Women’s World Cup
The Irish Women’s team have qualified for the Women’s World Cup to be held in Australia and New Zealand in 2023. Their qualification was the result of a 1-0 win over Scotland in Hamden Park, Glasgow in October. That victory was tarnished after a social media posting of the team singing part of the Wolfe Tones song ‘Celtic Symphony.’ It featured the team singing ‘Ooh aah up the ‘Ra, Ooh aah, uptheRa.’ Their manager Vera Rauw apologised profusely and explained that the player who had put up the post was at home in tears. She promised that it would not happen again.
Angela Lansbury
Not many people knew that Angela Lansbury was an Irish citizen, her mother a young Irish girl living in London at the time. She returned her family to Ireland in 1970, buying a house and 20-acre farm in Cork, after her home in California was lost in a bush fire and her teenage children were becoming involved in drugs. From then to her death in October she lived between Cork and New York.
Claire Keegan
In our October edition, Frances Devlin-Glass wrote a long review of a short book, Small Things Like These. The book is a finalist for this year’s Booker Prize and would add to the prestige of that award if it were to win. At only 110 pages, it is a gem. Frances described it well when she wrote, ‘…the writer has an uncanny ability to walk the reader to the edge of hard topics, flirt with sentimentality, and then step back.’
Tinteán 