In 1999, I arrived in Baltimore Ireland on a bright summer day, waiting for the foot ferry across Roaring Water Bay. A week later, I departed from Skibbereen on the River Ilen.
In the March/April 2020 issue of Wooden Boat is a story of the restoration of the Irish ketch Ilen, built in Baltimore in 1926 (and serving 70 years in the Falkland Islands) at a boatyard on the river of her name.
Ivan Cooper, one of the few Protestant leaders to march with Catholics on Bloody Sunday, has passed away.
According to the Irish novelist Eoin McNamee, the armed border partitioning the island of Ireland was “a moral wrong, in the sense that the Berlin Wall was a moral wrong, an affront to civilization.” Now, two decades since that partition was removed, English nationalists–opposed to open borders–threaten to return Ireland to the troubling past of manned security checkpoints and wanton violence that terrorized its citizens.
As Andrew Maxwell puts it,
It’s not the Irish border–It’s the British border in Ireland. The Irish border is the beach.
Only 66 miles from Belfast, and 108 miles from Dublin, Fintona in West Tyrone is a treasure trove of Irish culture. As a 4,000-year-old village, the many surrounding ancient ruins compliment modern amenities such as the community equestrian center.
1916 The Irish Rebellion, narrated by Liam Neeson, tells the story of the 1916 Easter Rising, when actors, poets, teachers and socialist workers took on the British Empire.
Martin McGuinness walks on. Sinn Fein pays its respects.
It took fifty thousand years for my Celtic ancestors to migrate from Caucasia across Turkey, the Balkan Peninsula and Iberia before landing on the island of Ireland five thousand years ago. My Irish lineage has only been in North America since 1768, and we’re clearly just beginning to understand what it’s like for the indigenous peoples here to be ignored in ways similar to the experience of our forebears and their relationship with Queen Elizabeth I of England and King James I of England and Ireland.
The apostrophe, frequently used in Anglicized spellings of Irish surnames, is ultimately of Greek origin. Adopted by the Latin alphabet, and later incorporated into French punctuation, it was introduced into the English language in the 16th Century.
Key events of the Civil Rights Campaign (1964-1972) are accessible through the University of Ulster CAIN web service, as well as in the BBC history of Northern Ireland. As a key player in this era, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association brought together a powerful mix of civic leaders, as evidenced by the meeting at Maghera.
The Celtic nation of Galicia, in northwest Spain, are cousins of the Irish. As the embarkation point of Celts who migrated to Ireland, Galiza developed the Castro culture of communities of Palloza stone roundhouses, surrounded by stone walls. When I visited Portugal in 1999, I saw this architecture preserved at Citania de Briteiros. Similarities to Irish art are apparent in these ancient Galician stone motifs.
The Galicians also bred the Gallego, the bay-colored mountain horse that is the ancestor of horses in Ireland and later Mexico, from which my buckskin Galaceno Weesa was descended. A good working horse, as well as sturdy riding horse.
neoghan ua niall 
