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http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/Nationalists-foil-PSNI-attack.5163339.jp
Published Date: 11 April 2009
NATIONALIST residents in Lurgan have foiled a terrorist attack on the town's police station.
Gunmen in Kilwilke estate tried to force a Post Office worker to drive a suspected bomb to the town's police station, but locals stepped in and chased the thugs off.
Police said that the Post Office worker was walking back to his van in the Ennis Close area when he was approached by a masked man with a gun.
"The masked male threatened the victim and told him he wanted him to drive a package to the police station," said a PSNI spokeswoman.
"Members of the public noticed what was happening and disturbed the masked male, who then ran off."
The Post Office employee's mother said the residents may well have saved the life of her son and many others.
"Kilwilke gets a bad press but there's bad and good people everywhere," she said.
"I would like to acknowledge the decent people of Kilwilke who came to my son's rescue. If those two cowards had got their way my son could have been dead with who knows how many others."
She said her son had almost finished work for the evening when he was approached by two masked men in the estate.
"They came out of nowhere as he was coming from the Post Office to the van," she said.
"They held a gun to his back and told him he had to drive the van to the police station with a bomb on board. They said, 'If you don't do what you're told we'll shoot you'.
"The two women from the Post Office came out along with two men and an old woman.
"In a couple of minutes the place was surrounded. They were shouting at the two boys and they panicked. One of the men tried to chase the two of them, but they got away.
"Only for the brave people who came to the rescue he would have had to drive the van to the police station. How was he to know if they were serious or not?"
It was a very traumatic experience for her son, she said, describing him as a quiet man who works hard for his family.
Police have only just released details of the recent incident.
DUP MLA Stephen Moutray praised the Kilwilke residents.
"I welcome people that support the PSNI in whatever way they can to foil potential attacks," he said.
"I don't believe the people organising such attacks have got much support from the public at large."
Sinn Fein MLA John O'Dowd said the story confirmed that nationalist and republican communities like Kilwilke are against any return to violence.
"Nationalist and republican communities don't want to return to the past and want to be able to move on," he said.
"Once these residents saw what was happening, a number of women came out of the shops to intervene. Initially there were about half-a-dozen but this grew up to 15 or 20 people."
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0411/breaking11.htm
Police in Northern Ireland are investigating an attack on an Orange hall in Co Antrim in the early hours of the morning.
Two youths were reported to have been seen throwing petrol bombs at the hall on Main Street in Rasharkin at about 2am, causing some damage to the building.
They were described as being between 18 and 20 years of age, about 5 foot 7 inches tall, and were wearing hoodies and jeans.
The youths fled the scene, and police have appealed for information form the public on the incident.
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/Church-helped-reduce-Troubles-retaliation.5163343.jp
Published Date: 11 April 2009
PROTESTANT churches played a crucial role in reducing the level of retaliation in border areas as the IRA systematically murdered Protestants during the Troubles, a leading academic has said.
Professor Henry Patterson said that he believed the churches' Christian teaching had played a part in a "remarkable" absence of attempted retribution.
The University of Ulster Professor of Politics, who is researching the border Protestants of Co Fermanagh, said that he was struck by the largely restrained response from Protestant victims.
In an interview with the Church of Ireland Gazette, Prof Patterson said: "One thing that strikes me, particularly in Fermanagh, is the lack of tit-for-tat retaliation. There's very, very little of that. It was a very restrained response."
Prof Patterson said that he believed the Church as an institution, but also Christian values, had played a role in restraining victims from seeking retribution.
"People's religious values play a role. Some of the people I've talked to have said this, in terms of the sanctity of human life, respect for law and order, authority and issues like that," he said.
"It's fashionable now to go on about the UDR being infiltrated and collusion and all these things.
"I think that in somewhere like Fermanagh one of the functions of the UDR and traditional leadership of the Unionist Party was actually to ensure that people didn't respond in a tit-for-tat way; that they left the response to the security forces – even at a time when a lot of people thought the security forces weren't protecting them enough."
Prof Patterson said that the "dreadful, dreadful experience" of border Protestants had been endured with a great deal of "forbearance".
"There are obviously other areas where Protestants find themselves as a minority community, but in Fermanagh, unlike south Down or south Armagh, there was still a relatively large Protestant community in border areas at the beginning of the Troubles and there is still obviously a Protestant community in these areas," he said.
"Although the Protestant community was a minority in Fermanagh, it was a bigger group than it was in other border areas.
"There is a tradition in border areas and in particular in Fermanagh and south Tyrone of service in the security forces, in the B Specials and then after 1970 in the Ulster Defence Regiment and in the Reserve of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
"Because many of these people were part time it made them easy targets and right from the beginning the IRA picked on them and targeted them."
Last year, a report by the Church of Ireland's Hard Gospel project highlighted the trials of border Protestants living in the Church's Clogher diocese, which straddles the frontier with Cavan, Monaghan, Louth, Leitrim and Donegal.
Parishioners told the report's authors of their distrust of some Catholic neighbours – particularly after Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone – but also of acts of great kindness by their Catholic fellow countrymen during the height of the Troubles when murders were routine.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/10/kennedy_appointment_to_vatican_scotched
Fri, 04/10/2009 - 4:02pm
Not such a good Friday for Caroline Kennedy, daughter of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Just last week, her name emerged as a possible ambassador to the Vatican. News outlets reported that Senator John Kerry (the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) recommended her for the role, lobbying U.S. President Barack Obama, who makes the appointments, on her behalf.
The rumor sparked outrage among Catholic groups, because Kennedy, who is Catholic, supports abortion rights, which the church vehemently opposes. One called it an "insult," saying, "It's inappropriate to appoint someone who pretends to be a Catholic but rejects the fundamental teachings of the church."
It seems that the Vatican has crossed names off of Obama's list. "At least three names...have been 'burned' even before the proposal of nomination could be made formally, because they were unwelcome to the church," one Italian journalist wrote, as translated by the Washington Times. (The Vatican denies the allegation.)
The United States has never appointed a pro-choice ambassador to the Holy See.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/easter-1916--myths-lies-and-newsreels-1705945.html
Dublin 1916 -- The Siege of the GPO By Clair Wills (Prolific Books, £15.99)
Saturday April 11 2009
A stock joke in the old Dublin Opinion postulated the infinite extendibility of the walls of the GPO building in order to accommodate all those who claimed to have been inside during the 1916 Rising. If they had, the occupying garrison of a few hundred would have swelled to about 30,000. By then, of course, the rebels were recognised as an elite band, with a passport to a national record, to political advancement and ministerial office, and in many cases, to a pension.
Clair Wills, in this fascinating study, shows how the building itself waxed and waned in the imagination as the state tried to identify itself, and how, later, a more mature society veered between remembering and forgetting.
In a magisterial review of the sources (and, helpfully, of the literature in an extended bibliographical note) she focuses attention not on the Rising, but on the Post Office as the main centre of activity, the headquarters position where the general staff actually came under fire and, in the front line shared, the heat and burden of the day, the locale for the foundation myth of the national narrative.
The focus of the book is the symbolism of the events and their aftermath, and the transition of the building from a concrete expression of the imperial presence to a stage for dramatic revolution, to bomb shelter, to ruin and to resurrection as a national icon. Its centrality to the political culture of modern Ireland is underlined by the struggle for possession of the myth and the memorial, as competing custodians of the republican tradition used it as a backdrop to their claims to legitimacy as the true heirs to that tradition.
The week of the Rising is dealt with in fascinating detail, drawing on personal diaries and memoirs, contemporary newspapers and reports of official commissions. The main and well-known cast of characters are all there, but we are introduced to a variety of bit-players, extras, bystanders, opponents, critics, sympathisers and opportunistic looters. Much of this introduces an intimate, almost domestic detail, which counterpoints the lofty language of the Declaration, the amateur soldiering of the Volunteers, the relentless grinding into gear of the military machine, the looting, the citizens caught in crossfire, the rumour and counter-rumour that swept the city and the country.
There are many engaging vignettes too -- the social distance between the intellectuals in the main office discussing morality and the soldiers on the roof trying to keep warm, of Desmond Fitzgerald trying to maintain restaurant service for the leaders while those on the roof complained of only getting tea and biscuits at infrequent intervals. There is a highly interesting account, too, of the movement into and around the GPO, to outlying outposts and other garrisons. Sean T O Kelly was able to carry a message to Tom Clarke's wife on the Thursday, wait for tea and, as she cattily remarked in a memoir, "seemed in no hurry to get back".
The author notes, too, the amazing outpouring of poetry (most of it not very good) which followed the Rising, and the swing in public opinion as the leaders were executed. The treatment of the Rising in drama and literature is well covered: the controversy over The Plough and the Stars, and the writings of St John Ervine, Corkery and Denis Johnston, the restoration of the building and surrounding O'Connell Street, its appropriation by Fianna Fail as a site for commemoration and as a potent symbol of de Valera's greater legitimacy in his struggle with the IRA.
Much of the book concerns the use of the GPO as a backdrop to the political dialogue and the commem-orations. De Valera militarised the 25th anniversary to upstage the IRA; the 50th was an exercise in glorification; the 75th in forgetting, in case people would remember too much; and the 90th was a reassertion by Bertie Ahern of the primacy of the democratically elected government.
A recurrent theme has been the necessity for political incumbents and those in power to explain to a younger generation that what was all right then is no longer all right -- a dilemma currently faced by Sinn Fein in the North in opposing the claims of die-hards and dissidents.
The 1966 commemoration is pivotal, the last great ceremony of glorification, with pageants in Croke Park and Belfast, a factional recreation on the new national television channel, and the production of Mise Eire. Apart from patriotic nostalgia and adding to the stature of Connolly, it also had the effect of prompting revisionist historians to begin to re-examine the legitimacy, the legacy and the political utility of the Rising itself.
In the North the effect was more explosive in rekindling the hopes of irredentist nationalism and enabling Paisley to stoke the fires of Protestant fears and sectarian hostility. It was not the only, or even a main cause of the troubles that were to follow, but it helped to set the scene.
This is a wonderfully detailed discussion of the events and their significance. It clears the ground for the great debate which now needs to take place about how the nation should mark the centenary of the Rising in seven years' time -- on what note, carrying what message, on what site and by whom, who owns the narrative, which group sets the agenda, is it to celebrate the achievement of nationhood, failure to live up to the ideals of the Declaration, or simply to record work in progress?
The answer will depend on how the nation sees itself at the time, and how problems of identity, allegiance governance and community relations, which have remained since 1916 in constantly mutating forms, are to be resolved peacefully in the years ahead.
Maurice Hayes is a former Ombudsman in the North
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/11/gpo-siege-dublin-books
Roy Foster listens to the continuing resonances of the Dublin Easter rising
* Roy Foster
* The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009
The Easter rising of 1916 is a foundational moment of modern Irish history, though not (as some would have it) the foundational moment. Charles Townshend, author of the classic and comprehensive study of the event, defined it as "demonstration politics", a key instance of the propaganda of the deed. When an armed group of rebels occupied the General Post Office in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916, provoking a week-long insurrection against British rule, the point was not to ignite a successful revolution in the streets but to inflame a spirit of violent resistance in Irish hearts and minds. Thanks to the draconian reaction of the authorities, as well as some other fortunate contingencies, they succeeded. And as WB Yeats presciently remarked, future generations of Irish politicians would date their entitlement to elite status from an ancestor's presence in the Post Office, much as Americans referred to their forefathers coming over on the Mayflower.
Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO by Clair Wills (224pp, £15.99)
Like the ship, the building would have to achieve Tardis-like dimensions to accommodate all such future claimants. This aspect of mythmaking is one of Clair Wills's preoccupations. Others include the thick detail of that extraordinary week: the food people ate, the way messages got passed around, the atmosphere of guerrilla war in central Dublin, the exalted state of the men and women who participated in the drama. And "drama" is the word. The deliberate theatricality of the occasion has been noted by many commentators (as it was disapprovingly commented upon at the time by the hard-headed Michael Collins, who would direct an effective campaign in the next phase of hostilities). The leader Patrick Pearse's statements placed it firmly if hyperbolically in the litany of rebellions over the centuries. But he also related it directly to Dublin. "We have wiped out the blackest stain in Dublin's history - that of 1803," he told his listeners in the GPO. He meant the lack of support afforded to Robert Emmet in his equally unsuccessful attempted rebellion. Some at least of his audience probably needed their memories jogged, but the chief participants were buoyed up by a turbocharged sense of taking their places in a historical pageant.
This is the aspect which interests Wills. A distinguished scholar of Irish literature as well as a formidably accomplished social historian, she is alert to the loaded implications of words and symbols. Her title is correspondingly significant: this is a book about the theatre of the GPO, the effect on Dublin and the resonances cast forward by the event. It is not an alternative to Townshend's Easter 1916, but an exploration of certain aspects; some of the best chapters deal with the 20s and the 60s. But she also possesses a sharp eye for the quiddity of the everyday, and a marvellous ear for quotation - as when one volunteer, told by James Connolly that "it didn't matter a damn if we were wiped out now as we had justified ourselves", privately decided that this was "a bit rugged".
There are "rugged" aspects of the whole affair that are not part of her brief. Her book is one of a Profile series exploring the resonances of key historical episodes. It does not cover the pre-planning of the rising, the extent to which German aid was counted upon, the plans for provincial outbreaks, or above all the effect of the Dublin cataclysm in entrenching Ulster resistance to any form of Irish nationalism, and destroying the old constitutional-nationalist party of "Home Rulers". The early chapters reconstruct the events and give the heroics their due; but in confronting the reverberations over the decades, she does not flinch from the maudlin, the opportunist and the kitsch. Above all she interrogates the translation of the everyday into the sacred, and the way that the symbols of the 1916 rebellion project forward into the creation of the Irish state and retain an uncomfortable presence there.
One aspect of this concerns the social radicalism that inspired a section of the rebels and was ostentatiously discarded by the new state; another, of course, was the sanctification of violence in pursuit of republican separatism, which raised awkward questions when the Provisional IRA invoked it 50-odd years later.
This continuing relevance, and the manipulations of memory that the rising involves, raise fascinating echoes. There are signs that the Irish government is highly sensitised to them: Wills quotes a notable speech from President Mary McAleese three years ago, claiming the 1916 martyrs in language alternately mawkish and strident, and clearly designed by its authors to cut Sinn Fein out of the 90th anniversary celebrations. There is a rich trawl of such quotations (alas unreferenced, owing to the series' conventions). Dublin 1916 absorbingly charts the reconstructions and reactions accompanying the half-centenary jamboree of 1966 (already the subject of some fascinating research elsewhere). What the centenary will provide in seven years' time will be fairly mind-boggling.
It will also be intensely political. Irish history is remarkable for fast-forward moments when everything becomes "changed utterly", as Yeats rapidly saw was the case in 1916. The 1800 Act of Union, the advance of home rule to a constitutional possibility in 1885-86, the treaty of 1921, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 - all represented at a stroke reversals of position and unexpected departures. So did 1916.
Wills sees the 1981 IRA hunger strikes as directly analogous: a moment of sacrifical intensity altering the political landscape. She has a point, but the "utter change" was not quite what the actors expected. From today's perspective, the lasting effect of that moment of high drama was to bring Sinn Fein into constitutional politics - a move which ultimately reversed their position on taking office alongside Unionists in a devolved Northern Ireland. There are parallels here, too, with the way that the campaign begun in 1916 ended in a partitioned Ireland, a civil war and a Free State remaining (until 1948-49) unwillingly within the Commonwealth. As Charles Peguy put it: "Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics." Wills's stylish, suggestive and highly intelligent book provides a riveting commentary on that process.
• Roy Foster's Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000 is published by Allen Lane.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5132022/Interview-with-Seamus-Heaney.html
On the eve of his 70th birthday, Seamus Heaney tells Sameer Rahim about his lifetime in poetry – and who he thinks would make a good poet laureate
By Sameer Rahim
Last Updated: 4:23PM BST 09 Apr 2009
Seamus Heaney published his earliest poems under the pseudonym “Incertus”, meaning “uncertain”. Perhaps his reticence was understandable. As every schoolchild now knows, Heaney grew up on a farm where what counted was your skill with a spade or a plough – not a pen. He also faced the dilemma of being a Catholic in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland.
Over time, though, as the critical adulation has flowed, the shy soul has transformed into the most lauded poet of our times. Last month, in addition to his dozens of garlands (including the Nobel Prize in 1995), he won the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. Heaney will turn 70 on Monday. So perhaps this qualifies – in the words of his Nobel speech – as a “point of arrival” in his life, though one he hopes will turn into a “stepping stone rather than a destination”.
I meet Heaney at Faber & Faber’s new sunlit offices in Bloomsbury (pleasingly close to TS Eliot’s old premises in Russell Square). “It’s a terrific prize,” he says, looking amiable and spry. “I was on the jury which gave the first award to Naipaul – that was when I was professor of poetry at Oxford.” Awarded every two years, there is no longlist or shortlist; more importantly for Heaney there is no “hullabaloo” or competitors exhibited like “creatures at the banquet”, something which makes him uncomfortable.
One benefit is the money. Along with £40,000 awarded to him personally, Heaney has been given £12,500 to spend on a project that encourages young writers. He is sending the money to Poetry Aloud, an Irish organisation that runs a poetry recital competition for schoolchildren. “North and South,” he is quick to add, “I like that.
“I love it because poetry enters them immediately: it ritualises poetry for them and then it never goes away. I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.” He cites one of his favourite examples: Primo Levi in Auschwitz taking comfort from the Dante he learned at school. So would he like children to memorise his poems? “It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme,” he admits. It was quite different when he was at school, a point he proves by reciting the opening of Keats’s “To Autumn”.
Heaney’s poems may not be learnt in schools but they are extensively studied. Exam boards love the poems of childhood from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), which are deemed perfect for GCSE students. The more complex Bog poems in Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) are staple fare at A-level. Is he flattered or does he resent the classification of his poems into “easy” and “difficult”? “I don’t feel resentful,” he says. “If I have any doubts,” he ventures carefully, “it’s the trimness with which the poems are taught sometimes. They’re much more related to the sociology of the times than they were – which is a good thing.” But he misses the traditional approach – “The rite words in the rote order,” he quotes approvingly from Joyce.
One classroom favourite is “The Early Purges”, which describes drowning kittens on a farm. “It’s terrific because it sets off a debate,” says Heaney, “but I think the poem is flawed because the voice changes halfway through” – from sympathy with the kittens to an acceptance of their deaths. “‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town/Where they consider death unnatural/But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down,” he quotes. “Very heavy handed but a gift to an English class because you’re left with issues.” Heaney would rather a poem such as “Sunlight” (below) were given more attention. The vision of his Aunt Mary baking bread on Mossbawn farm has no issues to extract; instead, the poet shares his pleasure in physical details – the “sunlit absence” in the yard, the “whitened nails” of Mary’s fingers.
Not all his poems lack strong opinions. On the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Easter Rising he published “Requiem for the Croppies” – a poem that commemorates the Irish rebels of 1798. I was surprised to learn that in the Sixties Heaney read this poem to a Protestant audience (unthinkable during the later years of Republican and Loyalist violence). “To read ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ wasn’t to say ‘up the IRA’ or anything,” he recalls. “It was silence-breaking rather than rabble-rousing.” Nevertheless it is a romanticised portrait of the rebels (“shaking scythes at cannon”). Heaney acknowledges that his audience listened to the poem in frosty silence. “You don’t have to love it,” he says. “You just have to permit it.”
Did he turn down the laureateship 10 years ago for political reasons? “Partly,” he says, quickly adding that, “I’ve nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time… it’s just that the basis of my imagination, the basis of the cultural starting point, is off-centre.” This is a less forthright response than the one he gave in 1982, after being included in an anthology of British poets: “My passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/to toast the Queen.” (He has lived in the Republic of Ireland since 1972.) His close friend Ted Hughes could write “mythological poems about the Queen Mother” because he was “an English patriot” – something Heaney could never have been.
How does he judge the outgoing laureate, Andrew Motion? Heaney chooses his words carefully. “Andrew gave it the complete 21st-century attention, did the outreach and the poems for the sovereign. He did wonderfully well,” he says, sounding like an indulgent teacher. So who should replace him? In 1977, Heaney gave a lecture which spoke appreciatively of three English poets: Hughes, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill. Might Hill (the only one still alive) make an interesting choice? “He would make a magnificent poet laureate,” says Heaney. “He has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech… a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain.” However, he continues, his poems show an acute distress at the falling away of standards – cultural and political. “I think because of that he wouldn’t want the job.” Heaney’s work lacks Hill’s religious seriousness.
But there are hints of his Catholic upbringing. Did he ever consider the Church? “The verb ‘consider’ covers such a wide range,” he says. “It was always a possibility. It was an overarching invitation at a Catholic boarding school in the Fifties.” His teachers posed the question to him: “Are you going into the Church or are you going into the World?” When given the choice of studying Greek or French – the Church or the World, as it were – he chose French. Could he have followed the example of Hopkins, a poet and a priest, and chosen both? “Hopkins’s poetry delighted me,” he says. “It brought me alive in all sorts of ways.” But Heaney’s delight was linguistic not religious.
Instead he chose poetry. But even so the world has made a habit of intruding, not least in critical praise and the prizes. There is a tension between the public poet – the laurelled voice of wisdom – and the man trying to write poems in his Dublin attic. “I’ve been working at that separation for a lifetime. That separation is a lifetime achievement also,” he adds. Ever since his first book, he has been aware of “the gap between the textual entity known as ‘SH’ and the inner poet”. How does he protect the poems? “The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful,” he says, “to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.” His words come alive. “The prizes can’t help you at all.”
Recently he reread TS Eliot’s later works. “I think only now am I beginning to understand the utter beauty and strength of something like ‘Ash Wednesday’,” he says. “It is a sort of affirmation and withdrawal: melody and prayer and deep uncertainty.” Eliot won the Nobel Prize after his best work was done. Since Heaney won it 14 years ago, he has published three more collections as well as his translation of Beowulf. Is there more to come? “My ideal would be Saul Bellow – they forgot he got the Nobel Prize.” Longevity helped with him. He chuckles. “There’s hope for that.”
From ‘Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication’ For Mary Heaney
Sunlight
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
Reproduced in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996’, published by Faber & Faber
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/nyregion/thecity/12gael.html
By SOPHIA HOLLANDER
April 12, 2009
DAN GREANEY’S brown-flecked blue eyes can still see half a century ago, when thousands of spectators roared at his every move, piled into stands at Gaelic Park, spilling out along the hillside and packed in around the sidelines. He is 71, his ruddy cheeks now spotted with age, but he can hear the cries of the beer sellers and the bands, heavy with fiddlers, behind the field where generations of Irish and Irish-American athletes once clashed.
Gaelic Park, a 2,000-seat stadium that sits in the shadow of the el at Broadway and 240th Street in Riverdale in the Bronx, was always more than just a sports field. It was the place where New York’s Irish went to make connections and to meet potential spouses, to mingle with friends from the old country and to discover new ones.
From the 1920s on, players battled ferociously in the Irish sports of hurling (a combination of baseball, lacrosse and field hockey) and Gaelic football (which blends elements of soccer and rugby) while fans caught up on teams back in Ireland. Amid the alien concrete landscape of America, where streets were filled with strangers, Gaelic Park was a haven.
“There was so much activity here, so many teams, so many players,” Mr. Greaney said one Sunday afternoon, surveying the thin spread of fans gathered under a drizzling gray sky. “They removed all that stuff.”
Where rickety wooden stands once teetered toward the sky, there is now a scattering of empty picnic tables. On the field where players once barreled into one another, cracking heads and bones in brutal pursuit of the ball, a referee’s whistle regulates play. The beer sellers and the Irish bands are absent.
Though the great waves of Irish immigrants had long since passed, by the 1980s New York’s concentration of Irish immigrants earned the region the status of an Irish county in the eyes of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which is based in Ireland and oversees hurling and Gaelic football (the rest of North America is considered a second county).
But from 1990 to 2000, the number of Irish in New York fell from about 390,000 to just over 300,000, according to census data. And while the booming Irish economy of the 1990s has started to skid, the reversal has yet to staunch the number of Irish returning home.
Gaelic Park, where the season officially starts next Sunday, has felt the impact of these shifts. The number of hurling teams has fallen to four from nine; men’s Gaelic football teams have been slashed to 27 from 32. On the women’s side, nine Gaelic football teams have withered to five.
“What we find is the people who are actually managing and running these clubs are the same old faces,” said Larry McCarthy, chairman of the Gaelic Athletic Association of Greater New York, the group’s local branch. “They are not being replaced.”
On this Sunday, a cluster of young men were warming up, cheerfully smacking small, hard balls against a wall bearing the words “Absolutely No Ball Playing in the Area.” Players scrabbled for the ball, sticks crashing in rapid fire.
But old-timers acknowledge that crowds are not what they used to be, that the park’s centrality to the Irish experience is fading as older players start families and feel the tug of American options.
“The type of immigrant coming out of Ireland now isn’t dependent on that social structure,” said Mr. McCarthy, who teaches management at Seton Hall. “There are a lot of people in New York, Irish immigrants, who have never been to Gaelic Park.”
And while the park is currently in its best physical condition ever — a $3 million renovation provided a new turf field and night lighting — other forces have taken their toll. Tightened immigration laws and stricter border security after 9/11 have drained the park of players and spectators, further challenging its historic role as the heart of New York’s Irish community.
“The funny thing is, for years Gaelic Park was going very well because there were so many Irish here and we were trying to get the field renovated and done up,” said Peter Slattery, 39, a hurler turned coach. “Last year is the first year it was done with the new surface and made a massive improvement. But it’s a shame that there are so many people gone, that it didn’t happen years ago.”
‘The Worst Place Ever’
When Therese Crowe arrived in 1962 from Tipperary in Ireland, the Bronx seemed to be all concrete. Back home, jobs were scarce, and relatives and other adults tracked every move she made. And so at 27, she exchanged her lush, intimate village for a land of pavement and tall buildings, surrounded by strangers with a bewildering assortment of accents, languages and activities.
“I wanted freedom,” said Ms. Crowe, now 74, with cropped blond hair and eyes ringed with dark eyeliner. She was sitting in a dimly lighted banquet hall next to Gaelic Park, chairs stacked on tables. She looked around and sighed. “It used to be fabulous years ago.”
Growing up in Ireland, Ms. Crowe had heard of Gaelic Park; everyone had. She envisioned a vast stadium, grand and glittering. Instead, she said with a laugh, “it was the worst place ever,” an expanse of balding fields dotted with “a couple of little huts.”
It didn’t matter. Thousands streamed into the park every Sunday, filling the stands with familiar talk, familiar food and, most of all, the feeling of home.
“You met everybody,” said Ms. Crowe, who has volunteered as the park’s nurse for more than 30 years. “If you were lonely, it was a great place to go.”
In the crowd was Terry Connaughton, a barrel-chested athlete who in 1952, at age 19, had emigrated from western Ireland. His oldest brother had left before him, sending back the family’s single suit for the next sibling to wear on the journey.
When Mr. Connaughton was growing up, his village was home to 100 people and four pubs. There were no movie theaters, no television sets. Entertainment consisted of one main activity: hurling.
“I was involved practically since the day I was born, like most of the people,” said Mr. Connaughton, now 75, sitting on the sidelines of Gaelic Park. “I would be playing every single day. Because back in the day, as the fellow says, Ireland was poor in my time. Very poor.”
On Mr. Connaughton’s first Sunday in New York, his brother took him to Gaelic Park. He joined a team and played for the next 20 years.
Over that time, he joined the Police Department, met his future wife in the stands and found a second career as the owner of a local restaurant. Even after he stopped playing, his life remained interwoven with Gaelic Park, and he served three terms as president of New York’s Gaelic Athletic Association.
The field that Mr. Connaughton played on — the “Sahara Desert,” as the Irish papers called it — is now gone, replaced by artificial turf. The dressing rooms, with their unpredictable water temperatures, have been renovated. But it is other things that he misses.
“One thing is for sure, there’s less people attending the games now than back in the day,” Mr. Connaughton said. “Almost 100 percent of the Irish immigrants would come here. Today it would be 20 percent, maybe, tops.”
The Ireland he knew is also changing.
“Young people have almost everything they have in this country,” he said. “Irish people coming out here today? They go skiing.”
New World, Old Pastime
Even a generation after Ms. Crowe and Mr. Connaughton emigrated, little had changed in their homeland. When Peter Slattery was growing up there during the 1970s and ’80s, schoolbags were still packed with books and a hurling stick, and in rural villages, the hurling pitch remained the central gathering place.
“From the time you’re a kid, that’s what you’re taught,” Mr. Slattery said. “All your idols are playing it; all the kids you know are playing it; everybody’s playing it.”
Hurling unified the community and provided identity. Mr. Slattery and his five siblings grew up with the game, but when it came time to find work, they struggled. Listening to stories spun by cousins home on holidays from America, Mr. Slattery began to dream of a different life.
In 1992, Mr. Slattery made his move. He immigrated to the United States, settling in New Jersey and going to work as a bartender. Like Ms. Crowe a generation earlier, he felt an initial shock.
“I loved it and all that,” he said, “but there wasn’t that many Irish up around here. There’s no point in talking to an American person about hurling because they won’t know what you’re talking about.”
One day, a priest named Father Bolland walked into his bar.
“How is everything going?” the priest asked in a Galway accent.
“Great, great,” Mr. Slattery recalled replying.
“There aren’t too many Irish around here,” Father Bolland observed. He passed along the number of a local hurling club where he had played 30 years before, and a few weeks later, Mr. Slattery joined the team.
At Gaelic Park, Mr. Slattery found the conversations he craved, along with news about teams back home. He tried to make it to Gaelic Park every Sunday, whether or not his team was playing, and frequently staggered home at 3 or 4 in the morning after postgame nights at the pub.
But when Mr. Slattery finally retired from playing, he noticed that everyone else seemed to be retiring or moving away, too. He stayed involved, suiting up when there were too few people to field a team, but other players just disappeared. Mr. Slattery began hearing talk of teams disbanding. Clubs started to fold, one by one, and two years ago, he realized that his team could be next.
“It’s very hard to have a championship with less than five or six teams, but if it goes below four, you’re going to have big problems,” Mr. Slattery said. “We’re always trying to recruit new guys. But the numbers are dwindling all the time.”
‘Can You Play Camogie?’
As Geraldine Lavery, then a trim 34-year-old with long dark hair, stepped out onto the field, a shiver raced through her body. It was June 2007 and the first day of the Cul Camp, an Irish camp making its debut in New York.
More than 80 boys and girls from 6 to 9 years old were arrayed in hurling and Gaelic football practice stations around the field. Not all of them were Irish. She was overwhelmed.
“I saw in front of me the future of Gaelic sports for my children,” Ms. Lavery recently recalled. “I had a rush that just came through me.”
Her involvement began in the late ’90s, just weeks after she arrived from Ireland. A young teacher uncertain about her next steps, Ms. Lavery stopped at a pub down the block from Gaelic Park. There, a friendly Irish waitress started peppering her with questions, most important of which was: Did Ms. Lavery play camogie, the female version of hurling?
“Once you hear that accent, the first question you ask is can you play football or camogie,” said the waitress, Pauline Coll, who is now a close friend of Ms. Lavery’s. “You serve her a cup of tea. ‘By the way, can you play camogie?’ It’s just something automatic that comes out of my mouth.”
Ms. Lavery joined a camogie team and soon began playing Gaelic football as well.
“Had I not had the Irish sports and the Gaelic sports the first two years, I would have gone home within the first six weeks of being here,” said Ms. Lavery, who is now dean of students at St. Jean Baptiste High School on the Upper East Side.
Both women were participants in the Ladies Gaelic Athletic Association of New York, which was founded in 1991. When a president named Nollaig Cleary was elected, she asked Ms. Coll to found a youth program for girls.
“Patience, hard work and lots of phone calls,” Ms. Coll said of her strategy. “Initially I’d say to one mother: ‘Oh, you know Gaelic football. Why don’t you bring your daughter up?’ It’s a very tight-knit community, and if your daughter is doing it, my daughter should do it, too.”
Ms. Coll recently moved back to Ireland. But results of her efforts are clear. More than 300 girls play in a program that began with 35. The boys’ side has undergone a similar transformation; today, as many as 600 boys play on local teams.
The leader of the boys’ youth program, Roger Slattery (no relation to Peter Slattery), retired from playing in 1979, but when his first son, Ciaran, turned 5, he wanted to play.
“My father hurled here in Gaelic Park when I was a kid, and I hurled in Gaelic Park when I got old enough,” said Mr. Slattery, now 53.
Every Friday and Saturday night, his household in Castle Hill in the Bronx crackled with debates between his father and his uncle over Irish clubs. Hurlers visited the house, photographs of their exploits adorned the walls, and radios broadcast the games. Every Sunday, they all trooped to Gaelic Park.
It’s a tradition he has tried to pass on to his American-born sons.
“There comes a place where family, work, children come along and our priorities change, and we can’t devote the time that we have to,” Mr. Slattery said. “And we miss it.”
He paused. “Maybe we’re living a little vicariously through our children at this stage,” he continued. “We never wanted to be spectators on the sidelines. But now we have a chance to get back involved.”
http://www.transparent.com/languagepages/irish/overview.htm
Overview of the Irish Language
The Gaelic language is divided into two distinct varieties: Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic. Irish Gaelic is more commonly just called "Irish". It is a Celtic language that is part of the Indo-European language family.
Written Irish was based at first on Latin orthography and British pronunciation, which makes ancient texts difficult to decipher. Viking invasions in 8th century Ireland left their mark on Irish vocabulary by introducing Scandinavian words that refer to navigation and urban life.
Up until the 17th century, the Irish language was spoken by the entire population of Ireland. It was predicted that Irish would become extinct in the 19th century due to the influence of English. However, the language experienced a resurgence after the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921. A standard written form of the Irish language was implemented in 1945.
Today, about 500,000 people speak Irish, which adds up to about one-seventh of the population of the Republic of Ireland. Irish Gaelic is the official language of Ireland, but it has been overtaken by English as the primary spoken language. Because of this, the government has instigated revival programs. The Irish language is now taught in all of the schools in Ireland. Dialects of Irish are prominent in the following areas: Munster, Connacht, Donegal, Leinster, and Ulster.
The Irish Alphabet and Irish Vocabulary
The Irish alphabet has only 18 letters, as compared to the 26 in English. The remaining letters, such as "j" and "z," may be used in loanwords from other languages, but are not used in native Irish vocabulary words.
English words of Gaelic origin include bard, glen, bog, whiskey, shamrock, and galore.
When you're learning Irish vocabulary, watch out for false cognates. These are vocabulary words that resemble English words but have a very different meaning. If you are learning to speak Irish and you ask someone for a bean, you may be surprised to find out you requested a woman! The phrase "Have no fear!" might get you in trouble, fear means man! If you tell someone they are bád, you're calling them a boat!
Irish Grammar and Irish Pronunciation
Unlike English, Irish nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles have a gender assigned to them. To complicate matters, the gender of Irish nouns does not always seem logical. For example, cailín (girl) is a masculine noun, whereas bean (woman) is a feminine noun.
Learning Irish pronunciation can be tricky for English speakers because the words are not pronounced phonetically. Some words are particularly baffling. Teamhair (hill) is pronounced "t'yower"; niamh (brilliance) is pronounced "nee-av"; and suidhe (sit) is pronounced "see."
Regular practice is necessary to learn to speak Irish well. That's one reason why good Irish software programs can be so useful for Irish language learning. It's easier than ever to learn Irish and to begin to speak Irish with the language resources and Irish language software from Transparent Language. With IrishNow!, Before You Know It, and our other language learning products, you will speak Irish, learn Irish vocabulary, conjugate Irish verbs, understand Irish grammar, and master Irish pronunciation quickly. Best of luck with your Irish language learning!
Top Ten Reasons to Learn Irish
10. You can never have enough green widgets on your iGoogle page.
9. Lend credibility to your “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” t-shirt.
8. Corned beef and cabbage works on the Atkins diet.
7. Speak the language where towns have more pubs than people.
6. Understand the secret morse code in Irish step dancing.
5. Finally understand what those banshees are wailing about.
4. Insult the Lucky Charms leprechaun in his own language.
3. Realize that when the Irish enjoy good craic, it's fun and legal.
2. Enjoy your U2 music videos without subtitles.
1. Order your Guinness in its native language.
(Poster's Note: Popular Irish Northern Aid Language site http://irishnorthernaid.com/language_hub.html)
Updated: 10/4/2009
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