Aran Isles

Celebrating Tim Robinson

2012-05-16T03:03:50Z

By Richard Marsh

I've always loved maps. I can't think about travelling or a new place without a map, not always to find my way but more usually to try to get a picture in my head of context and the shape of things. I recall my delight on a visit to the Zanskar Valley in the Himalayas where the only maps available in Stanford's emporium were US Surveys with whole patches carrying warnings that, in these areas, the maps could be out by 5,000 feet in elevation and 5 miles awry in other dimensions. It didn't seem to bother the locals that they were living somewhere which hadn't yet been properly mapped, but I was entranced by it.

But not all maps are about defining context. The maps of Connemara, Aran and the Burren made by Tim Robinson are an entirely different proposition.

The fractured limestone landscapes of Western Ireland, and in particular, Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Burren are the subject of Robinson's cartographic and literary output. A Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-educated mathematician, Robinson brings to his task linguistic diligence, an inquisitive spirit, and the capacity to translate and communicate the abstract into his maps and writings and make it wonderful. Last year, my partner Ro and I explored the islands of Inis Meán and Inis Oirr, clambering over dry-stone walls, walking down ancient boreens accompanied by Tim Robinson's increasingly dog-eared map. Monochrome, with the greyness of the landscape itself, and covered with hints and gifts, here a dolmen, there a blow-hole. And, on one memorable afternoon in the spring sun sat on the stones of an ancient fortress with the sea a distant but insistent drone and found the music of a flute that brought the first cuckoo to an eerie duet.

This is fractal cartography that describes the intersection of geology, human activity, the ascent of the human spirit in myth-making and story-telling and the ever-present sea. The maps guide the traveller to look harder, listen longer and take time to absorb his/her surroundings.

Robinson's two volume work The Stones of Aran is a loving, irritating, learned, experienced account of the largest of the Aran Islands, Inis Mor in which, so it seems, the history, geology and mythological landscape of every red kelp-clad field is described and laid out to view. But this is very different from the writing of urban flaneurs or psychogeographers, though no less personally experienced or etched into well-worn shoe-leather. I first came to these islands with my father who had seen Robert Flaherty's 1934 film, Man of Aran and, with that etched on his childhood memory had always wanted to visit.

Tim Robinson's recent work has been a triology of books of essays distilling a lifetime's learning and engagement with Connemara. The latest Connemara:The Last Pool of Darkness, is a thing of great beauty and includes an essay on the time that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent in the village of Rosroe. Not only is it a wonderful description of place, time and biography; the mathematician Robinson manages a masterful articulation of the development of Wittgenstein's thinking from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. There are few writers who could achieve this. Robinson maps more landscapes than those of Connemara and Aran, he maps the intersections of landscape and imagination that belong to all of us.

Tim Robinson

Cottage

2012-04-21T18:14:30Z

"The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. . . ."

2012-02-11T17:43:14Z

Photo: Leonard Doyle

Extract: JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

New York Times Published: February 10, 2012

He was blind in one eye and couldn't see especially well out of the other, wore dark-framed, vaguely government-issue glasses, but they're lowered, he's turning his head and squinting over the top of them. He reads from "The Portable James Joyce," my mother's Penguin paperback from college. He's holding it close to his face. me the famous last paragraph, "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. . . ." Nothing of the actual language remained with me, except, years later, reading the story at school, there was something like déjà vu at the part where Joyce first says the snow was "falling faintly," then four words later says it was, "faintly falling." The slight overconspicuousness of that had stuck, as I suppose he intended.

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Separated at Birth, the Burren and the Aran Islands

2011-07-10T13:31:26Z

The Burren, a rocky wilderness in western Ireland, is a region of ancient magic and infinite strangeness The cliffs of Moher Nearly halfway up the west coast of Ireland, at about 53 degrees north, nine degrees west, there stands the presiding symbol of one of Europe's most peculiar places. The thing is peculiar enough in itself, being an ungainly megalithic structure, five millennia old, that stands there all alone and looks to me, especially in silhouette, suggestively like a witch's supper table. It is the Poulnabrone dolmen, and it is a proper symbol of the Burren, a place of infinite strangeness. The Burren is an indeterminate limestone region of about 100 square miles, sparsely inhabited, with small towns and villages only at its edges, and a landscape that can seem, at first sight, forbiddingly unwelcoming - stern bald hills, apparently devoid of life or colour, crossed only by a few narrow roads, and with nothing much to see, so the map suggests, but tombs and ruins. But wait. The witches of Poulnabrone stir their cauldron and the Burren reveals itself to be a place of paradoxical magic. As the clouds shift, those grey hills are suddenly tinged with mauve or violet, those uninviting lanes blossom with gentians, an ancient history comes to life and almost everywhere you go you will stumble across the geological wonders that have made these 100 square miles celebrated across the world. Stumble is the right word, for the Burren's most famous features are the immense platforms of limestone slabs that figure on the jackets of books and travel brochures. Patterned with crevasses, they can be treacherous to the unwary. These huge expanses of empty stone vary from pavements that might almost be man-made to wide piles of rubble, and there are patches of them throughout the Burren, sometimes noisily attended by tourist coaches and hiking parties, more often weirdly silent. The Irish name for the region, An Boireann, means simply "a stony place", and probably the most famous quotation about it comes from the Cromwellian general Edmund Ludlow, who said it had "not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him". Summit fever Send out the speedboat, we need more champagne! This is karst country, akin to the limestone highlands of Slovenia or the Mendip hills of Somerset, riddled with caves and potholes, sparse of foliage, conducive to poetic legend. It has its own jargon - the big slabs themselves are called clints, the cracks between are grykes, and the big boulders that stand here and there, left behind when the ice of the Ice Age melted, are properly known as erratics. There is a pub in the middle of the Burren, called Cassidy's, which overlooks a wide green declivity: it seems a kindly pastoral prospect but is really a geological hiccup called a turlough, and every now and then water floods into it from hidden springs, turning it in a matter of hours into a lake. That's the stuff Burren legends are made of, like the cave in the north they call the Cave of the Wild Horses, because once upon a time a herd of mustangs suddenly emerged from it and laid waste to the country around. But it is not all turloughs, caverns and grykes, because all over this place of secrets a sweet sub-alpine flora flourishes. Everywhere, subtle touches of colour, in between the sterile rocks, show you where the gentians lurk, or the wild orchids, Lady's Smock, milkwort and irises and honeysuckles. The Burren is like one vast botanical rock garden but infinitely subtler than most, and minus all labels. There are wild goats about, too, and pine martens, seals in the sea, kestrels in the air, and in some of the waters a kind of water-beetle so rare it has been found only at five sites on earth - one in Sweden, the other four here. . . . There are also walls, miles and miles of walls. The place is criss-crossed with dry-stone walls, on flat ground as on hillsides, walls of such complex fascination that they amount to a kind of composite art form. Where do all the Burren walls go? Where do they start? How old are they? What are they for? They may be just piled together any-old-how, they may be carefully patterned, and they have been lovingly analysed by scholars and artists alike. Some are age-old, some were probably piled together by a farmer's bulldozer the week before last, and they are a constant reminder that the Burren, far from being a desert or a wilderness, has been the home of humanity for longer than history. The place is instinct with human allusions, often curious, sometimes unique, from the bones of the 33 people buried beneath the Poulnabrone dolmen to the shades of the German U-boat crews who, locals say, came ashore during the second world war to draw water from the holy well of Gleninagh. There are supposed to be only about 1,700 people living permanently today in the Barony (yes, the Barony!) of the Burren; many thousands, though, have lived and worked there, from the Stone Age until now and, almost into modern times, they were governed by the local clans and chieftains, O'Louchlins, O'Connors, O'Briens, living by their own immemorial laws, honouring their own bardic traditions. Since then, famines, wars, evictions and economics have all conspired to lay waste to the Burren's population but not to destroy its sense of continuity. Those ageless walls help, of course, and so do the countless miscellaneous lumps of masonry, once tower houses, villages, shrines, monasteries or churches, which hauntingly litter this countryside. Customs and allusions die hard here. On islets off the coast, I am told, the odd farmer still makes a raft of seaweed, and poles it ashore to use as fertiliser. In taverns fiddles, flutes, accordions and whistles still play the old music. Cassidy's, that pub beside beside the turlough, was not always a pub: it was a British army post long ago, and then a station of the Irish garda, and its walls are full of mementos of a man from down the road, Michael Cusack, who was the original of the Citizen, Joyce's anonymous and curmudgeonly character in Ulysses. Christianity came to the Burren at least a thousand years ago and the most substantial of its monuments is the ruined abbey of Corcomroe, near the northern coast. It was founded by Cistercians in the 13th century and is now evocatively isolated in its silent valley but those monks knew what they were doing when they dedicated it to Holy Mary of the Fertile Rock. . . . For, despite tinges of desolation and touches of the forlorn, the Burren has been wonderfully creative - fertile in a wider sense, a sense that needs no rafted seaweed to maintain it. Artists and writers have long been inspired by it, the ancient music has been sustained by it, eccentrics and enthusiasts of every kind have pursued their convictions in a place where the extraordinary is so often the norm. Think of it! The minute village of Kilfenora has its own 10th-century cathedral, and its titular bishop is the Pope. Inside the grykes of the limestone platforms, land winkles live. The glue fungus, I am assured, is almost unique to the Burren, but the dear old slow worm showed up for the first time only in 1971. Tolkien's Gollum, they say, was conceived in a Burren cavern, and the longest free-hanging stalactite ever discovered in Europe hangs in one of them. Many a rare bumble bee frequents this countryside, 70 sorts of snails prefer it. At Lisdoonvarna, they hold an annual mating festival, where young men and women are united under the equivocal blessing of the Burren. So whichever way you leave this place, you will be taking with you, in your mind, a jumble of paradox and peculiarity. If the strangeness mixture has all been a little too rich for you, you can always go home via the Cliffs of Moher, a last astonishment of the Burren. There you may look down the sheer 200 feet of cliffside and see to your relief, far, far below, the very ordinary Atlantic. For information on visiting the Burren, see www.burrennationalpark.ie and www.discoverireland.com Read more here

Stones of Aran, a NY Review of books "masterpiece"

2011-06-11T21:52:58Z

Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (New York Review Books Classics) by Tim Robinson">Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (New York Review Books Classics) by Tim Robinson

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Inis Meáin, through the peephole, 1973

2010-12-23T21:25:41Z

Inis Meáin, Aran Islands, Ireland. 1973 from Brendan F. on Vimeo.

A short film on life in Inishmaan (Inis Meáin) in the early 1970's. Inishmaan (meaning "middle island") is the middle of the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland. It is part of County Galway in the province of Connacht.

Inis Meáin, Aran Islands, Ireland 1973

2010-12-23T21:16:41Z

Aileen's is the perfect wave

2010-11-25T18:58:45Z

LORNA SIGGINS, Marine Correspondent The Irish Times

IT IS a magnet for surfers, a nightmare for rescue agencies, and now it has attracted the attention of NUI Galway (NUIG) researchers.

A team of geoscientists at NUIG have found that north Clare's infamous surf break, Aileen's, is the nearest thing to the "perfect wave".

What's more, the NUIG team has applied computer modelling and physical analysis to determine how Aileen's regularly reaches wave heights of over nine metres (29.5 feet). National seabed survey data shows the full extent of the jagged shallow rocky reef that helps to create it.

Aileen's, which breaks below the 200-metre-high Cliffs of Moher in north Clare some four kilometres southwest of Doolin, has become a key location on the world surfing map, and was captured in the award-winning Waveriders film documentary by Joel Conroy in 2008.

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Local surfer John McCarthy is credited with naming it after the nearest headland Aill na Searrach or "leap of the foals" - named for the seven Tuatha Dé Danann who transformed themselves into young horses and bolted over the edge of the precipice.

The steep face that Aileen's is best known for allows for high surfboard speed. It also creates a vortex or "barrel" in which the most experienced surfers love to ride - using the tow-in surfing technique where a surfer on a lead-weighted board is towed behind a jet ski and whipped into the wave.

The Californian Malloy brothers, featured in Waveriders, have compared it to "Jaws" or "Pe'ahi", a surf break that is reported to be able to reach heights of 36 metres off the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Keen surfing "dude" and NUIG earth and ocean sciences undergraduate Alexander Hart initiated the research project, working with supervisor Dr Martin White of the earth and ocean sciences department, PhD students Siddhi Joshi and Damien Guihen and post-doctoral researcher Garrett Duffy.

Dr White says mapping with the multi-beam acoustic seabed profiler on the Marine Institute's research vessel, Celtic Voyager, was combined with Mr Hart's own wave modelling - a single-beam system mounted on a raft which was towed out in a small craft.

"It is the first time that Aileen's was studied in this way, though we have the evidence from surfers who recognise it is one of Europe's top locations," Dr White said., The Irish Times

At last the west awakes to broadband

2010-04-30T04:05:22Z

Dún Aonghasa on Inis Mór in the Aran Islands. The islands have already been covered by the National Broadband Scheme, which is scheduled for completion by September.

Despite criticisms, the roll-out of the National Broadband Scheme is providing vital business links in remote areas, writes SUZANNE LYNCH

FOR SEÁN O'Flannagáin broadband access is more than simply a luxury. The former investment banker left Merrill Lynch earlier this year to set up a small investment management firm, Kinsale Capital Management. Based between Dublin and Inisheer, the smallest of the Aran Islands off the west coast, O'Flannagáin depends on high-speed internet access to successfully run his business.

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"When we decided to set up the business, we knew that dependable, high-speed broadband was imperative," he says. "It wasn't just a matter of having access to e-mail and the internet, we're increasingly using cloud computing so we need to access data remotely." Much of the firm's work involves the use of web-enabled applications. Because it works with global banks, it needs to have secure and speedy access to finance programs.

The arrival of wireless broadband to the remote islands in November last year allowed O'Flannagáin to base his business in Inisheer.

He eventually hopes to work full-time from the area.

Kinsale Capital Management is exactly the kind of business activity the Government is hoping to encourage through the National Broadband Scheme (NBS). Following years of under-investment in telecommunications infrastructure, the Government announced a search for a provider for the scheme in 2007, with the aim of addressing the "digital divide" between urban and rural areas.

Mobile operator 3 Ireland won the contract to implement and operate the scheme, which required it to deliver the service to areas of the country not covered by other commercial operators. Under the terms of the contract, 3 is required to provide wholesale access to any other authorised operator that wants to serve premises in the NBS area.

The investment has been costed at €223 million, with the Government providing almost €80 million. Customers are charged €19.99 per month for a 15GB data allowance plus a once-off connection fee of €49.

Under the terms of the contract, the roll-out is to be completed by the end of September - but is it on schedule?

3's Damien Gallagher says he has high hopes that 100 per cent broadband will be delivered by deadline. "Approximately 60 per cent of the target areas are now covered. At this point we are confident that all areas will be covered on schedule," he says.

Some of the areas that have already been covered include the Aran Islands, which was connected in November; Fanad and Malin in Donegal, connected in October 2009; Rathmore and Knocknagoshel in Kerry, which received broadband under the NBS in June last year; and most recently, Lettermore and Roundstone in Galway, which were connected earlier this month.

But while the NBS looks set to be on target, the scheme has attracted criticism. Under the terms of the scheme, 3 will provide a minimum download speed of 1.2Mbps up to 5Mbps, and an upload speed of 200Kbps to 1.8Mbps. The operator has also committed to implementing two upgrades within the next two years. To many, the speeds are insufficient.

Ireland Offline has argued that the 3G technology offered by the scheme is not considered "broadband" by most EU and OECD regulators. The group argues that due to its low speeds and high latency the technology associated with it will be unsuitable for many common broadband uses.

The Alternative Operators in the Communications Market group has also called for greater emphasis on the central role played by Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) in providing broadband to rural areas.

Chairman Ronan Lupton says that MANs, which are high-capacity networks around urban areas to which operators can connect, are vital for local users, particularly businesses, and should be supported by the Government as such.

Similarly, while supportive of the National Broadband Scheme, the Telecommunications and Internet Federation (the Ibec group that represents Irish telecoms providers) has concerns about the limitations of the scheme and has warned the Government about the level of future investment needed. Earlier this month the group said that it could cost up to €2.5 billion to build a new national multi-platform access network.

For those who have been connected through the National Broadband Scheme, there are no such concerns. According to Máire Ui Mhaoláin of Comhar na nOileán, the Aran Islands-based development body with responsibility for allocating funding to local businesses, broadband connectivity has given a huge economic boost to the area.

"There has been a great response from users, both individuals and businesses. We have seen a surge in applications for website development grants from local businesses, keen to get online."

The arrival of broadband has also helped Comhar na nOileán itself, which is exploring the idea of developing video conferencing facilities between the islands.

The potential economic dividends of broadband access cannot be overstated, says economist Jim Power.

In a recent research paper, he argued that, in Co Mayo, for example, if high-quality and affordable broadband were to result in the creation of one new small business employing 10 people in each of the electoral districts covered by the NBS, it could result in a net wage injection of €26.9 million into the local economy.

For small business owners such as Seán O'Flannagáin broadband access has meant that conducting business away from the metropolitan centres has become a viable prospect, something that will ultimately feed back into the local economy.

Turning Green With Literacy...Why should we celebrate the Irish?

2010-03-18T17:01:06Z

Op-Ed Contributor

"Well, the heart's a wonder," says Pegeen Mike in John Millington Synge's comedy "The Playboy of the Western World." It was a sentiment first articulated by Patrick's converts, who put down their weapons and took up their pens. They copied out the great Greco-Roman books, many of which they didn't really understand, thus saving in its purest form most of the classical library.

By THOMAS CAHILL

Brian Cronin

No doubt, several reasons could be proffered. But for me one answer stands out. Long, long ago the Irish pulled off a remarkable feat: They saved the books of the Western world and left them as gifts for all humanity.

True enough, the Irish were unlikely candidates for the job. Upon their entrance into Western history in the fifth century, they were the most barbaric of barbarians, practitioners of human sacrifice, cattle rustlers, traders in human beings (the children they captured along the Atlantic edge of Europe), insane warriors who entered battle stark naked. And yet it was the Irish who were around to pick up the pieces when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West under the increasing assaults of Germanic tribes.

more after the jump

]]> It is hard to overstate the momentousness of that collapse. By the early sixth century, Western Europe had become largely illiterate, its teachers dead, its students on the run, its libraries turned into kindling. Ireland, however, had just settled down, thanks to a tough old bird named Patrick, a Roman citizen raised in the province of Britain who had been grabbed by Irish slavers when he was a teenager. It was after his escape that Patrick resolved to seek priestly ordination and return to Ireland to preach the Gospel.

The glories of Christianity -- particularly its books -- fascinated the Irish. They came to love the Roman alphabet that Patrick and his successors taught them, as well the precious illuminated manuscripts that he presented to them. There was indeed nothing in their intellectual heritage to block their receptivity to the Christian faith.

There was also nothing in their heritage to draw them to master the intricacies of the Greco-Roman tradition. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, for the ancient Irish never embraced classical cynicism or the gloomy Greco-Roman sense of fatedness.

Instead, they remained in many ways remarkably unjaded, full of wonder at the unexpectedness of human life. "Well, the heart's a wonder," says Pegeen Mike in John Millington Synge's comedy "The Playboy of the Western World." It was a sentiment first articulated by Patrick's converts, who put down their weapons and took up their pens. They copied out the great Greco-Roman books, many of which they didn't really understand, thus saving in its purest form most of the classical library.

The Irish fanned out across Europe, salvaging books wherever they could, making copies, reassembling libraries and teaching the newly settled barbarians of the continent to read and write.

But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of "refreshment, light and peace," to quote the ancient Latin liturgy. These scribal doodles eventually became elaborate design elements, leading the way to Irish masterpieces like the Book of Kells.

The scribes also contributed jokes, poems and commentary to the works they replicated, saving for us a world of fresh insights. One scribe, tortured by the difficult Greek he was copying, wrote: "There's an end to that -- and seven curses with it!" Another complained of a previous scribe's sloppiness: "It is easy to spot Gabrial's work here." A third, at the bottom of a tear-stained page, tells us how upset he was by the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy. In these comments, sharp and sweet by turns, we come in contact with the sources of Irish literary humor and hear uncanny echoes of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett.

One scribe leaves us a charming poem about his cat, who hunts mice through the night while the scribe hunts words. Another, presumably a female scribe, describes a young man in four brief lines:

He's a heart,

He's an acorn from an oak tree,

He's young.

Kiss him!

A third scribe (for they were not all monks and nuns) wonders who will sleep tonight with "blond Aideen." (It's quite certain someone will.)

The quotations above are English translations from the Irish, the first vernacular language of Europe to be written down. In this way, the Irish initiated what would eventually become the great torrent of European national literatures.

We have many reasons to be grateful to St. Patrick and his fierce and playful Irishmen and Irishwomen. So on this St. Patrick's Day, remember them as they would wish to be remembered. Read a book.

Thomas Cahill is the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization."

This article first appeared in the New York Times

How Many "Greats" in Obama's Irish Grandfather?

2010-03-18T03:08:57Z

President Barack Obama walks with Ireland's Prime Minister Brian Cowen and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., after a Friends of Ireland luncheon for St. Patrick's Day, on Capitol Hill, March 17, 2010.

(Credit: AP)

Updated 8:45 p.m. ET

It's genealogy be damned on St. Patrick's Day - even at the White House. Every president claims to have at least a small branch of his family tree than can be traced to Ireland.

Again this year, President Obama trumpeted his bit of Irish blood from his mother's side, though he added a couple of "greats" to his description.

"I believe it was my great-great-great-great-great grandfather," he said at Speaker Pelosi's Friends of Ireland Luncheon today in the Capitol.

But that's two "greats" more than the far-removed Irish relative he referred to on St. Patrick's Day a year ago as "my great-great-great grandfather."

]]> But by the time of the evening reception he hosted in the East Room, the number of "greats" changed again.

"I want to make sure I get this straight," he said. "It was my great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother's side."

So it was three "greats" last year, five this morning and four this evening.

It suggested the president might have inherited a long-lost Irish relatives gift of blarney, not unknown among American politicians.

Not seeming to realize the twists in his family tree, Mr. Obama went on to say his relative hailed from County Offaly, the same as Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen.

Irish Ambassador William Patrick Fay pins a cluster of shamrocks on President Nixon's lapel on March 17, 1969, during a St. Patrick's Day celebration at the White House in Washington. The President is holding a foot-high Waterford crystal vase, bearing a White House etching, which also was presented to the Nixons from their Irish visitors.

(Credit: AP)

Checking up on claims of Irish lineage was easier 41 years ago on Richard Nixon's first St. Patrick's Day as president.

"I should point out that in our family, Mrs. Nixon's father was Irish, and on my side my mother was Irish," he said in a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room with William P. Fay, then-Ireland's Ambassador to the U.S.

Year after year, St. Patrick's Day gives American and Irish leaders a chance to hail the longstanding friendship between their two countries and peoples.

"The Emerald Isle has given much to the world, but she has blessed America abundantly with her most precious gift: her children," said President Reagan at a St. Patrick's Day event in 1982.

In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt broadcast radio greetings on the occasion of St. Patrick's Day from his retreat in Warm Springs, Ga.

"Our own country owes a great debt to them for their contribution to its upbuilding," said FDR in a tribute to the millions of Irish who immigrated to the U.S.

In 1994, then-Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds took note of the exodus from his country to the U.S.

"Because of the generations of Irish people who have come to these shores, St. Patricks' Day is perhaps even more honored here than in Ireland," he said at a shamrock ceremony with President Clinton.

Shamrock is always part of the White House observance of March 17th. Year after year, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) presents the U.S. president with a Waterford crystal bowl of shamrock.

"I want to offer you a gift of a bowl of shamrock, which is genuine shamrock and which I think should be enough for you, your Cabinet, or your family -- anybody else around," said Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald to Reagan in 1986.

Photo Gallery: Presidents and Shamrocks Over the Last 40 years

A few years earlier, Reagan didn't have any shamrock so he presented the Irish ambassador to the U.S. with a bowl of jellybeans - all green.

At that first St. Patrick's Day for Nixon in 1969, Ambassador Fay offered to put a sprig of shamrock in Nixon's buttonhole.

"Does it work," asked Nixon about the reputed powers of shamrock.

Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, left, presents a bowl of shamrocks to President Clinton at the White House Friday, March 15, 1996. The presentation is a St. Patrick's Day tradition.

(Credit: AP)

"I hope so," replied the ambassador, enough of a diplomat to respond with a non-committal answer.

Years later, Mr. Clinton just assumed the power of shamrock, though he mistakenly stated its plural form.

"I hope the shamrocks will bring us the luck of the Irish over the next few months," he said to Prime Minister John Bruton in 1995.

But in 1989, it wasn't a gift of shamrock that symbolized Irish-American friendship, even as President George H. W. Bush received a bowlful from Ireland's Deputy Prime Minister Brian Lenihan.

"Once you're had a glass of Guinness with a man in Ireland, as I have with Brian Lenihan, why, you're friends," said Mr. Bush.

Whether with dry Irish stout, or three-leafed clover, St. Patrick's Day has become a White House tradition and reason enough for some music and dance.

Also, check out the fountain in front of the White House today, tinted green for St. Patrick's Day:

(Credit: AP)

St. Patrick's Day With the Irish and the Jews

2010-03-17T18:30:28Z

Above, Mick Maloney's new album recreates music from the nearly forgotten era
of collaboration between Jewish and Irish songwriters in pre-World War New York

By Sarah Litvin, The Forward

The first time Mick Moloney visited America, he fell in love with a library. "God almighty!" Moloney said when remembering it in a 1993 interview with Steve Winick of Dirty Linen magazine. "I couldn't leave it. I used to stay up all night reading these books." The library belonged to Kenny Goldstein, then chair of the University of Pennsylvania Folklore and Folklife Department. After enticing Moloney back to the States in 1972 to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania's folklore program, Goldstein served as Moloney's mentor, advocate, and friend, guiding him to international acclaim as a folklorist and musician. Thirty-six years after meeting Goldstein, Moloney noticed a trend: ?
Nearly all the significant partnerships I've had with people professionally have been with Jewish people."
Now read on after the jump

]]> Listen to Mick Moloney interviews in The Forward

Last October, Moloney completed an album celebrating these Irish-Jewish relationships both within his own life and in American musical history. Growing up in Limerick, Moloney says, he knew "very little" about Jews or Jewish culture. He met Jewish people for the first time while at college in Dublin, and later learned that Limerick was one of few Irish cities ever to have a pogrom, in 1904. Moloney sees this project as "turning the circle, as it were," celebrating Irish-Jewish cooperation. "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" includes 14 songs, all researched and performed by Moloney, and products of the fruitful and nearly forgotten era of collaboration between Irish and Jewish songwriters in New York's pre-World War I Tin Pan Alley.

Between 1880 and 1920, waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe shifted the makeup of New York City and its entertainment industry. In 1880, Irish immigrants made up one-quarter of New York City's population and dominated the popular minstrelsy, variety theater and vaudeville scenes. First the Irish took to the New York stage and later the Jews did so, partially because of limited job opportunities elsewhere. The two groups were living on the fringes of society and in close quarters on the Lower East Side, where they often clashed along the rocky road to acceptance into mainstream American society.

At the same time, Irish New Yorkers reached out to their new neighbors by inviting them into their political circle, Tammany Hall. Moloney explained, "For the Jewish groups, it was a leg into the system. For the Irish groups, it was a way of bolstering their majority." William Jerome and Jean Schwartz, who became an Irish-Jewish songwriting team in 1901 and wrote "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" in 1910, celebrated this warm political relationship: "Why Tammany would surely fall, there'd really be no hall at all if it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews." Moloney explains that reality was a bit more complicated. "Whether [cooperation] was happening on the ground is debatable," he said, "but at least it was happening in popular culture."

Within popular culture, this reciprocity and competition led to fruitful cross-cultural pollination. Moloney points to upstart Jewish songwriters like Leonora Goldberg, who thought that to succeed, she had to "go Irish," and so she changed her name to Nora Bayes. At the same time, farsighted Irish musicians were "hedging their bets," worried that the only way to survive was to "go Jewish," Moloney explained. Though he has heard thousands of songs from this era, Moloney still cannot guess the ethnicity of a song's writers just by listening. "These were commercial songwriters," he explained. "They knew what went over. Their genius was that they created these beautiful, crafted songs that just tugged at people?s heartstrings."

One of Moloney's favorite Tin Pan Alley songwriters is Al Dubin. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Dubin grew up in Philadelphia and was "a holy terror of a kid," who refused to go to school because he wanted to write songs. His despairing parents sent him to a seminary, from which he was promptly expelled for drinking. Eventually, Dubin ran away to New York. Working on 28th and Broadway, Dubin paired with various Irish songwriters, including John O'Brien, with whom he joined in 1916 to write, "Twas Only an Irishman's Dream." On his album, Moloney orchestrates this song soulfully, paying homage to a 1917 recording by the Peerless Quartet. "Shamrocks are blooming on Broadway," Moloney croons, accompanied by Susan McKeown's harmonies. Classically trained violinist Dana Lyn and cellist Egil Rostad accompany the vocals to create a wistful, nostalgic mood.

How could a Jewish boy from Philadelphia write about "Sweet Shannon bells ringing," Moloney explains it simply: "It wasn't just dear old Ireland. It was songs that would somehow create a positive image of a place left behind." In order to gloss over the harsh reality of immigration, "you buy into a fantasy fable of an imagined homeland." This idea of an imagined homeland easily struck a chord with Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe a generation or two earlier.

Moloney finds that to record a song well, it is important to understand its history. But an interesting history is not enough. "I'm attracted to them not because they're sociological documents," he said. "I think they're great songs! Fantastic songs! If they weren't, I wouldn't bother singing them." Critics agree. Earle Hitchner of the newspaper the Irish Echo wrote of Moloney's last album, which came out in 2006, "No one has succeeded more in taking this once vital part of Irish American culture out of musty archives and moldering dissertations and placing it afresh on CD and concert stage than Mick Moloney."

Moloney doesn?t live in a time when many New York Jews parade down Broadway with shamrocks pinned to their coats; there may never have been such a time. Still, he sees deep cultural connections between the ceilidh and the klezmer bands, the Irish tenor and the Jewish cantor. Coming full circle to his own professional history of collaborations with Jewish musicians, he said: "One or two is an accident. When it goes on for 35 years, it's not an accident anymore, it's a pattern. It's just a good fit."

THE UNOFFICIAL EMBASSY OF IRELAND'S GUIDE TO DIPLOMACY

2010-03-16T22:23:05Z

After a month in Kosovo, the Unofficial Embassy has shut up shop and moved home. The money ran dry and the gig was up. The ambassadors said ciao to the newest country in the world with moist eyes and trembling lips. We had enough laughs for a lifetime but we also learned some valuable lessons about diplomacy that we'd like to share with the rest of you not fortunate enough to have had your own embassy.

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BE COOL

An embassy in a foreign country is no different from photos of your girlfriend's ex in her bedroom. They're symbols of attachment and influence. Cheeky little reminders from the past. That might explain the heavy fortifications and the paranoia. The Yanks, for example, had automatic spotlights rigged along their walls. They were bright as stadium lights and if an ambassador were to be a little tipsy on his walk home, he might mistake the lights for an alien craft. The Brits, our neighbors, had bollards at either end of the street, which was the biggest pain in the hole. Whenever you ordered pizza as it meant you had to run halfway down the road to collect it. Now, as anyone who's ever played second fiddle before will tell you, a bitter ex is about as cool as shopping for tampons with your mother. Whereas if you can be the "I'm happy if she's happy" guy, you steal the high moral ground and everyone likes you. As ambassadors the only thing cold about our welcome was the ice in the Guinness Martinis.

PRESS THE FLESH
It goes without saying that ambassadors should be friendly and never turn down an invitation. Invites open doors to valuable networking opportunities, drugs, and girls. That said, if you were in the game on a full-time basis, you'd really have to pick and choose your parties or you wouldn't make it through one term. This is a picture of us at one of the many parties we attended. The big guy standing between us is Ramush Haradinaj. He's the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo and was once the prime minister of the country. In the picture he's holding a hurley stick, the national sport in Ireland. We used to give them out instead of business cards. Anyway, Ramush goes to us, "You know what I'm going to do with this? I'm going to hit someone over the head with it." We didn't laugh. He's ex-KLA and bench presses in the middle of contract negotiations to intimidate people.

SHARE THE WEALTH
I know very little about Luxembourg. I believe they recently introduced some sort of a watered-down one-child rule as it's getting packed over there, but really, if you asked me to describe them, I'd have to say they're like Eurolucky dip. The Lux ambassador lived about three doors down from us in a heavily fortified cottage. The curtains were always drawn. The doors were always closed. Anything could have been going on inside. And that's exactly the point. If you don't show and tell every so often, people are just going to assume you've something to hide. Embassies should be run like backpacker hostels, where bored kids can sit up till three drinking wine out of cartons and playing Shithead for irredeemable traveller's checks. They should let them dry their beach towels on the flagpole and call home on the ambassadors' dime. After breakfast, we liked nothing more than strolling the wings to see how many guests we'd accumulated from the night before. I don't want to boast, but if in nine months time we get a phone call asking us to be godfathers of a kid named Embassy, I won't be surprised.

BE A CLOWN
Albanian is an extremely difficult language. There are all kinds of dashes, dots and squiggles jumbled alongside your common everyday alphabet, making it next to impossible for a foreigner to master. On top of that there's dialects and accents, and a population relatively fluent in English to further complicate the matter. On the first day we learned how to say hello and thank you, then for nigh on five weeks solid, there was precious little else that came out of our mouths. We repeated the words like bird calls. The locals thought us simple, like village idiots from another land. We were light entertainment, and that brings us to the real essence of good diplomacy. Allow the rest of the world to laugh at you. It's a brave thing to do, but it works. The best way to confront a negative stereotype is to accentuate it to the point of implausibility. And then listen for the crack as it shatters into a hundred pieces. Good diplomacy is turning a cliché to your advantage. Hence we never refused a drink, we blushed if a girl crossed our path, and we turned jigs in the street at the slightest hint of music. And then just when they were thinking these good Catholic gents were safe company for their daughters...

CONOR CREIGHTON

Inis Mór could be a location for a science fiction movie set either in the distant past or the distant future- so old it's new. ...

2010-03-14T20:48:10Z

by Peggy Hernon

The wind blew me in the door of Inis Mór Airport this Saturday morning, a cold east wind that sprayed fine sand in ahead of me and fluttered the notices on the bulletin board. It feels like it's been January since 1962 and the wind has been blowing even longer. Coming to work this morning through a dim, windswept landscape, it struck me the island could be a location for a science fiction movie set either in the distant past or the distant future- so old it's new. That, however, does not apply to Inis Mor Airport which is just old. And draughty. And full of ooky little corners that fill up with piles of fine sand when the wind is from the east. The crewmen were already at them with brooms.

Peggy Hernon has written a wonderful collection of short stories chronicling her experience working with Aer Arann Islands and life in Connemara. Pggy is a member of the Ground Operations staff at Inis Mor Airport. She was born in the Bronx in New York, attended NYU and worked on Wall street for 18 years. She moved to Inis Mor in 1990 where she married Micheal Hernon, Inis Mor Airport Manager and has been living on the island ever since.

]]> The first flight at 0900 on Saturday morning routes to all three Aran Islands. Two of my departing passengers are transferring to Inis Meain for a funeral. The other two are an elderly couple going to the mainland to mind their grandchildren while their daughter and son-in-law attend a wedding. Mamó is bubbling in anticipation of being with the grandchildren overnight, but Daidó has the bruised look of a man deprived of his own chair by his own fire for two whole days. Next to their overnight bag on the trolley is a large bag of wool going to a hand knitter on Inis Meain. I ran the safety video when aircraft EI-CUW called finals, and with a firm grip on the paper manifest of weights, I headed out into the wind to meet the arriving aircraft.

The first flight is routing from Inverin in Connemara to Inis Oirr/Inis Mor/Inis Meain and back to Inverin. Four passengers disembarked here at Inis Mor - three from Inverin and one who transferred from Inis Oirr. Three passengers for Inis Meain stayed onboard and I seated my two for Inis Meain and two for Inverin after giving the weight information to the Pilot. We took off two bags from Inverin, three boxes of vetinerary supplies put on for us at Inis Oirr, and put on the bag of wool for Inis Meain. Island ground crews provide accurate counts and weights of what departs from the islands, but it's the Inverin staff who plan the overall numeric jigsaw that is a three-island flight. The pilots keep track of the changes in numbers and weights at each stop on the route and they have the last word about their aircraft's load. If you work at Aer Arann Islands, odds are you're a champ at the Japanese number game, Sudoku. One pilot regularly skates through the Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper in the time it takes me to make a pot of coffee.

Back at the desk doing paperwork I came across a note from the weekday crew who have been doing an airport clean-up to get rid of a year's worth of accumulated junk. A clean-up is a logical chore for the low season, but it's also a tradition of Samhain, the deep winter months of November, December and January in the Celtic calendar. Samhain is the time to get rid of unwanted baggage, including habits and attitudes, in the same way that dead leaves are shed from the trees and swept away by the winter wind. In the course of the clean-up I'm sometimes asked about what to keep and what to dump. The note read: 'See the 5 umbrellas in the back - what do you think??' Underneath, another crewman had written, 'The ugly brolly couldn't get a date'. And a third had added, 'It's obvious these brollies are a couple & a threesome - this is New Ireland!' Rascals.

I'm not sure I have a handle on Old Ireland, never mind the New. But I do know a brand new Irishman is coming home today with his parents on the 1130 flight. Newborn babies, flowers, birthday cakes, glassware, and anything delicate (including granny) always come in on the plane. The new parents, the 7 pound baby and 110 pounds of baby gear were unloaded and reloaded into the family car. It was time for lunch and a look at the newspaper - the headlines lately are more scary than Sci-Fi movies.

Seven of the passengers who arrived on the 1430 flight were oblivious to wind and weather; they're here for a Stag Party. When aircraft EI-CUW departed for Inis Meain to take funeral attendees back to the mainland, I went over to speak to the eighth passenger from the flight who was waiting to be picked up. He told me he will be departing on the 1600, he's come in to take some measurements for a conservatory. 'Conservatory', I mumbled. 'Yes', he said, and went on about styles and colours and double glazing. I caught myself bobbing my head at him like a toy dog in the rear window of a car. He gave me a business card and hopped into his client's jeep. I needed to hear the word 'conservatory'. Like a hinge it opened a door to images of sunlight and pots of daffodils. In one tick 'late January' became 'nearly February'. I trotted back inside to do a little clean-up job of my own.

I took down the Brigidine cross that hangs on the bulletin board behind my desk. Two right angles bound at the center, it was woven out of rushes by an Aran schoolchild, and was a present from my husband on the first day I started work at Inis Mor Airport, February 1, 1996. Besides being my work anniversary, February 1st is layered with meaning in Ireland. It's the festival day of the Celtic goddess Brid, the feast day of the saint and patroness of Ireland, Bridget of Kildare, and it's the first day of Imbolc, Spring in the Celtic calendar. Over time, the myth of the goddess and the legend of the saint have become intertwined and blurred. The goddess Brid is associated with fertility, healing, the hearth and forge; Saint Bridget is the patron of mothers, nurses, and female warriors. 'Female warriors' always brings a smile. I don't know any woman, including myself, who isn't a female warrior at some time or another. I gave the cross a gentle dusting and rehung it in its place between the calendar and the work roster. Set for another year. The airport needs new flower troughs for the front windows and a box ball tree (or four) might be fun. I scribbled a note to the weekday crew: 'I'm planning a Galway shopping trip - need anything?' I can't wait for the replies.

The passengers for the 1600 started to arrive. I wish I could say the weather had changed magically for the better now that it's nearly February, but no, it's as cold, windy and dim as it was this morning. An island family of four checked in. They're headed to a Galway hotel to swim, a birthday treat for the kids. The dancing teacher and the couple who came in this morning arrived on the bus, and with one minute to spare, the conservatory salesman puffed in the door. I gave him a full 100-watt smile in exchange for his ticket. Finals, video, manifest, biro, and I'm out the door into the wind to meet the arriving aircraft.

On the Bow'ry, in search of Tammany Hall

2010-03-14T17:06:18Z

Dan Barry,one of the best writers on the New York Times has written elegantly about visiting Co Galway and his own Irish roots. In today's Times, he delves into the extraordinary history of a New York flophouse to tell the story of George, its final resident.

The hotel's history, murders, prostitutes, con men, the lot, is closely entwined with Irish-run Tammany Hall.

It starts with one Frederick F. Fleck: city alderman, bail bondsman and self-important member of the court to the Bowery king himself, Timothy D. Sullivan -- "Big Tim" -- a Tammany Hall leader said to control all votes and vice south of 14th Street......

Searching for George on the Bowery: Audio book

Read the full piece here

Does the Real Ireland still exist? Read Dan Barry in Co Galway