Irish America

Irish America

Emigration

A Window on the Past

By Katherine Hartnett, Editorial AssistantDecember / January 2008

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This book is lovingly dedicated to my son, Max George, whose great-grand-father Edward Conway immigrated to America in 1900 at the age of 18. Arriving at Ellis Island from Ballina, Ireland, he had two dollars in his pocket and listed his occupation as “laborer.” By 1915, he was already living the American dream – he had a family, owned a home, and in one photo, a derby hat sits … [Read more...] about A Window on the Past

Hibernia: Irish
U.N. Sculpture

By Irish America Staff
October / November 2000

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The United Nations recently received a sculpture from the Irish government. The work, by renowned Galway artist John Behan, celebrates the Irish diaspora and their contribution to the world. Entitled Arrival, the work portrays Irish emigrants debarking from a ship. If this sounds like a typical Famine commemoration, it's not. As the Irish Minister of State at the Department … [Read more...] about Hibernia: Irish
U.N. Sculpture

The Bearing of the Green

By Pete Hamill, Contributor
October / November 2000

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Some thoughts on being Irish-American. As a proud Irish-American, I begin with a simple assumption: there is no way to precisely define that elusive, complex human category called the Irish-American. The tools of sociology are as inadequate to the task as the forms of the Census Bureau, and the jeweler's art of the lexicographer can't come close to an answer. This should … [Read more...] about The Bearing of the Green

Nora, an Excerpt

By Thomas Lynch
October / November 2000

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Even now, here 30 years since, when I turn to the southwest in Ennis from Shannon, and head out on the peninsula that ends at Loop Head, and somewhere on that road get my first wind of turfsmoke, I remember the first time and the sense that I had then of coming home. "The name's good," the man in the customs hall had said, letting my bags pass without a look. I had a hundred … [Read more...] about Nora, an Excerpt

Leaves of Pain

By Jimmy Breslin
October / November 2000

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How too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. At first, it seemed to be nothing. It was a curled-up dark brown leaf about the size of a good lock of hair and it was preserved in glass in a room in the Fairlow Herbarium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A typewritten card alongside the leaf said that it was taken from an infected potato plant in Ireland during the … [Read more...] about Leaves of Pain