‘The Gathering’ and ‘The People’s Parade’ give an added boost to St. Patrick’s Festival in Dublin

By BIR News Room
March 6, 2013

By Judy Enright
Special to the BIR

The St. Patrick Centre: Inside the St. Patrick Centre in Downpatrick, Co. Down, Northern Ireland. One of the many interesting interactive displays at the St. Patrick Centre in Downpatrick, Co. Down, Northern Ireland. The Centre is about 2 1/2 hours from Dublin.

Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration is always extraordinary and lasts for much longer than just a day. But as spectacular as the annual festival always is, this year’s event promises to be the biggest and best yet thanks to the tourist industry’s massive global promotion, “The Gathering Ireland 2013.”

The Dublin festival runs from March 14 to 18 and one of the many interesting new attractions this year is The People’s Parade, which will precede the annual parade. As many as 8,000 visitors have been invited to fill out applications and march on the 17th along a 2.5 km (a little over a mile) route through Dublin’s streets. If you’d like to be included in The People’s Parade, an application form is available on the website (stpatricksfestival.ie)

The Burren’s McCarthy takes pen in hand, result is ‘The Fiddlers of Inishbofin’

By Sean Smith
March 6, 2013
Sean Smith

A musical disaster en route to a picturesque island off the coast of Galway may seem an unlikely inspiration for a play, but these elements suited the imagination of long-time local Irish music personality Tommy McCarthy.

A West Clare native, McCarthy is well known as musician, promoter, and organizer, and as the owner of the popular Boston-area Irish pub The Burren in Somerville’s Davis Square and its sister pub, The Skellig in Waltham.

Old dances can inspire new ones

By Kieran Jordan
March 6, 2013
Kieran Jordan

As an Irish dancer, I work with traditional steps and rhythms that are hundreds of years old. Irish dance steps are usually not transcribed or written down, and there is little standardized terminology for the movements. Steps are passed on through live teaching, and are retained through practice and performance.  The repertoire lives in the dancer’s body and mind.

‘Little Bit of Ireland’ remembers Larry Reynolds: Reagle’s celebration plays March 15 - 17

By R. J. Donovan
March 6, 2013
R. J. Donovan

The atmosphere is always lively at “A Little Bit of Ireland,” Reagle Music Theatre’s annual celebration of Irish music, dance and lighthearted comedy.  This year’s 15th edition takes place March 15 - 17 at Robinson Theatre in Waltham.

An ombudsman will review Reporter’s coverage of the State Senate campaign

By BIR News Room
March 6, 2013

Spurred by state Rep. Linda Dorcena Forry’s announcement on Monday that she will be a candidate in a special election to replace state Sen. Jack Hart, who resigned from office last week, The Reporter has taken immediate steps to avoid political bias or impropriety, or the appearance thereof, in its coverage of the First Suffolk Senate race by hiring an ombudsman who will review that coverage for the duration of the campaign.

Deer Island memorial getting a second look

Ed Forry
By Ed Forry
March 6, 2013

The awful years of An Gorta Mor, the great hunger that ravaged Ireland in the middle of the 19th century, saw thousands of Irish board ships that took them across to America. Between 1847 and 1849 some 25,000 souls arrived in Boston Harbor on the “coffin ships,” which under an edict by the city’s health officials were steered to Deer Island, where the passengers would be examined, and if necessary, quarantined to prevent the spread of any communicable diseases from coming ashore.

Enshrining Patrick Cavanaugh

By Thomas O'Grady
March 3, 2013
Thomas O'Grady

By Thomas O’Grady
Special to the BIR

Recently, but not for the first time, I paid a visit to a roadside shrine (as it were) that remembers one of the iconic figures of so-called Bohemian Dublin of the 1940s and ’50s. Actually, the “shrine”—commemorating poet Patrick Kavanagh—has two separate but related parts. The earlier part is a bench dedicated by his friends on St. Patrick’s Day of 1968, the year after his death, fulfilling a wish Kavanagh had made a decade earlier in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin.”

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