December / January 2004

One Life to Give

Chuck Feeney has just put into practice something he had been considering for many years. He has decided that all the vast wealth he accumulated in his lifetime should be given away while he is still...

A friend, a teacher in Northern Ireland, who is forever puzzling over the intricacies of our race, recently asked me what I considered to be the essence of the Irish character. Clarence Darrow, the...

The hopes that were raised in the latest advances in the peace process were dashed as Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble criticized the transparency of IRA decommissioning and said he was...

Bono looked admiringly at the soft white portrait painted by one of today’s greatest Irish painters, Louis le Brocquy, an artist whom Bono has admired since he was 13, at an unveiling at the...

A group of Irish nuns in Galway are both continuing their secluded religious worship and reaching out to the online world. The Poor Clares, an order of Roman Catholic nuns founded by St. Clare of...

Irish Sunday Independent journalist Alan Murray unearthed a plot by loyalist terrorist Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair to assassinate Courtney Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy and her husband...

Recently Hollywood and the Irish government have come to blows over taxation. The debate is over the section 481 tax allowance, otherwise known as the film-tax incentive that has bolstered the film...

Thousands turned out in lower Manhattan on a rainy Sunday morning on September 28 to remember relatives and friends lost on September 11, and to retrace the final steps of Stephen Siller, a...

We’re juggling with numbers here. Every five seconds someone in the world loses his/her sight; a child goes blind every minute. That amounts to seven million cases a year. Add that to 45...

Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, is donating his papers and letters to Emory University in Atlanta. While Heaney’s manuscripts will stay in Ireland, his letters and...

Rape charges against Michael Flatley filed last March by Tanya Marie Robertson have been dropped. A judge in Chicago advised Robertson’s lawyer to drop the case or see it be thrown out of...

A collection of letters written by Hollywood star Audrey Hepburn to her father and stepmother sold for £45,500 at auction at Christie’s — nine times more than the estimate of between...

Five thousand years ago, on the windswept edge of Western Europe, near the village of Ballycastle, halfway between Benwee Head and Killala Bay, a community of farmers, cattlemen, crafters of wood and...

Looking at a cross section of Irish businesses today, you would think that the Irish are the masters of invention. Whether they are companies taking symbols as traditional as the Claddagh into new...

Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc. recently re-edited its U.S. television commercial when scores of irate Irish-Americans phoned in complaining of what sounded like a leprechaun shouting an ethnic slur. In the...

The Irish Arts Center (IAC) of New York celebrated a stellar night and raised over $120,000 at its Gala in the New York Athletic Club on October 3. Honoree hosts Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne, both...

Donald O’Connor, best known for the physical and musical acumen that made him a star in the 1950s, and the mastermind behind Singin’ in the Rain’s famous “Make ‘Em...

As part of the chain of festivals from Leitrim to Beara in the summer of 2003, a flotilla of naval ships arrived in Glengarriff, County Cork on August 29. Chief among the ships was the Naval...

When outspoken Irish President Mary McAleese criticized the “stupid, wasteful abuse of alcohol” in her country during the Re-Imagining Ireland conference in Virginia earlier this year,...

At 6-foot-2, Gerry McNamara, who calls himself just “a skinny little white kid who takes pride in working hard,” is a hero in the working-class town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. McNamara,...

A few years ago, Newfoundland tourism officials decided to give names to roads around some peninsulas to help travelers plan trips by calling attention to a region’s most significant feature....

Kelly comes second to Murphy as the most common surname in Ireland. The name is popular because it originates from at least seven different and unrelated ancient clans or septs. These include...

I look forward to the Christmas holidays more than anyone I’ve ever known. In addition to the main events, my birthday falls smack dab in the middle between Christmas and the New Year. All my...

As Legal Affairs Reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, I enjoy covering the courts, not being hauled into them as a defendant in an international case about press freedoms. As I wrestled with the...

My father played Gaelic football most of his life. He was the captain of the County Leitrim team that won the New York G.A.A. Football Championship in 1932. Sundays during the spring and summer...

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December / January 2004

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