Word: irishness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 - he would later, much later, memorably describe the scene of his conception in his memoir - but he grew up in Ireland. His parents were both Irish immigrants, and they moved back there, to Limerick, in an effort to stay ahead of McCourt's father's drinking problem. They didn't succeed. Malachy, Frank's father, worked intermittently as a laborer, but he drank constantly...
...baby girl - died of disease and malnutrition. "It was, of course, a miserable childhood," McCourt famously wrote in Angela's Ashes, in a passage that's worth quoting in full. "The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English...
...Australia's complexion, too, is changing - literally. Until the 1970s, an exclusionist White Australia Policy kept out most Asian immigrants. But today, around 8% of Australians are of Asian descent. (If nothing else, Rudd jokes, the changing immigration pattern has catalyzed a culinary revolution in a country where Irish stew was once considered haute cuisine. "At last," says the Prime Minister, "we have some decent food...
...clutch of Western countries have put curbs on burqas and niqabs, the full-face veils that leave only a slit for the eyes. The Irish have banned the burqa from classrooms, and in June, the Michigan Supreme Court gave judges the power to direct how witnesses dress for court, after a Muslim woman refused to take off her niqab while testifying. The French, however, have gone beyond practical arguments, saying that face veils don't just gum up processes in courts, surgeries and schools, but are an affront to the republic itself and its traditions of secularism. In 2004, France...
...falling apart at the seams: Last week 22 people were killed in a tragic train accident that almost certainly could have been prevented by better controlling techniques, and for over two months Berlusconi has been under attack for his sex life. Not to mention the fact that Irish pop-singer-turned-activist Bob Geldof virulently criticized Italy’s Prime Minister for only delivering three percent of the international aid it had promised to give...