Emigrant drama takes Irish award, goes to US
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007A drama about Irish emigrants in London has taken a major Irish film award. “Kings”, a feature shot mostly in Irish, has taken the Directors Finders Series award. The film, based on the play “Kings of the Kilburn High Road”, tells the story of a group of young men who leave the west of Ireland for London in the 1970s. Thirty years later, they are reunited at the funeral of the youngest of them. The film depicts the men’s feelings of dislocation and isolation after three decades spent on the building sites of Britain.
The award means that it will be taken to the US, where it will be showcased to distributors with the intention of securing a US distribution deal.
The film stars Colm Meaney as well as Donal O’Kelly, Brendan Conroy, Donncha Crowley, Barry Barnes and Seán Ó Tarpaigh. It was regarded as one of the hot tickets at the recent Galway Film Fleadh.
The film was recently reviewed favourably in Variety. Read the review.
Intrepid Cork pioneer honoured by Cowgirl Hall of Fame
Monday, July 30th, 2007Cork native and intrepid Gold Rush pioneer Nellie Cashman will be inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Texas in November. Nellie Cashman was born in 1845 in Cork, and died in 1925 in British Columbia. Her life of adventure took her throughout the American and Canadian West, where she operated boarding houses and restaurants.
Cashman was also a humanitarian, who began hospitals and would give free meals to miners in need of aid. In one particularly dramatic episode, she funded and led a 77-day rescue operation through severe winter conditions to save dozens of miners in the Cassair Mountains in British Columbia.
Visit the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame web site.
Minister meeting with NY undocumented
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan is meeting with undocumented Irish immigrants in New York today. The Green Party member is visiting the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in the Bronx, then going to the Aisling Irish Community Center in Yonkers, and then meeting with the undocumented in Eileen’s Country Kitchen, a Yonkers restaurant. Later tonight, the Irish Times is reporting he is meeting with the “Young Irish Network”, where he will be accompanied by Niall Mellon, a property developer who is best known in Ireland for his work mobilising volunteers to build homes in impoverished areas of South Africa.
Mr Ryan will meet with New York City speaker Christine Quinn, the highest-ranking elected politician in New York politics. He will travel by train to Washington for a meeting of the European-American Business Council and also meet with US officials on environmental and communication issues.
The Green Party politician will travel by subway while in New York, instead of limosine, and the government has bought carbon offsets for the very first time to compensate for the emissions produced by the trip.
Irish nurses among those leaving
Monday, July 23rd, 2007Nurses are leaving Ireland for better pay and conditions, according to a spokesperson for the Irish Nurses Organisation. INO representative Ann Keating was quoted in an Irish Independent article that highlighted the fact that Canadian hospitals are headhunting Filipino nurses working in Ireland.
There are more than 10,000 foreign-born among the 43,000 nurses working in Ireland; a Canadian recruitment firm is recruiting among them here in the belief that immigrant nurses will have had the opportunity to acquire English and experience working in Western hospitals. Filipino nurses were recruited to fill shortages in hospitals run by religious orders, in a drive that started in 2000. Many of the nurses are leaving now for Canada to access better incentives, including subsidised housing grants, cheap car loans, and the ability to bring close relations over after four years. In contrast, Filipino nurses in Ireland, very few of whom have citizenship, have reported dissatisfaction with the high cost of living and the fact that their spouses’ qualifications are often not recognised; in addition, their children are treated as overseas students and cannot access free college tuition.
Irish nurses, however, are also finding life abroad tempting. “But it’s not just Filipino nurses who are leaving. In the past eight years, about 12,000 Irish nurses have left for places like Canada”, said Ms Keating.
Potato patch inspires thoughts of home
Monday, July 23rd, 2007Kevin Connolly, a US-based Irish emigrant, wrote in Saturday’s Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times of his experiences growing potatoes in his home in Indiana. While the topic may seem prosaic, the writer creates a particularly moving snapshot of a simple link with home.
He notes that he grows Kerr’s Pinks, and adds, “Inspired by a nostalgia for seed types that I grew up with and which were developed in Scotland or Ireland, I sought out a variety that might even remind me of home. Watching them grow through their various stages is like looking at the garden in Sligo where I grew them for years.”
Mr Connolly elevates the humble spud to iconic status, admitting that he sends digital photos of them over to his father in Ireland, while the tubers themselves allow him to feel a sense of continuity. He also gives bemused house guests tours of his tiny patch.
He concludes the article:
“Here in the Indiana night air with the sound of the locusts and katydids cranking up the volume of their nocturnal cacophony, and amid the flickering lights of the fireflies, I think of a poem by Rupert Brooke, with slightly altered words and greatly altered sense: “That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever Ireland”.
Read the entire article at the Irish Times website (subscription required).
Journalist who chronicled emigration’s losses honoured
Friday, July 20th, 2007The author of a seminal work on Irish emigration will be honoured by having a road named after him in his hometown. Journalist John Healy was a crusading journalist who wrote “Nobody Shouted Stop” (also called “Death of an Irish Town”) in 1968; the work details the losses suffered by Charlestown, Co Mayo in the middle of the last century, as unemployment and emigration took its toll. Healy wrote for local Mayo newspapers before moving to the Irish Times, where his work helped keep the problems of his native region in national focus.
The town of Charlestown has fared well in the ensuing years, with a population of around 1,700, up from less than half that in the 1960s. While the economic boom that lifted Ireland’s fortune brought prosperity to the town, it was also aided greatly by Knock Airport – a development championed by the journalist.
The N5 Charlestown Bypass will be named “The John Healy bypass”, pending final approval by a full meeting of Mayo County Council in September. The move was proposed by Cllr Joe Mellett, who said, “He’s a guy that we can associate with especially in bad times. He made the rest of the country aware of what was happening then, but he would be delighted if he saw what was happening today. All Charlestown is proud of him, as are the people of Mayo”.
The 18-kilometre stretch of road is due to open in October.
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