard liner the Lusitania arriving in New York on April 24 1915.

TONGUE FU, a riotous experiment in live literature, music, film, and improv, and one of London’s best attended spoken word nights, is coming to Galway.

GEORGE ORWELL’S first full-length book was Down and Out in Paris and London, his classic account of living on the breadline in France and England in the 1920s. More than 80 years after its publication in 1933, the book’s vivid portrayal of people struggling to survive from one day to the next has lost none of its power. Indeed, with homelessness again a headline-making issue, the book has gained fresh topicality.