BY SEAN SMITH
SPECIAL TO THE BIR

A union of two local folk/acoustic music series has created a new Boston-area venue whose offerings will include Celtic performers.

The Eliot Street Coffeehouse will kick off on Nov. 1 with Fellswater, a Massachusetts-based ensemble that plays music of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Canada. On Nov. 22, Eliot Street will feature The Bombadils, a Canadian quartet with a repertoire from Irish, Canadian, bluegrass, and old-timey traditions, along with their own material.

Leo Moran and Anthony Thistlethwaite are co-founders of two of the more beloved, manifestly Irish pop-rock bands of the past couple of decades: Guitarist-vocalist Moran was a charter member of The Saw Doctors, while the multi-instrumentalist (sax, mandolin, bass, etc.) Thistlethwaite helped establish The Waterboys. Both groups went on to achieve considerable critical and popular success, in Ireland and elsewhere, including the US.

BY GREG O’BRIEN
SPECIAL TO THE BIR

While Breandán Ó Caollaí never set out to make a big name for himself, he did just that with a blend of passion, perseverance, and Gaelic street smarts, all blessed from birth with a mouthful of a surname that most of us could never pronounce. This Dubliner, newly appointed Irish Consul General in Boston, has a resume of diplomatic service as long and fertile as the Ring of Kerry.

Can you imagine taking the floor of the United States Senate to debate the morality of a US strike on Syria, the merits of a farm bill, or the confirmation of a new US Supreme Court justice?

The Boston Irish Reporter, the region’s leading chronicler of all things Irish-American, will host “Boston Irish Honors 2013” on Fri., Oct. 25, in the main ballroom of Boston’s Seaport Hotel. This fourth annual event will draw an appreciative audience of some 400 top Boston business and civic leaders and officials of Boston’s many Irish social and cultural organizations. The event committee chairman is Edmund Murphy, Managing Director, Putnam Investments.