Irish Role In Australia Changes

By BostonIrish.com... (not verified)
November 2, 2012

Almost a century and a half has passed since those early convict ships filled with the Irish sailed from English prisons like Dartmoor and Portsmouth bound for Australia. The Fenians constituted the first wave in the 1860s of a British solution to a British problem: What to do with the overcrowded prisons filled with minor criminals, many of whom were Irish convicted of petty crimes amidst the anti-Irish fervor of the day? The answer was to create a prison colony in distant Australia to accommodate the criminal Irish, in a phrase: to “export” the problems at home.

Tags: 

As Abbey Theatre looks ahead, it is asking for help fulfilling its mission

By Ed Forry
November 2, 2012

Abbey Theatre in Boston: Director and CEO of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach Mac Conghail, Shelly O’Neill, the Irish actor Bosco Hogan, the Irish actress Brid Ni Neachtain, Tom O’Neill, and Bryan McMahon, chairman of the board of the Abbey Theatre.Abbey Theatre in Boston: Director and CEO of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach Mac Conghail, Shelly O’Neill, the Irish actor Bosco Hogan, the Irish actress Brid Ni Neachtain, Tom O’Neill, and Bryan McMahon, chairman of the board of the Abbey Theatre.Officials and two artists from The Abbey Theatre were in Boston last month for the launch of a support group for a charitable foundation to support the enterprise.

The Oct. 18 launch was held at the Beacon Street home of Tom O’Neill, who has been named the first president of the Boston Irish Abbey Theatre Association as the Dublin-based theatre approaches its 110th anniversary next year.

The Abbey Theatre Foundation is a New York-based 501 © (3) non-profit organization that supports the work of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland and in the United States.

Let’s call political debate winners by tallying the vote at ringside

By James W. Dolan
November 2, 2012
James W. Dolan

Saturday Night Live should come up with a new formula that combines debating and prizefighting as a way to give viewers a definite winner and loser instead of the endless “spinning” that occurs under the traditional debate formula. Both sides now claim to be victorious.

This process would at least provide some finality to the annoying speculation that now surrounds political debates. Something like what follows would make future contests more amusing:

As the wide world watches us, the Irish say, ‘Obama’s the one’

By Joe Leary
November 2, 2012
Joe Leary

BY JOE LEARY
SPECIAL TO THE BIR

The United States is the most powerful, resourceful nation in the world, so what goes on here is of intense interest to all other countries. especially Ireland.

In fact, there is so much attention paid to American elections in English-speaking Ireland that two organizations conducted polls of its citizens to determine who they would choose (if they could) between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

The results are quite interesting.

Curiouser & Curiouser: Mitt Romney as our Shanachie-in-Chief?

By BY PETER F. STEVENS
November 2, 2012
BY PETER F. STEVENS

by Peter F. Stevens
Bear with me here, but I’m wondering if somewhere, somehow on the Romney family tree, an Irish branch stretches out. Why is that? Whether or not Mitt Romney wins the Oval Office this month, a question will remain. Who is Willard Mitt Romney? Boston Globe contributor Tom Keane chides the Obama camp for deriding Mitt as a fool. Keane is right – Mitt is no fool. Renee Loth, once the Globe’s editorial page editor, views Mitt as a coreless delegator who will allow running-mate Paul Ryan to shred the nation’s safety net.

Boston Irish Reporter Endorsement: Forward with Obama

Ed Forry
By Ed Forry
November 2, 2012


If only every decision in life were this easy.

President Barack Obama has earned re-election with an impressive first term that will come to be viewed as one of the most productive, progressive, and — ultimately— successful periods in the history of the modern US presidency. Obama has done so in spite of an inherited economic crisis that would have upended lesser leaders and in the face of a Republican Congress whose sole reason for existence over the last two years has been to undermine the president and his initiatives at every turn. The GOP has failed, the president has prevailed, and we enthusiastically endorse his re-election next Tuesday.

Tags: 

Lehane takes on the Roaring Twenties in new novel

By Bill Forry, Managing Editor
November 2, 2012
Bill Forry, Managing Editor

“South Boston punk becomes a Florida crime boss.” That’s how one newspaper boiled down Dennis Lehane’s latest novel. Sure, that’s one way of summarizing “Live by Night,” the Roaring Twenties gangster page-turner that will also be a big-studio film some day soon, but any sting that Lehane might suffer from the blunt summary is soothed by the source: The New York Times Book Review noting that his latest novel has debuted at No. 8 on the paper’s bestseller list.

Remembering Larry Reynolds, fiddler: ‘He never, ever got tired of the music’

By Sean Smith
November 2, 2012
Sean Smith

Larry Reynolds: Photo by Bill BrettLarry Reynolds: Photo by Bill BrettHe was the big, amiable fellow from Galway who worked with wood in his profession and in his music, and who seemed to know, personally, just about anybody who’d ever so much as touched a fiddle, accordion or flute, or sang an Irish song.
In fact, Larry Reynolds knew, and touched the lives of, so many people that there was literally no room for all of them to come and say goodbye to him.
Reynolds died on Oct. 3, leaving behind an extraordinary six-decade legacy as musician, organizer, and pioneer in the Boston Irish music scene. The Waltham resident, a carpenter by trade and fiddler by inclination, was 80 years old.

From his prison cell, Bobby Sands made the world take notice

By BIR News Room
October 4, 2012

by Stephen M. Pingel
Special to the BIR

Following is the eighth in a series of articles on individuals who had a substantial impact on civic life in Ireland in the 20th century.

Bobby Sands
1954-1981

Beginning in the late 1960s, many of the most dramatic events in Ireland over the following two decades or so took place in the North, most of them tied to The Troubles.

Pages

Subscribe to Boston Irish RSS