Word: sligo
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When Patrick Paddy Hale left his native County Sligo in Ireland to volunteer in the Royal Air Force, he probably never imagined that duty would take him to a country some of whose inhabitants might regard him as a kind of latter-day Black and Tan sent by the British to frustrate a legitimate demand for self-determination. But Paddy Hale was ordered to Cyprus, where for 2½ years he lived quietly off port with his wife. One day last May three Cypriot laborers came to the hut at Nicosia airport where Corporal Hale worked. They asked for water...
That is the epitaph that Poet William Butler Yeats wrote for himself, and, according to his careful directions ("No marble, no conventional phrase"), it is engraved on his simple tomb in the churchyard of Drumcliff, in the poet's native Sligo. But ever since his death in 1939, his admirers have refused to cast a cold eye on his memory. Last month an American economist, John J. Kelly, remarked at a Dublin dinner party that he would subscribe $1,400 towards a Yeats memorial if Ireland would put up an equal sum. Ireland's men of letters soon...
Inishmurray is a 100-acre sliver of rock off the northwest coast of Ireland's County Sligo. In World War I, a British destroyer mistook its low-lying shape for a German submarine, let fly with a torpedo. The explosion shook the island up a bit but it failed to deflect the inhabitants from the pursuit of customs stemming back to the time of Saint Columba, who is said to have stopped off at Inishmurray on his way to convert Scotland to Christianity...
...19th Century observer reported Inishmurray poteen flowing "extensively over the whole seaboard from Sligo to Bundoran and even to a considerable distance inland." In 1893, a detachment of Royal Irish constabulary was quartered there for revenue duty, but in later years, news of police visits usually reached King Michael in time for the great stone jugs of poteen to be hidden in the island's shallow lake. Once sentenced to pay a ?50 fine or spend six months in jail for poteen-making, King Michael said: "I would have paid ?10, but they would not make...
When barley and potato prices rose during and after World War II, the poteen industry languished. In 1948, Waters and some 60 remaining inhabitants of Inishmurray petitioned the Irish government for new land, were moved to Sligo. There King Michael, a huge figure in homespun tweeds, with a sweeping mustache, continued to hold court among those of his subjects who revisited the island every summer, ostensibly to graze cattle, but actually, it was said, to engage in their traditional industry. In Sligo last week, at the age of 80, Michael Waters died. His eldest son Michael, known to the islanders...