‘I started singing the sean-nós style about 15 years though didn’t participate in competitions ’til 2022. The sean-nós style is in our family going back generations and my Dad won the biggest competition at the Oireachtas, the Corn Uí Riada, in 2006. Continue reading
Maria left Ireland aged fourteen. According to the Irish Famine Memorial’s orphan database, she left Portumna as a Roman Catholic orphan of James and Margaret Maher (both deceased), sailing on the Thomas Arbuthnot to Sydney in 1850. Continue reading
Ireland’s Coach Andy Farrell is facing spot fires on no fewer than five fronts. Continue reading
Mary and many of her fellow passengers – convicts – on board the Earl Grey, having left Dublin five months earlier in December 1849, and disembarking on a grey May day on the other side of the world in 1850.
Melbourne Hosts successful two-day symposium on Irish Language. Next is a review of Australian novelist and diarist Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, much appreciated by those of us who are Garner fans. ‘Priests in the Family’ provides Enright’s intriguing family connection to James Joyce, followed by an ‘Introduction to Ulysses’ where she talks about her personal experience of starting to read that famous book at the age of fourteen, ‘mainlining language, getting high on words’ Continue reading
Irish in Australia: Irish-themed Movies, Tours, and Festivals Continue reading
The Irish Famine Orphan Girls Commemoration will take place on November 23, 2025, in Melbourne to honor the arrival of orphan girls in 1850. Events include a film screening of Na Trí Céilithe with a discussion panel. Other cultural activities include a series of music sessions and the Canberra Irish Language Summer School in January 2026. Continue reading
Maria left Ireland aged fourteen. According to the Irish Famine Memorial’s orphan database, she left Portumna as a Roman Catholic orphan of James and Margaret Maher (both deceased), sailing on the Thomas Arbuthnot to Sydney in 1850. Continue reading
‘Only Our Rivers run Free’, ‘It was a classic example of the right song, in the right place at the right time, recorded by the right artist, Christy Moore, because Christy’s career was taking off in a big way it afforded an authority and a whole importance to the song… Continue reading
Beads of rain streak the window beyond which there is a violet tint in the sky as dusk begins to fall. Dim telegraph poles slip by. Then the chequerboard of yellow and black at the edge of a small town, and bubbled letters caught in the floodlights of an AstroTurf pitch. Continue reading
Tinteán 