Musings, ramblings and thought provoking articles from our team of talented writers - all views expressed are their own!
If you watched Ireland play in the World Cup qualifiers against Denmark in the last week, you heard the song. Actually, if you’ve seen any Irish team play any sport against another national team, you’ve heard the song. You mightn’t know the name or the history of it, but if you’ve watch an Irish sports […]
Happy New Year! November 1st is the first day of the ancient Celtic year. Like January 1st, it’s the day after the big party. Around Ireland, neighbors are quietly cleaning up after the bonfires and fireworks of Halloween. Parents are taking down decorations and encouraging their children to pace themselves as they devour their candy. […]
You can expect a steady stream of pirates at your door this Halloween. Pirates are a staple of Halloween, along with vampires, superheroes, witches, zombies and ghosts. Part of the fun of dressing up as a pirate is that there are endless variations. Boys and girls, men and women can be pirates. No one is […]
As you carve the pumpkins, hang the fake spider webs and stock up on candy for trick or treaters, you probably are not thinking about romance. But the Celts of old were. Halloween’s roots are in Samhain, the pre-Christian Celtic New Year. People believed that a veil separated this world from the spirit world, where […]
Galway is known as the City of Tribes, but who were those tribes? Are you descended from one of them? Today we use the phrase ‘city of tribes’ in many ways to include all of the people of Galway and to celebrate the city’s history. But long ago, it referred specifically to 14 families who […]
The wet and cold are settling in. September’s mix of rain and surprise sunny days is over. Farmers have gathered their last harvest, and by now everyone has their turf in for winter. Fires are lit at night, filling the air with the smell of burning turf. Young people eager for Halloween are stashing away […]
Bogs, a particular type of land, play a quiet but central role in Irish life. It is quintessentially Irish that we would see a substance that is 90% water as burnable fuel and be correct. Bogs shape our language and cultural views. City dwellers jokingly refer to their rural counterparts as ‘boggers’. In small towns […]
In August, summer is in full swing in Ireland. The weather is changeable, of course, but most years it is mostly warm and dry. Well, warmer and drier than the rest of the year! We’re past the summer solstice. The days are shorter than in July, but it is still light until after 10 pm. […]
Ireland is full of amazing destinations that are rightly famous around the world for their beauty and charm. The Cliffs of Moher. Blarney Castle. Dublin’s Temple Bar. Newgrange. No visitor is ever short of must-see sights in Ireland. But sometimes you want something different. Sometimes the joy of travelling lies in discovering something that not […]
We don’t get our fair share of sunshine in Ireland. The island is famous for rain, for the endless soft drizzle that gives us our 40 shades of green. So when summer comes and we do get some sun, which isn’t guaranteed even in summer, we tend to celebrate it. This isn’t new. Our ancient […]
