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    Colm Toibin focuses on reluctant exile in “Brooklyn”

    Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

    Colm Toibin’s new novel, “Brooklyn”, garnered substantial press over the weekend. The author’s sixth novel is about a reluctant emigrant from Enniscorthy who moves to the New York borough knowing “the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar”. The book reflects on the pangs of homesickness and depicts the struggles of the main character, Eilis as she adapts to a new land fraught with its own struggles and eventually falls in love.  Just as she begins to settle in, Eilis is called home by a family tragedy and must return to Enniscorthy.

    The book is receiving widespread critical acclailm.

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    Ringsend native publishes memoir on American life

    Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

    Angeline Kearns Blain, a woman raised in 1950s Ringsend who today is an adjunct professor of sociology at Boise State University in Idaho, has published a memoir. “I used to be Irish” is being lauded by critics for its insight into a story too little told: the experience of Irish women emigrants.

    Angeline Kearns Blain left Ireland at the age of 18 in 1957 to become the wife of an American soldier she had met at a Dublin bus-stop.  The streetwise young woman had been consciously focusing on Americans as romantic targets in order to escape her working-class life as a cinema ice-cream seller. After settling in New England with her conservative, Protestant husband, she eventually settles in Idaho Falls where her husband gets a job at a government nuclear research facility. She would suffer a nervous breakdown and a marital breakup before turning to education and a career in academia.

    The Irish Independent says “Her memoir is extraordinary, told with blunt honesty and scathing with. It’s a long way from the flats in Ringsend to being a professor at an American university”.

    The Irish Times review notes the subversive nature of Kearns Blain’s story:

    I Used To Be Irish exposes both the gender and class fault-lines not traditionally attended to in accounts of emigration: Kearns Blain’s overtures to a fellow Dublin woman emigrant marooned alongside her in a backwater town are spurned when the Loreto College graduate in question discovers that Angeline left school at 14 to scavenge dumps. The memoir upends the popular image of the Irish emigrant, that of the raw country boy pining for rural simplicity in a debauched foreign land: Kearns Blain is a streetwise Dubliner who knows enough about American popular culture to initially act the pure Irish colleen to beguile her GI, a teetotaller Puritan who later winces each time Angeline lets slip some obscene Dublin colloquialism or orders a shot of whiskey.

    Angeline Kearns Blain has also written a memoir of her Dublin childhood, called “Stealing Sunlight”.

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    ESRI predicts 17% unemployment next year

    Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

    The Economic and Social Reseaerch Institute is predicting unemployment reaching 15% by the end of this year before peaking at 17% next year. The organisation is estimating emigration figures will be 60,000 over the next two years. The Irish Independent notes that the organisations cautions, “It would be wrong to call that a forecast. It is more of an assumption, because migration is so hard to predict”.

    The ESRI also predicts that the economy will contract by 14% in the three years from 2008 to 2010, noting, “By historic and international standards, this is a truly dramatic development. Prior to this the largest decline for an idustrialised country since the 1930s had been in Finland, where real GDP declined between 1990 and 1993”.

    The CSO announced today that the unemployment rate now stands at 11.4%, with 388,600 people on the Live Register.  This is more than double the rate of a year ago.

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    Global Irish Economic Forum to focus on growth, relationship

    Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

    The government is inviting leading Irish and Irish-connected individuals from around the world to attend the inaugural Global Irish Economic Forum on September 18-20. The planned conference, which will be held at Farmleigh in Dublin, is the latest in a series of events aimed at harnessing the economic power of the global Irish community.

    Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin said,

    “The primary purpose of the Forum will be to examine how the Irish, at home and abroad, can work together to generate ideas which will contribute to our overall efforts at economic recovery. It will also play a critical role in shaping the future direction of the relationship between Ireland and its Diaspora, particularly in the economic area”.

    Minister Martin noted that the conference is part of its strategy to engage more deeply with the diaspora:

    “Successive Irish Governments have built a multi-layered relationship with the global Irish community, one that has marked us out as a role model for many other countries.

    “The Forum will provide us with the opportunity to take Ireland’s relationship with the global Irish community in a new direction, to examine innovative ways of working together and to generate ideas for Ireland’s economic recovery. Now is the time to shape a more strategic relationship which will bring benefits both to Ireland and to our global community and which has a more developed economic focus.”

    “Our global Irish community constitutes one of the most powerful and far-reaching resources at our disposal and, using our worldwide network of Embassies and Consulates, we have identified some of the most successful individuals from that global community. They will bring with them an invaluable global perspective. To help facilitate discussion, a relatively small and tightly focused group of individuals is being invited.”

    The effort is complementing the Ireland-United States Strategic Review launched last month and the strategy for economic renewal outlined in “Building Ireland’s Smart Economy” in December.

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    Surfing film highlights Irish role in origins of sport

    Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

    The role of Irish-American George Freeth in establishing the modern sport of surf-boarding is explored in a film now playing in movie theatres. Waveriders tells the story of Freeth, who had a Hawaiian mother and an Irish father. He brought the sport of surfing from Hawaii, where it had nearly been eliminated by missionaries, to California, where he initiated a revival of the sport. Freeth also set up the first lifeguard unit in California and introduced the sport of water polo to the state.

    The film, which won the audience award at the Dublin International Film Festival, also highlights the role of Irish-Americans in establishing the sport in Ireland.

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    ILIR renews campaign as Obama gives mixed signals on reform

    Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

    The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform has resumed its campaign on behalf of the undocumented in the United States with a meeting outside Boston this week. More than 350 attended the meeting, which was held in the Irish Cultural Center in Canton.

    ILIR President Ciaran Staunton said, “ILIR wants to make sure that this is the last generation of Irish in America that has to listen to a family member’s funeral on the telephone. It is our goal that this is the last generation of Irish to be undocumented in America.”

    Former Congressman Bruce Morrison spoke about the proposal to create a visa similar to the E-3 that was established in a deal between Australia and the US last year. Even if such a deal could be passed for Ireland, however, this visa would probably not assist the undocumented already living in the US.

    The Obama administration has given mixed signals on immigration reform in recent weeks. In March, President Obama told the Hispanic Immigration Caucus that he remained committed to comprehensive immigation reform; Obama had made a campaign pledge to address the issue in his first year in office. He said in March that he would initiate the process with a White House meeting this spring. However, Vice President Biden told a gathering of Central American leaders this month that the economy was an obstacle to immigration reform.

    “It’s difficult to tell a constituency while unemployment is rising, they’re losing their jobs and their homes, that what we should do is, in fact, legalize (illegal immigrants) and stop all deportation.”

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