Latest News
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Book highlights Irish contribution to US slang
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007Snazzy, slugger, balony, lollygag: all of these words entered the American vernacular thanks to the Irish speakers who migrated to the US in the last century, according to a ground-breaking new work.
Jack Cassidy has recently published “How the Irish Invented Slang: the Secret Language of the Crossroad”. The book has received substantial attention in Ireland in recent weeks, and noted Irish American essayist and novelist Peter Quinn has weighed in on the subject with a review posted on the publisher’s website.
Quinn lauds Cassidy’s “momentous” revelations, noting that his discoveries have made a “hugely significant breakthrough in our ability to understand the origins of vital parts of the American vernacular”. Quinn continues:
He has solved the mystery of how, after centuries of intense interaction, a people as verbally agile and inventive as the Irish could seemingly have made almost no impression on English, a fact that H.L. Mencken, among other students of the language, found baffling. What was missing, it turns out, wasn’t a steady penetration of Irish into English, but someone equipped with Cassidy’s genius – a unique combination of street smarts and scholarship, of memory, intuition, and intellect – who could discern and decipher the evidence.
Read the review on the Counterpunch website.
Atlantic Arc to encourage research cooperation
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007A new research network will examine the migration of Ulster-Scots, Scots and Irish to Canada and the US. The Atlantic Arc has been founded by a group of academics, including several from the University of Ulster, who visited recently as part of a cross-border delegation to New Brunswick aimed at developing academic, cultural and economic co-operation across the Atlantic.
The Atlantic Arc will facilitate research cooperation and the use of archives among institutes in Canada, the US, and Europe.
See the press release from the University of Ulster.
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.
« Previous Entries Next Entries »