Land of Ire

IRELAND – What's Up?

ABORTION VOTE

Will be covering Ireland and will report issues of political and cultural interest.  The greatest right now is the vote on abortion on May 25, 2018.  Given Ireland voted for civil unions as the first country in the world to do so, its right-wing Catholic heritage is eroding.  The scandals around dead orphans packed into graves at Catholic orphanages didn’t help.  The Irish, like the rest of Europe, now say they might be ‘religious’ but no longer attend church in the numbers they once did.  I expect mass demonstrations in Dublin around the vote on the 25^th.

England's Colony Rises

EASTER RISING

Dublin was the scene of the Easter Rising in 1916, part of the revolutionary waves that moved through the world during WWI.  There is a tour of Dublin based on that insurrection.   Jim Juice will get a nod too and any such Viking relics that are interesting.
 
THE SOUTH

Other than the scenery, there are bits of more recent history in the south of Ireland.  Besides the beer, music, windswept, wet and cool land.   A British poorhouse for the Irish.  Ruined cottages, abandoned during the famine.  The location where Michael Collins was assassinated.  The ancestral home of Daniel O’Connell.  And …

THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN

Reading a book about the Irish revolutionary and Union Civil War general Thomas Meagher, who was part of the “Young Ireland” movement in 1848 during the ‘great hunger.’  He was arrested by the English for his role in that struggle, and was sent to a penal colony in Tasmania.  Then he ended up in the U.S. where he led the union Irish Brigade in some key battles of the U.S. Civil War.  Slavery and the oppression of the Irish seemed similar struggles to Meagher.  To be reviewed fully.

Red Frog
May 17, 2018