Word: irishness
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...into yet another disastrous fight? This week Britain is set to suspend self-government, close the Stormont Assembly and rule directly from London, one more unhappy time. The immediate cause was a police crackdown on a ring of alleged spies run by Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. Police and government officials say republicans had vacuumed up more than a thousand sensitive documents, from conversations between Tony Blair and George W. Bush to personal details about security personnel. First Minister David Trimble, who negotiated the Belfast agreement for the unionists, was planning to take his party...
...Lowell Lecture Hall to Lamont to Commencement 2000, he’s enriched the University with hundreds of appearances over the years—an effort he extended last Thursday with the kickoff to his October lecture and reading series. Red-faced, squinty-eyed and with a rich Irish accent, the affable Heaney delivered to a capacity crowd at Jefferson Hall on “Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven: How Some Poems Got Written.” What began as a highly anecdotal speech about the process of composition became an earnest defense of poetry and the arts...
...much of his own writing, Heaney returns to County Derry and his childhood on an Irish farm, to those “long forgotten and suddenly remembered places.” For instance, the foci of his poem “Lightenings,” which became the night’s case study in composition, are the recalled image of a beggar on a threshold, Heaney’s feeling that the world had become “unroofed” after his parents’ deaths and his memories of playing marbles as a child. Mix thoughtfully...
...around the country and then return in winter to a self-contained, anachronistic universe. The Travelers arrange their children's marriages and, in front of "country people" (non-Travelers), speak a Gaelic-English dialect called "cant." ("Misli shayjo!" means "Go away, the police are here!") Some have traces of Irish accents, though their ancestors arrived in the U.S. 150 years ago. Says Michael McDonagh, one of the 30,000 Travelers still in Ireland, who has worked with hisU.S. counterparts: "Their sense of tradition is stronger there than here...
...Many Irish Travelers, once known as tinkers, moved to the U.S. to escape the potato famine. They started out as horse traders. Today, between 20,000 and 100,000 English, Scottish and Irish Travelers (nobody knows the actual number) live in groups, mostly in the South. They are reviled by some as con artists who prey on the elderly by overcharging for shoddy home-repair jobs. Others insist the Travelers are hard workers and have no more lawbreakers than any other community...