Irish Catholic v. Irish Catholic

Irish-American Catholics face each other in Thurday’s (October 11) vice-presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan.

It’s the “Lace Curtain Irish Ryan” against the “Shanty Irish Biden,” says columnist Niall O’Dowd. NPR produced a “tale of the tape” profile of the two pols.

The Irish Times just published this piece, which says:

Twenty-seven per cent of the electorate in the last two elections were Catholic. Romney and Obama hope their Irish-American Catholic running mates – from opposite sides of the rift between conservative and liberal wings of the church – can “deliver” Catholics as well as the white working class.

No matter what happens in November, an Irish Catholic will hold the #2 job come January.

Non-Irish in Ireland reaches over 544,000

Newly released Irish census figures show the number of non-Irish nationals living in the Republic has reached over 544,000, a 143 percent increase from 2002. Such foreign-born residents now account for about 12 percent of Ireland’s population.

Here are links to news stories in Irish Central and the Irish Times.

Polish nationals have the largest presence in Ireland, more than 122,500 people, compared to 112,000 from the U.K. The number of U.S. citizens living in Ireland has declined by nearly 12 percent since 2006 to about 11,000.

Here’s a link to all the data from the Central Statistics Office in Ireland.

I reported and wrote about this population diversity trend during my March 2009 trip to Ireland. Here’s the story I wrote for the Sunday Perspective’s section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Ulster Covenant centenary

I am a few days late with this post, but still wanted to note the 100th anniversary of the Ulster Covenant.

On September 28, 1912, nearly 500,000 men and women signed separate documents to protest legislative attempts, called “Home Rule,” to secure more domestic autonomy in Ireland. The pledge to “use all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present” conspiracy was soon backed by the creation of a loyalist militia called the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Here’s news coverage of the anniversary in the Belfast Telegraph.

The Ulster Covenant was one one of the first steps toward politically cleaving the northwest corner of Ireland from the rest of the island. Nine years later six counties were partitioned as “Northern Ireland.”

The Ulster Covenant centenary is the first of many important centennials that will be marked over the next decade. Other upcoming anniversaries include the August 1913 Dublin labor lockout; April 1916 Easter Rising, January 1919 start of the War of Independence; December 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty; and the 1922-23 Civil War.

Here’s a link to the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland with more information about the Ulster Covenant, including a search feature to check for ancestors who may have signed the document.

Here’s a Wikisource link to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Ulster, 1912.”

Finally, here’s an interesting take on the anniversary by Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole.

University to open “Great Hunger” museum

Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., is opening the largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials related to the Irish famine of the mid-19th century.

“This is the only museum anywhere in the world dedicated to Irish art on the Great Hunger,” University President John Lahey told the Hartford Currant. “There is nothing like this in Ireland. The educational piece is that this was an avoidable tragedy.”

The 4,750-square-foot “Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum,” opens to the public Oct. 11.

Here’s the museum’s website.

Ghost estates

The unfinished and vacant housing developments from Ireland’s property boom-turned-bust are called “ghost estates.”

There are more than 2,000 of these forlorn neighborhoods spread across the country. Here’s a New York Times story about one in Dublin. Here’s a government paper about the problem in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

We saw a few of these ghost estates during our June visit to Ireland. Nobody seemed to know what’s going to happen to these properties, though it’s a safe guess that many will end up being bulldozed.

If so, and given enough time, the land will re-green itself. But will the lessons of greed be remembered?

Her emigration, 100 years ago

One hundred years ago, in mid-September 1912, Honorah Ware boarded the passenger ship S.S. Baltic at Queenstown, Ireland. The 20-year-old farm girl from rural Kilelton townland in northwest Kerry was bound for the American city of Pittsburgh.

Her journey began with a seven-mile trip to the railway station at Listowel. She probably was joined by an 18-year-old girl from nearby Ballylongford who also was bound for relatives in Pittsburgh. The 65-mile trip to Queenstown, now called Cobh, included stops in Tralee, Killarney, Mallow and Cork city.

The young women likely spent a night or two in a boarding house before taking a lighter out to the Baltic anchored in the harbor. Remember, this was five months after the Titanic sank in the icy waters of the north Atlantic. Imagine what must have going through their minds.

The crossing took eight days. Nora and the other passengers were processed at Ellis Island on Sept. 21, 1912. From there she took a 300-mile train trip to Pittsburgh.

Like many young Irish women of the period, Nora spent her early years in America working as a household servant, or domestic. She married a Kerry man in 1924, at age 33, and they had six children, including my mother. In 1959, I became the seventh of Nora’s 12 grandchildren.

Nora died in 1983, shortly after her 93rd birthday. She never lost her Kerry brogue, but she never got back to Ireland, either. I have had the pleasure of walking the north Kerry headlands and Shannon estuary of her birthplace.

At this centennial of her emigration, I honor her memory. God love her.

Just wanted to post a pretty picture. This is from Feb. 2009 trip to North Kerry.

Modern eviction drama in Co. Kerry

The story reads like something out of 19th century Ireland. A farmer is being evicted from his land. His rural neighbors rally to his side.

But this drama is playing out in modern day County Kerry.  The Bank of Scotland is in the role of the villain instead of an English landlord and his ruthless agent.

Here’s coverage from the Kerryman newspaper. Here’s an interesting blog post from Maggie Land Blanck with lots of historical background about 19th century evictions, mostly in County Mayo. Maggie’s great collection of artist renderings and even a few photos of evictions in rural Ireland is worth the click over to her site.

Court battle over Troubles stories

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to settle a legal dispute over the release of the tape recorded interviews of people involved in violence during The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The case involves the governments of the United States and United Kingdom, as well as Boston University, and the perpetrators and surviving family of a 1972 IRA killing.

Here’s a quick summary of the details from the Boston Globe. Here’s a video report from the PBS NewsHour.

There is some irony here. The case has been working its way through the courts at the same time Ireland’s Bureau of Military History has made available online more than 1,700 witness statements from the revolutionary period 1913-1921, as we detailed two posts below.

Were there any legal attempts to have those statements released to prosecute events that had happened decades earlier? Is there a secondary issue of considering these matters as crimes or as war-related?

I certainly understand the surviving family members desire for justice. And as a journalist I have frequently argued for the release of any material that sheds light on public events. But I also understand the BU researchers’ desire to keep their word to the people who came forward to give statements, just as I would want to protect a source. I also have some sympathy for the witnesses who shared their stories in the belief their remarks were being kept secret until after their deaths.

It’s an interesting and thorny case.

Ireland’s consul general coming to Tampa

Paul Gleeson, consul general of Ireland’s Atlanta consulate, is set to make his first visit to Tampa on Aug. 31.

My blog life and my work life intersect at this story.

Here’s a link to the Atlanta consulate.