Living in Ireland is always an adventure for sure. They should issue hard hats, worry beads, and ear plugs at the every airport. Just when everybody has been fretting to death about the economy, the next pint, and maybe global warming if they are good at the long face, we have had weeks of...Read more »

At once emblematic and ultimately shocking, A Century of Silence: Echoes from a Massachusetts Landscape is the poignant story of the vanishing of an Irish family abroad decades after the Famine. Such severance of course affected nearly every household on this island, and encounters with fresh travails on “the other side” were scarcely rare....Read more »

When the kids were little, and Owen still a baby, we travelled Ireland’s west and came to this weird Sligo hilltop zone of burial cairns and caves said to hold the most ancient inhabitants of this island. The warning sign was clear, but we ignored it, and have since. Next, we stayed in a...Read more »

The news lately has remained so bad you could laugh for crying. As tax revenues have dried up, the country’s most ambitious schemes for the future have shut down one-by-one. Manufacturing plants keep closing; urban redevelopment schemes and support for the arts, road works, and soaring bridges all dematerializing. The six public libraries in...Read more »