Search Results for 'Rita'

In the spirit of Easter and community outreach, young professionals from JCI Galway, a non-profit organisation dedicated to creating positive change, visited the St. Bernadette's Children's Unit and emergency department at University Hospital Galway during the Easter holidays.

Michael Newell was born near Headford, and went to school in Roscrea where he played rugby for the school. He emigrated to New Zealand for a while before returning to Galway to take over a premises on Sea Road that had been occupied by Dan Whyte the barber, and his daughter Rita, who taught Irish dancing there. He set up an ice cream parlour that became a great haunt for local teenagers. He made his own ice cream and ice pops but the biggest attraction was the novel (for the time) milk shakes that he made, and then topped them off with strawberries or raspberries or some other fruit. “It was almost impossible to look in the window without feeling a huge need for an ice cream.” He would roll up a piece of paper into the shape of a cone, put a twist on the end of it and pop a measured number of bulls eyes into it, a process which always fascinated the children. He was ahead of his time but he was not really a businessman.

Irish traditional music is one of the great survivors of history. Maybe it was because we are an island, way off on our own in the western Atlantic, and until the latter decades of the last  century, out of hearing from the mass cultural movements of popular cinema, radio and TV, especially the modern music from Europe and the US, that something distinctive has survived. As a boy I would only hear traditional music sessions in a few Gaelteacht areas, or from the welcoming Standún family in Spiddal, or at the Féiseanna at An Taibhdhearc, which was more memorable for the day off from school than it was for the music.