Fourth Annual Boston Gathering visits Co. Roscommon

By Ed Forry
June 15, 2017

Seated in the front row are Fr. Michael Finneran, Patty Kenny, and Fr. Peter Nolan who are surrounded by other members of the group. On their nine-day Crystal Travel tour of Ireland, the group visited Tipperary, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Galway, Clare, Mayo, Roscommon, Westmeath, Dublin, Cavan, Fermanagh, and Donegal. The fifth annual Boston Gathering tour is being planned for August 2018.

Joe Finnegan Park— Decades of faith in Port Norfolk are finally realized

By Jennifer Smith
June 1, 2017
Jennifer Smith

The 15-acre stretch along the banks of the Neponset River has long ridden the razor’s edge of becoming a dumping place for hazardous waste, home to gas tanks, a docking site for natural gas tankers, or adjacent to a proposed site of a stadium for the then-Boston Patriots.

Saluting Westport House in Mayo, a many-splendored delight

By BostonIrish.com... (not verified)
June 1, 2017

by Judy Enright
Special to the BIR

As most homeowners know, it can be very expensive to protect property from the ravages of time and weather.

So, imagine how costly it must be to maintain a huge 18th Century mansion such as Westport House in Westport, Co. Mayo, in the damp, coastal Irish weather.

The ingenuity of its owners back in the 1960s was the key to this old house’s salvation. Thanks to the insight and marketing skills of the late Jeremy Altamont, his wife Jennifer, and other members of the resident Browne family, Westport House became the first stately Irish home to be opened to the public. That was in 1960 and, since then, the house and grounds have welcomed more than four million visitors. And, Westport House has survived and flourished while many other historic Irish homes have been burned, demolished, or simply abandoned.



ADDITIONS
Over the years, the Browne family has enhanced the property’s appeal to all ages by adding a series of colorful, multi-generational attractions to the grounds. A ferris wheel, merry-go-round, miniature train, and fairway-type games and rides give Westport House somewhat of a carnival atmosphere, making the landmark a major tourist draw that adds millions annually to the town and the area’s economy.

And Westport House is a great place to spend the day. It’s great fun albeit a dichotomy in many ways. There is the frivolous atmosphere from games and rides on the extensive grounds that contrasts with the quiet elegance of a magnificent mansion chock full of priceless antiques and paintings from a gentler era of long ago.

Connecting With the Dancin’ Man, J. Michael Winward

By R.J. Donovan
June 1, 2017
R.J. Donovan

 J. Michael Winward is a man on the move, literally, an award-winning independent dance artist and choreographer with an active month ahead of him.  When not creating new work for himself and others, he maintains a busy private teaching schedule, is Project Lead at The Dance Complex in Cambridge, and dances as a member of the Peter DiMuro / Public Displays of Motion company.

June's Here and There

By Bill O'Donnell
June 1, 2017
Bill O'Donnell

  Living Through the Kennedy Years – I never gave much thought to John Kennedy before his razor-thin win in the1952 US Senate race against the better-known Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Kennedy, then a congressman, was 35, a war hero, handsome, well-financed, and a middling long shot who caught and passed a distracted Lodge, who was busy managing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential campaign. Kennedy was elected by a paltry 70,000 votes out of 2.4 million cast. It was a big victory, though, and the myth began to take on weight.

Lehane remains ‘stunned’ that people pay him well to do what he loves best

By Ryan Daly
June 1, 2017
Ryan Daly

LehaneLehaneDennis Lehane, the Dorchester native who writes for print, television, and the movies, and who calls his own work “a bizarre bastard child of pulp and literary influences,” launched his latest novel, “Since We Fell,” last week.

His decision to write as a female protagonist, Lehane says, presented some challenges—“There were moments when I was seeing through ‘guy goggles’ ”—but, for the most part, he says, he doesn’t feel hemmed in by gender or race when constructing his characters; identification comes with irreverence.

“The characters I understand are the outsiders,” Lehane says. “The square pegs in a round hole,” an archetype Lehane himself identifies with, saying it’s for this reason that people become writers.

‘The Irish Atlantic’ – Your Boston-Irish Heritage on Display

By John P. Rattigan
June 1, 2017
John P. Rattigan

The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is hosting a unique exhibition throughout the summer, the likes of which we will not see again for a long time. It is entitled “The Irish Atlantic - A Story of Famine, Migration and Opportunity” and it presents a chance to explore 175 years of the Irish in Boston from the founding of the Charitable Irish Society in Boston in 1737, through the famine relief efforts led by Capt. Robert Bennet Forbes, to a mass migration movement, the progression of community, cultural, and institutional building, and a rise in political power.

PROFILES IN COWARDICE Two Irish-American pols wage war against society’s weakest

By Peter F. Stevens
June 1, 2017
Peter F. Stevens

“Nothing is politically right that is morally wrong.” Those words were uttered some 170 years ago by Daniel O’Connell, who scared the proverbial bejeezus out of the British government in his battle for Irish Catholic rights and on behalf of his homeland’s poor. One can easily speculate what the man dubbed “The Liberator” and the “King of the Beggars” would have thought of two Irish-American pols whose own ancestors fled the Crown’s and Parliament’s callous, cruel treatment and views of Ireland’s poor.

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