Search Results for 'Irish society'

It was desperately disheartening and disappointing to hear Irish actor Gabriel Byrne hit out at Enda Kenny once again and call the Gathering 2013 a scam last week. The former Cultural Ambassador to Ireland made his comments on Matt Cooper’s The Last Word on Today fm which was broadcast live from New York.

The Irish-American vote used to be a sure thing. If you were Irish-American, you voted Democrat. It was as simple as that. When I was growing up in 1950s Chicago, Republicans were like another species. An analogy from Baseball. As a Chicagoan, you supported either the White Sox or the Cubs. It was a tribal thing. My family were White Sox fans. So I was a White Sox fan. Cubs fans, on the other hand, were weird. Why would anyone support the Cubs? In much the same way, Republicans were weird too. Why would anyone support the Republicans? If you were Irish-American, even to pose the question bordered on the ridiculous.

The Manchester Irish Festival committee and the Minister of State for Tourism and Sport, Michael Ring, are among the recipients of the 2012 Irish Diaspora Mayo Awards.

An Taoiseach Enda Kenny has welcomed funding from the Irish American Partnership for five Mayo primary schools totalling $7,500. The five schools are all in the parish of Islandeady; namely Cornanool, Cloggernagh, Cogaula, Glenisland, and Leitir. They each received $1,500 as a gift from the Irish American Partnership as part of its Rural Primary School Library Programme. The gift was announced by the Irish American Partnership during a recent visit by the Taoiseach to Boston while attending one of its events. The funding programme is intended to increase the size of the libraries in the schools.

Rugby has taken centre stage in Ireland recently with the exploits of the Irish team at the World Cup in New Zealand, and for those who would like a permanent reminder of the intensity of the game, a special John Behan sculpture will be auctioned this weekend.

This week you could not avoid the extensive television coverage that has been given to the weekend’s anniversary of the devastating September 11 2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

Irish emigrants have made major contributions to Canadian, Argentinean, American, British, and Australian life, but what might the world have missed out on if the Irish had not emigrated?

As the emigration trend continues to draw young and old from our shores, new networking groups to connect Irish people abroad are coming on stream.

The death of a man from Mayo in 2008, whose body was not discovered in his New York home for a week, has led to a census of elderly Irish people in the New York borough of Queens being launched.