Fine Gael, Fianna Fail in 2016 – That is a headline that a respected member of Fianna Fail is pushing, and the sentiment for change can be heard from other Soldiers of Destiny front liners.

The next election must be held before April 3 of next year, and Taoiseach and FG party leader Enda Kenny will lead and contest that election. The major question, looking ahead, is who would be a suitable junior partner with Fine Gael?

Up front, Fine Gael has said that they will not form a coalition government with Sinn Fein. Labour, aside from the bumps in the relationship, appears not to be anywhere close to winning enough seats to continue in coalition after the election. Early projections look for Labour to fall some 20-25 seats short of a 79-vote ruling majority when joined with Fine Gael.

Into this pre-election conjecturing season comes Fianna Fail’s finance spokesman and future party leader candidate, Michael McGrath, who is saying aloud for the first time that his party should be willing to swallow its pride and join with Fine Gael, even as junior partners in the coalition. It has been 90 years since the Irish civil war and reconciliation in the form of a national front, left-right coalition would be a powerful force for a new clarity of purpose and a refocusing of attention on domestic economic problems, growth, and long-term stability.

Political reality reflects a sharp drop in support for the coalition, and increased support for Independents, “pointing to difficulties in forming any government following the election which was not a Fianna Fail-Fine Gael alliance,” reports the Irish Times.

There are pitfalls in a FG-FF coalition, but history “has shown that two parties of roughly equal size have never gone into coalition before and might offer a different prospect.” (Stephen Collins, Irish Times) And it might prove to the Irish electorate, if proof is needed, that Fianna Fail’s recent past is not necessarily its future.

Ten Top Destinations in Ireland – TripAdvisor’s recently published with few surprises a list of its top 10 spots to visit. We have been to all of them, some on many occasions, and few would argue the choices. The list begins with Killarney and follows with: Dublin, Dingle, Galway, Donegal Town, Westport, Cork, Sligo, Doolin, and Tralee.

Killarney, everyone’s favorite. Can’t forget the Lakes and honeymooning at the Hotel Europe; Dublin, so many memories, including the premiere of “My Left Foot” and the Gresham party with Christy’s family; Dingle, our first trip around the peninsula in dense fog and a visit to the then Boston-owned Benner Hotel and to Doyle’s;  Galway, the capital of the West, dinner on the top floor of the Great Southern overlooking the Bay at sunset; Donegal Town, walking inside Donegal Castle, the old homestead showing its age; Westport, Knock, and a luxe afternoon tea at Ashford Castle; Cork, where I first met Christy Brown in the Oyster Bar, and shopping at Quill’s for Aran sweaters; Sligo, when I attended a Boston Ireland Ventures board meeting and chatted with our Galway & Derry board allies; Doolin, Gus O’Connor’s Pub amidst the trad music and the carefree backpackers, walking at the stone edge of the Atlantic and then on to the Arans for a ceili and a dark walk home to our guest house; Tralee, the gateway over the Slieve Mish Mountains to the home of my maternal grandfather in Castlemaine, Tadgh Flaherty.

While age and slow going keep us from getting back to Ireland too often, the memories, just scratched above, warm us during the New England winters. We’re thankful, in our own way, for both.

Let’s Look At The Record – The economist and columnist Paul Krugman, despite his Pulitzer and his Nobel Prize in Economics, isn’t the favorite of the conservatives who read. Too much truth? In an Irish Times column last month he laid to rest some of the “pants-on-fire” falsehoods about the six plus years of clarity, cleanup, and progress highlighting Barack Obama’s tenure.

First, Krugman discussed the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare,  and found it working, and quite well. Despite some 50 repeal attempts by an inept GOP leadership, the ACA is attracting more health coverage clients and has sharply reduced the number of uninsured while costing substantially less than expected. Obamacare was also predicted to be a jobs-killer, but since the ACA went fully into effect, the US economy has added an average of 237,000  private sector jobs per month. Remember Texas Sen. Ted Cruz calling Obama Care “an abomination.”

And despite the horrendous hand he was dealt, Obama’s administration has had unemployment rates lower than President Reagan had during his time in office. And while Republicans are screaming about the need for new gas and oil pipelines, domestic oil production has soared and oil imports have plunged since Obama took office.

But, as Krugman reminds us, there were very few mentions of the Obama record in office when the busload of GOP presidential hopefuls were on stage` “debating.”  Wonder why!

Boston Olympics Likely Heading to Los Angeles – No gloating, no “high fives” as Boston Olympics 2024 folded its tent and headed back to State Street, Federal Street, and their real estate empires. I am happy to see it go. As Boston City Councillor Michele Wu said in what could be the “Boston No” mantra, “Boston doesn’t need the Olympics to prove we are a world-class city.” No, indeed, we do not.

The flaws in the plan and the muddled pipeline between its supporters and the people of Boston when it came to the sticky numbers and commitments – and liability – was not something that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh could abide. These high-living mandarins called the International Olympic Committee and their Beantown Brothers, who were sincere if not tough enough with the visiting cheerleaders, tried. But hand signals and eye blinks, especially on multi-billion dollar mega-projects, went out with Lomasney.

The marriage, or rather, the troubled courtship between the Hub and the IOC was a tough fit from the outset. Let’s move on to bigger and better things – schools, public transit and in-town housing that folks without trust funds can live in. Now that’s a legacy.

Knock Airport Welcomes First US Charter – Some three decades after the inaugural flights from Mayo’s Knock Airport, the dream of Monsignor James Horan, the airport welcomed its first ever chartered pilgrimage flight from North America last month. The flight, from JFK Airport in New York to the shrine, was headed up by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, and Brian O’Dwyer, International Chairman of Ireland West Airport, or Knock as it is usually identified. Welcoming the pilgrims from America was Taoiseach Enda Kenny.

Each year the Knock Shrine receives some 1.6 million visitors. It is envisioned that with the introduction of charter pilgrimage flights, their number will increase and grow to at least three million in coming years. The shrine and the airport were conceived and came into being following years of fundraising, politicking, and outreach by Monsignor Horan. The Mayo-born cleric died at age 75 shortly after the airport was completed in May 1986.

Movies With A Local Twist – At least three major films of local interest are finished, in production, or, as the Hollywood types like to say, in development. Two of them will be released before the end of the year.

The first is the heavily anticipated “Black Mass,” the story behind the story of how Southie gangster James “Whitey” Bulger and the Irish mob co-opted each other as the FBI zeroed in during its investigation of the city’s Italian mobsters. Produced by Warner Brothers and starring Johnny Depp as Whitey, it is set to open in Boston and worldwide on Sept. 18.

The second is “Spotlight,” the story of how the Boston Globe investigated and published in early 2002 a series by its Spotlight Team on clergy abuse in the Catholic Church. Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law resigned in December of that year and the following spring the paper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its work. The Globe story’s cast includes Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams, and is scheduled for release in the Boston area in early November and worldwide on November 20.

The last of the three films with a strong Boston hook is actually two movies about the Boston Marathon bombings with one (called “Patriots Day”) that stars Mark Wahlberg, and a second, “Boston Strong,” that is reportedly in the development stages and starring Ben’s Affleck’s brother Casey.

Update: The Berkeley Balcony Tragedy – Clodagh Cogley, seriously injured in the California balcony collapse, returned to Ireland in early August and is in rehabilitation working to recover from her injuries, Clodagh joined Sean Fahey, Conor Flynn, and Jack Halpin, who had all recovered sufficiently to go home to Ireland.  Three of the seven students injured in the Berkeley balcony collapse, Aoif Beary, Niall Murray, and Hannah Waters, are receiving care and treatment in a US rehabilitation center.

A number of  funds are being set up and administered in Ireland. The Irish Consulate in Boston (617-267-9330)  may be able to provide Irish addresses for fundraising to benefit the injured students.

What’s Going On in the Health-Starved North – There is something wildly incomprehensible going on within the Northern Ireland health service. This government-run enterprise, less a few unaffiliated hospitals, has had a near historic breakdown that has nothing to do with the paucity of gurneys used to transport non-ambulatory patients from one hospital station to another. And it has little or nothing to do with the quality of medical care. Doctors and nurses in Ireland, north and south, are generally spot-on.
What confounds this observer of the past several years is that medical appointments with trained and competent health services in the North – that’s PCPs, specialists and senior status physicians – are being cancelled more and more. This means that patients and hospitals and the doctors who staff them are telling each other they cannot keep scheduled appointments.

Last year patients failed to turn up for almost 150,000 certified appointments. On the hospital side, in a failed process the health service describe as “disappointing,” more than 168,000 appointments were cancelled by hospitals across all five health trusts. In round numbers that translates into more than 300,000 cancelled medical appointments in a province that has, at last count, 1.85 million residents.

The total annual costs of this “Alice in Wonderland” misadventure (while welfare costs are being targeted for substantial cuts) to the British government is over $25 million. Add to this rescheduling, lost time for medical specialists, longer waiting times, etc. and you have a flat out crisis.

Is anybody in Whitehall or Stormont listening?
Heaney’s Hopeful Epitaph on Headstone – Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who died on Aug. 30, 2013, left something to lift our spirits and tell us a bit about his view of life. On a headstone recently inscribed near his Bellaghy, Co. Derry, birthplace his epitaph reads: “So walk on air against your better judgement.” 

Professor Fran Brearton, director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen University Belfast, talked about the line of poetry taken from the final stanza of “The Gravel Walks” that now adorns the Heaney gravesite: “It is about being able to see beyond your moment. He says it is a reminder to himself about what poetry can do.”

I think he was, at least partly, talking about putting a bounce in our step.

Maybe, as people do in front of Yeats’s epitaph in the parish churchyard in Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo, citizens and tourists will pause in that plot of land in Co. Derry to stop, to ponder the hopeful, expectant words Heaney wrote for himself, and for us. Maybe.
Former Provo Official Arrested as ‘Dissident’ – From Gerry Adams to Martin McGuinness and other Sinn Fein opponents of the breakaway “dissidents,” there is no warm house for those who do not follow the lead in condemning the rump Republicans who fight on for Irish unity, Brits out, and against the peace process. They are the enemy and are not welcome in Sinn Fein, but an arrest last month of Kevin Hannaway, says the journalist Ed Moloney, is a clear signal that the “significance of the allegation is twofold.”

Hannaway’s father and Gerry Adams’s mother were brother and sister, which makes Kevin and Gerry first cousins. Moloney says the fact that Hannaway, a close relative of Adams, the chief architect of the Sinn Fein/IRA peace process, has been accused of being in sympathy with the enemies of the peace process is likely to be a source of considerable embarrassment and political discomfort for the Sinn Fein president.

The other important feature of Kevin Hannaway’s arrest “is that he is one of the most respected survivors of the Provo IRA’s founding fathers,” says Moloney. This is a tested veteran of the war with Britain and it should send a red-hot alert to Sinn Fein/IRA that some of their most trusted operatives are unhappy and possibly moving into the dissident orbit. Not good news for anyone.

RANDOM CLIPPINGS
Former Irish Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’Loan went on BBC’s Radio 4 to tell listeners that peace in the North is “fragile” as she delivered a broadside against current British government agencies for overlooking endemic post-traumatic stress disorder in NI. … On Sept. 28, 1960, at Fenway Park, Ted Williams delighted me and 10,453 other spectators by hitting his 521st home run in his last MLB at-bat. … Rory McIlroy is king of the Green but he is touting another northerner, Belfast’s Tom McKibbin, who just won the under 12 world championship in the US. … Irish clothing retailer Primark is opening its first US store in Boston this month. … A new political party in Ireland, Renua, is promising major tax cuts for self-employed. … Fifty years ago a newspaper strike in Dublin closed 46 printing houses and the papers for ten weeks. … The AOH says that CNN, still looking for an identity, is in a time warp looking at Irish history. … The new Google maps somehow omitted the giant Goliath crane from its recent mapping. … the Orange Order is unhappy that easyJet warned passengers about the July 12 “travel disruptions.”

A lovely lady, Mary Keane, John Bs wife who took John’s place at their pub in Listowell on many occasions, has passed on at 86. … Ryanair, in a new milestone, carried 10 million passengers in July. … Months after a Galway waitress at An Pota Café recognized a customer who had left his disability money by mistake, she was able to return his cash. Happy Days. … The Irish holiday home industry remained strong even through the recent terrible weather. And, sadly, the number of Irish home repossessions has reached 60 a week. … Sean Fitzpatrick, who lent himself 100 million euros from his bank, Anglo Irish, is trying to get his ongoing trial adjourned. Fat chance.

Tea sales in Britain are dropping and retailers are blaming coffee and green tea. … Old pal Dr. Frank Costello, and Dr. Gerard MacAtasney are collaborating on a book on the global impact of the Irish Famine. … Good to see that Ace Atkins, the successor to Robert Parker in the ongoing series of Spenser novels, has been seamless in continuing to use Parker’s references and mentioning some musicians from early novels. Atkins spent Page 200 in his “Cheap Shot” Spenser novel  weaving the late pianist Dave McKenna and the Copley’s Oak Bar into his story line. As with Parker, the reference worked well in highlighting local color. … Support your local food pantries and meals for the homeless.