Search Results for 'priest'

The Gathering Ireland, the Fáilte Ireland tourism initiative, has the potential to rekindle relationships with relatives, neighbours, and friends, while forging new ones with the Irish Diaspora across the globe. The Foxford community in association with Ireland Reaching Out, the not for profit organisation, are working through voluntary effort at parish, village and townland level, to identify those who emigrated, and trace them and their descendants worldwide. Traditionally, the town, like most towns in the west of Ireland, suffered from the effects of emigration, the loss of family members, and a missing generation in the community, effectively leaving townlands devoid of their former population. Unfortunately, emigration has once again became a modern day reality as our young people seek out opportunities across Europe, Australia, and the USA.

One of the film highlights of the year for me was Anna Karenina, a British adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's great novel of the same name.

In April 1980, I interviewed Mrs Sarah Lynskey from Bridge Street, on her 100th birthday, for this column. In the course of our conversation, she told me her earliest memory was of “kneeling on the Salmon Weir Bridge with my mother and a lot of Claddagh women praying. I know they were Claddagh women because I can still see the triangles of shawl as they knelt on the bridge. We were praying for a fellow, they were going to hang him the next day. Joyce was his name”. She was talking about Myles Joyce, an innocent man who was to be hanged along with two others for the Maamtrasna murders.

I get both embarrassed and amused, in an hysterical sort of a way, reading back over the recent social history of poor Cathleen Ní Houlihan. Particularly when it touches on anything sexual. It is surprising that any of us were born at all, such was the misery caused at the mention that anyone might be enjoying a healthy sexual relationship with a partner. The impression was given that everyone who had sexual contact outside marriage was not only in a state of serious sin, but that they were some kind of social pariah, to be scorned and driven away from normal society. Even sex within marriage could be shaky. It really was a subject that could not be discussed in public at all without inviting legions of self-righteous men and women out on the streets proclaiming well-meaning but ill-informed opinion.

Last week Mrs Margaret Sekaggya, the UN special rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, met a delegation of 10 people to discuss the issues they face regarding the Corrib Gas Project. The delegation comprised seven members of Shell to Sea, Kilcommon parish priest Fr Michael Nallen, and two members of the human rights monitoring organisation Table Observers: Sr Majella McCarron and Donal Ó Mearáin.

I wonder would the following story still happen in Galway today. It happened in more innocent times, in the early 1960s. A very upper class gentleman, Major Woodfall Murphy, rented Bermingham House, the great 18th century pile once owned by the barons of Athenry, on the outskirts of Tuam. The genuinely snobby Lady Molly Cusack Smith, who owned the pile, was only too glad with the promised extra lolly. To the outsider it all felt hunky-dory: One snob helping another.

A 29-year-old Tuam man who continually targeted NUI Galway prowling the campus and committing a number of offences including taking handbags from the church, stealing a car carrying a laptop with sensitive medical information, and selling off the pieces of a medallion and chain worth €5,000 to a cash for goods store, has been jailed for 21 months and disqualified from driving for five years.

Ballina and the surrounding areas were plunged into mourning this week following the unexpected death of Fr Muredach Tuffy. The 39-year-old, who was a native of Castleconnor, Co Sligo, was a priest in the Diocese of Killala and better known as the director of the Newman Institute in Ballina.

Seventy-six years ago Fr Sean Kilcoyne first thought of becoming a priest. He was in secondary school in Castlebar and wondered what it would be like to be a man of the cloth.

More than 400 people gathered in the Galway Bay Hotel last weekend for the presentation of the annual Rehab Galway People of the Year Awards. The attendance included Mayor of Galway Cllr Terry O’Flaherty and County Mayor Tom Welby, as well as Minister of State Ciaran Cannon and other public representatives.