Word: irishness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lobby, the spy paused to scuff at a frayed carpet edge with the toe of one glossy, custom-made Irish brogan. He sniffed the air. His glance shifted to the flowers on the coffee tables, skipped from ashtray to ashtray around the small room. Tilting his head back, he peered at the ceiling plaster and moldings. Finally, almost diffidently, he walked up to the counter and cleared his throat. "Yes, sir? What can I do for you?" inquired the receptionist. The spy plunked Fielding's Travel Guide down on the counter. "My name," he announced, "is Temple Fielding. I happen...
Died. Robert Briscoe, 74, the irrepressible Orthodox Jew who was Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1956-57 and 1961-62; in Dublin. No one was ever more fiercely Irish than "Bobby" Briscoe. He was an I.R.A. gunrunner in Ireland's struggle for independence, then an activist in the civil war that followed. In 1927 he was elected to the Irish Dail (Parliament) and his terms as Lord Mayor were marked by many trips abroad promoting trade and tourism. His election, said Briscoe, would show the world that "at least in Ireland there is absolute tolerance...
...else fails with such devastating charm, with such splendid success. Of all the failed Irishmen, none carries down the broken standard of his race more convincingly than the failed Irish priest. Dublin Novelist and Playwright Richard Power has written a funny, rueful little classic about the last days of 63-year-old Father Conroy, whose sudden dying is less a natural act than a winsome acknowledgment of his own obsolescence-and perhaps that of his country as well...
Father Conroy is that saddest of all alienated creatures, a man half in step with his times. Both as a man of God and a man of Ireland, he lacks vocation. He has little use for the fuddy-duddy reactionaries of Irish Catholicism, but he is almost equally unsympathetic to the new-style, gogo, golf-club-toting young priests buoyed up by their faith in sociology. Outside of the church, Father Conroy hardly knows which to despair of more-the ignorant Irish peasants whom he loves, or the smooth, gray-suited men of the future whom he fears justly...
Impelled by premonitions of his own death, the priest revisits his childhood home and pays calls on relatives he has not seen in years. Most of them belong among the Irish categories of the spiritually dead. His sister, characteristically, after one memorable lovemaking holiday, lovelessly married another man and has lived out her life as anticlimax...