Northern Ireland’s Antrim Coast offers delights and then some

By BostonIrish.com... (not verified)
April 27, 2017


By Judy Enright
Special to the BIR
If you’ve been to Ireland but haven’t visited Northern Ireland, another trip should definitely be on your agenda.
We recently visited the glorious Antrim Coast and stayed at a charming hotel – Beech Hill Country House Hotel - near Londonderry. There is so much to see and experience in the North that two nights there was not nearly enough.

GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
Probably the best-known attraction on the north coast is The Giant’s Causeway, managed by the National Trust, which also maintains some 200 buildings and outdoor places and supports the economy by employing hundreds of local residents.

The Causeway - chosen as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO In 1986 – consists of about 40,000 interlocking basalt rock columns resulting from volcanic eruptions many centuries ago. Most of the columns are six-sided, although some have four, five, seven, and eight sides. The tallest columns are about 39 feet and solid lava in the cliffs can be as thick as 92 feet in some places. This area, like the Cliffs of Moher in Co. Clare, is a known haven for a wide variety of seabirds.

According to one of many fanciful legends, the rock columns are all that remain from a causeway built by the Irish giant Finn MacCool so he could meet and fight the Scottish giant Benandonner. The legend probably began because there are identical volcanic rock columns (assumed to be part of the same ancient lava flow) at Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish island of Staffa across the North Channel.

PEI’s Ten Strings and a Goat Skin trio revel in savoring the island’s traditions

By Sean Smith
April 27, 2017
Sean Smith

“We started very young, so this vocation has really colored who and what we are,” says Ten Strings and a Goat Skin fiddler Rowen Gallant (left), shown with brother Caleb (center) and Jesse Périard at a concert during the trio’s recent New England tour. Sean Smith photo“We started very young, so this vocation has really colored who and what we are,” says Ten Strings and a Goat Skin fiddler Rowen Gallant (left), shown with brother Caleb (center) and Jesse Périard at a concert during the trio’s recent New England tour. Sean Smith photo

Atlantic Canada has made a strong and wide-ranging contribution to Celtic music, especially in recent decades, what with performers like Natalie MacMaster of Cape Breton, Matthew Byrne of Newfoundland and, from Prince Edward Island, Vishten and now the young trio Ten Strings and a Goat Skin: brothers Rowen and Caleb Gallant on fiddle and percussion, respectively, and guitarist Jesse Périard, all in their early 20s. (The Gallants are nephews of Lennie Gallant, an award-winning singer-songwriter and musician.)

Formed during its members’ high school years, “TSAAGS” showcases PEI’s fascinating amalgam of traditions (among them Irish, Scottish, and French) in its own inimitable fashion, blending contemporary material that includes tunes and songs by the Gallants and Périard with centuries-old ballads and instrumentals – all delivered with a robust joie d’vivre and precision. The trio has taken its music well beyond PEI’s shores to Boston and elsewhere in the US, and overseas to events such as France’s Festival Interceltique de L’orient and England’s Shrewsbury Folk Festival, while releasing two albums, including last year’s “Auprès du Poêle.”

Last month saw Ten Strings and a Goat Skin embark on a brief tour of New England that included performances at Boston College’s Gaelic Roots series and The Burren Backroom (their second visit there). During a pause in their travels, Rowen Gallant reflected on the band’s growth and its ties to PEI culture and tradition.

CD Reviews

By Sean Smith
April 27, 2017
Sean Smith

Kate Rusby, “Life in a Paper Boat” • In her two decades-plus career, Rusby has never shown an inclination to stay with the tried-and-true. Hailed for her interpretations of traditional songs, she incorporated contemporary material – from songwriters as varied as Richard Thompson, Frank O’Connor, Iris DeMent, The Kinks’ Ray Davies, and Pee Wee King – used brass arrangements as well as conventional acoustic instruments for backing, gradually changed her core cast of accompanists, and perhaps most importantly, embraced her songwriting ambitions.

Celtic music/dance events for May

By Sean Smith
April 27, 2017
Sean Smith

• Among other Irish/Celtic events of note this month, the Burren Backroom series will present a double-duo show on May 3: Matt and Shannon Heaton, with their flute/whistle-guitar/bouzouki instrumentals and richly harmonized songs, grounded in Irish tradition but also drawing on other sources, and Natalie Haas and Yann Falquet, whose repertoire includes Scottish, American, Scandinavian, and Quebecois music.

Dorchester’s Jennifer Ellis does her own thing well in “Bridges of Madison County”

By R.J. Donovan
April 27, 2017
R.J. Donovan

Jennifer Ellis as FrancescaJennifer Ellis as FrancescaIn Robert James Waller’s best-selling novel “The Bridges of Madison County,” a lonely war bride in 1960s Iowa has a three-day affair with a handsome National Geographic photographer who came to town to shoot the community’s covered bridges. 

Published in 1992, Waller’s work sold more than 60 million copies around the world. In 1995, a film version followed, starring Meryl Strep, Oscar-nominated as the housewife, and Clint Eastwood as the photographer.

With a lush score by Jason Robert Brown, a musical adaptation premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2013.  A year later, the show opened on Broadway and was subsequently nominated for multiple Tony Awards.

SpeakEasy Stage at the Calderwood Pavilion on Tremont Street presents the Boston premiere of the musical from May 6 to June 3.  Boston’s award-winning Jennifer Ellis stars as Francesca, the Italian war bride, opposite Christiaan Smith as Robert, the photographer.

Hostile climate for immigrants seen as threat to New England economy

By Colin A. Young, State House News Service
April 27, 2017
Colin A. Young, State House News Service

Immigrants are the underpinning of entire sectors of the region’s economy and have been the driving force behind Boston’s population and workforce growth since 1980. But now policy proposals from the White House threaten to upend entire sectors of the region’s economy, city officials and immigrant advocates said last week.

Two men: A GOP prince at the public trough, and Daniel O’Connell, ‘The King of the Beggars’

By Peter Stevens
April 27, 2017
Peter Stevens

Eric TrumpEric TrumpLike father, like son. This is not a matter of Republican vs. Democrat or Left, Center, or Right. In more dizzying ways than can be tallied, President Trump and his family are flouting any distinction between the family business and the nation’s welfare. “Welfare” is the key word here: The Trumps are bigger pigs at the public trough than the stereotypical Conservative target: Anyone receiving public assistance, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, or even Social Security. Case in point: Eric Trump and his latest Irish junket – all at taxpayer expense.

No rational person can deny that the Trumps, as with every president and first family are entitled to Secret Service protection. The Trumps, however, also feel entitled to use the Secret Service as a traveling Praetorian guard on business trips and that you, I, and all American taxpayers should foot the costs to put up Eric Trump’s protective detail in hotels and pay the bill for meals and every other cost that Eric and his brother, Donald, Jr., hand off to the government.

The good ship Faith can wander off course, but I remain aboard

By BostonIrish.com... (not verified)
April 27, 2017

From nothing to nothing; is it all a dream, swirling fantasies lacking substance? Are we just another species to come and go, links in a twisted chain of happenstance and chance? Does life matter or is it a bridge from nothing to nowhere? Are efforts to find a deeper meaning futile?

Is truth an illusion, spun from thin air with no more substance than a cloud? Does justice even exist? Or is it as transient as shifting sand? And what of love: Is it only the means to perpetuate a species? Are we adrift in a sea with no absolutes, one wave overcoming another in the eternal tides?

The Irish don’t matter much as the British deal with Brexit plan

By Joe Leary
April 27, 2017
Joe Leary

For over six centuries Ireland has suffered from its imperialistic neighbor. Located just across the Irish Sea, certain parts of the three cultures of Wales, Scotland, and England, collectively known as the British people, have considered Ireland their personal punching bag.

And now it is happening again.

It’s a good time to take the ‘Jump’

Ed Forry
By Ed Forry
April 27, 2017

Tourism IrelandTourism Ireland
It’s time to Jump into Ireland!

That’s the catch line this year in the marketing strategy of Tourism Ireland, the agency that promotes travel and tours to the Emerald Isle, both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The flight time from Boston to Dublin is “almost the same as from New York to Los Angeles,” according to the agency. In fact, with a strong tailwind across the Atlantic, the flight time is a little more than five hours, and this year, with a new Delta Airline daily flight, and added Aer Lingus planes from Logan, there are more seats than ever before, and the increased competition affords some real airfare bargains this summer.

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