Ireland’s Minister of State for the Diaspora and International Development, Ciarán Cannon T.D., was in Boston last month for a two-day program of consultations with the Irish diaspora in which he met with representatives of more than 20 Irish-American organizations as part of the preparation for the Irish government’s new diaspora policy.

He also visited some of the six Irish community organizations that receive funding from the government to provide legal, welfare, and cultural activities to the diaspora in New England.

Michael Shea, 55, at right, was raised in the small Western Massachusetts town of Blandford before graduating from Stonehill College in 1985.  After obtaining a law degree, he practiced in Boston until moving to Ireland with his wife Margaret (a native of County Leitrim) in 1998.  He has lived in Dublin since arriving in Ireland, and recently sat down to explain how he came to write a book about the Royal Canal, the stretch of water linking Dublin to the Shannon River and made famous in Brendan Behan’s song “The Auld Triangle.”

Patrick Radden Keefe grew up in the heart of Boston’s Irish community— the Adams Corner section of Dorchester. His dad Frank— whose great-grandparents were immigrants from Donegal—was a regular at the Eire Pub.

But despite the name and pedigree, Keefe wasn’t raised like some of his Irish-American cousins who came of age as the Troubles roiled their ancestral homeland. He wasn’t regaled with rebel ballads on the Saturday Irish Hour. No plastic paddy, this one.