Musings, ramblings and thought provoking articles from our team of talented writers - all views expressed are their own!
While Ireland’s traditional music is famous, the nation is no slouch when it comes to rock and roll. U2 is Ireland’s biggest musical export. The band can brag of winning 22 Grammys in their 40-year career, and being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They’ve been topping the charts since the 1980s, and […]
Diego, the company that owns the Guinness brand, is poised to open a new Guinness brewery in Maryland sometime this year. But it won’t be brewing the traditional Guinness stout there. Instead, it will be making Guinness Blond and Guinness IPA. Is this a sacrilege or just the normal course of cultural evolution for the […]
Ireland held elections on February 26th, yet no new government has been formed. What does that mean and what will happen next? Is Ireland tumbling into complete political chaos? Many Americans are confused when they hear that Ireland does not have a government. Of course, we have do have political institutions and civil bureaucracy is […]
Moore Street in Dublin was a key battle site in the 1916 Easter Rising, and it recently came under attack again by property developers who wanted to replace the buildings with a shopping center. Dubliners were having none of it. Visitors to Ireland might be surprised by the number of historic heritage sites everywhere as […]
Presidential elections are only a year away in the United States, and it looks like it could be a very long, very tense year for the estimated 50,000 Irish in America without authorization. Republican candidate Donald Trump has made his anti-immigration stance a central part of his campaign, and his comments about immigrants, particularly Mexicans, have […]
Jackeens and culchies and boggers, oh my! Is the real Ireland Dublin’s fair city, the nation’s capital, or is it out there beyond the Pale? People often use the phrase ‘beyond the Pale’ without having the slightest notion of what ‘the Pale’ is. They usually know the phrase refers to something beyond civilized standards of […]
The nation laughed out loud last summer when a Fianna Fáil senator, Ned O’Sullivan from County Kerry, spoke out and declared that Ireland’s seagulls had “lost the run of themselves completely” and stated he was “very much against seagulls.” He went on to accuse the gulls of stealing candy from children and partying late into […]
The Confederate battle flag has been a very hot topic in the USA lately, since photos of a self-avowed white supremacist who allegedly murdered nine people in North Carolina have surfaced featuring the suspect with the flag. Americans have been doing some soul searching about how casual many white Americans are about a flag that […]
What do you know about Ireland? That is to ask, “what do you know for a fact about Ireland?” Knowing suggests being certain of things. But if I were to then ask you,”what do you believe about Ireland,” I would probably get a very different answer. You might know that Dublin is the capital and that […]
Across Ireland and the United States, there is much discussion of marriage, equal marriage and traditional marriage. But these discussions often lack a historic dimension. Marriage in Ireland has changed and evolved greatly over the ages. Marriage in Brehon times was quite unlike marriage now, although some aspects of a wedding in Brehon times are […]
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