Monthly Archives: July 2012

The Gathering, 2013

The Emerald Isle is promoting a giant homecoming called The Gathering Ireland 2013.

The year-long event “is about the people of Ireland throwing open our arms and inviting anyone with a connection to our country to come and visit.”

In addition to feel-good reunions and genealogy, the promotion is designed to boost tourism and other economic development. The number of visitors to Ireland was flat during the first half of 2012, though increased slightly in the second quarter, The Irish Times reported.

The timing of next year’s “Gathering” has special resonance in my family. My grandmother emigrated in September 1912; my grandfather in May 2013. Both were from rural north Kerry.

More on their centennial voyage, and next year’s events, in future blogs.

Kerry’s Lartigue monorail

The unique Lartigue monorail, shown above, operated between the market town of Listowel and the seaside village of Ballybunion from 1888 to 1924. The odd railway drew attention to north Kerry and became the focus of newspaper stories inside and outside of Ireland.

“It seems strange, but it is not less true that a remote village on the coast at Kerry should have been selected for the first experiment in a railway system which promises a revolution in the construction of our iron roads,” the Irish Times wrote at the line’s opening on Feb. 29, 1888, a leap year day. “The Lartigue system is about as different from all preconceived notions of railways as it is possible to imagine.”

The Lartigue figures prominently in a manuscript I have produced about late 19th and early 20th century Kerry, and some of its residents who immigrated to Pittsburgh, Pa.

Gorse

Gorse, also called furze, in north County Kerry, Ireland. This photo taken near where the River Cashen empties into the Atlantic Ocean, just south of Ballybunion.

tumblr launch

This is my initial tumblr post.

I intend the blog to serve both personal and professional objectives, the latter aimed more at my goals of publishing research and writing about Irish and Irish-American history and contemporary issues.

The views on this blog are my own and are not associated with my work at the Tampa Bay Business Journal, where I cover commercial real estate and other issues.