Search Results for 'Gaeltacht Minister'

GALWAY HAS long been a magnet for folk of an artistic bent; they arrive for a weekend or short stint in college and then find themselves setting down roots in the city.

“A potentially disastrous decision” with “serious implications in relation to employment” in the Aran Islands and Connemara is how changes to the Social Inclusion and LEADER programmes is being described.

It was a twofold mission — to do the best you could for yourself and to do the best you could for the folks at home. Margaret Craven was talking about emigration from Ireland the way it used to be in the 1960s. She knows. She left her native Letterard in Connemara as a teenager. She was then Margaret Connolly and, like thousands of others of her generation, the bells of emigration were tolling for her early in her life. She was speaking in Portland in the state of Maine in America last week. She is now a state representative for the Democrats in the state parliament in Maine; next week she will almost certainly be a state senator. She has an election next Tuesday and the bells are tolling for her Republican opponent. But last Monday it was the bells in the Church of St Dominick in Portland that tolled and told the story of the Irish in the state of Maine. And it brought together many elements of the Irish diaspora.

The White Mountains of New Hampshire are aflame this week. Trees of fiery orange and red entwined in a mix of russet and chocolate brown. The year is changing colours as the fall envelops the north east of America. “America is about to change colours politically as well,” says Theodore (Ted) S Sares, who now lives in the ‘Granite State’. He is a business consultant and also describes himself as a private investor. He would admit in a colourful burst of laughter that he is a millionaire, but he was a bigger millionaire before the financial crisis struck. Ted Sares could strike once too — and he could put together a one/two combination in the ring. He was a useful amateur light heavyweight with 130 contests under his belt. And he once closed the Digital Corporation business in Galway.