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Filed under Of interest to children …
Mary Murphy’s Christmas Pudding
As I was growing up in Edenderry, near Tullamore, in Ireland, my mother always made a Christmas pudding. The smells of the pudding, wrapped in cloth, pervaded the house with the scent of Christmas approaching. Continue reading
A Really Embarrassing Moment at St. Pat’s
My students were full of energy, fun-loving and were certainly not vindictive or in any way mean, but they loved playing pranks… Continue reading
Community Gatherings in Ireland: part two
The very earliest communal gathering and feasting for which we have solid evidence are known as fulachta fia. These were the locations where an animal, probably a deer or boar, was cooked following a hunt. The sharing of food is a social act that creates and maintains bonds and obligations within a group or community, which seems to have been the entire function of these feasts. Continue reading
Croí ár Náisiúin/Statement from the Heart
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’,
and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain
attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. Continue reading
Community Gatherings in Ireland Old and New part one
. To this day, we have a saying in Irish ‘Bhí togha gacha bí agus rogha gacha dí le fail ann’, The finest of every food and the choice(st) of every drink was to be had there. This is believed to originally date from bards of one to two thousand years ago. As a chieftain or king, one’s reputation had to be maintained, or enhanced and these ‘songs of praise’, so to speak, were pivotal in this regard. Continue reading
Colcannon
. At a charity event, in the Wicklow mountains, Martin Byrne was faced with the task of feeding 1,500 people (no, that’s not a typo) with Colcannon. What did he do? Well, I’ll tell you. Continue reading
Seasonal Poems
Vermeer would have made much of it Continue reading
Finding Our Heart in Irish
The Statement from the Heart won this year’s Australian international peace prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, from 200 nominations. Continue reading
The Lake School goes Online
The Lake School in Koroit goes online in 2021. Enrol for classes in fiddle, whistle, pipes, harp, flute, guitar, ukulele, bodhran, singing, dancing, Paddy Fitzgerald’s Irish Music Class, Irish session tunes, cello, poetry. PLUS special events – Paddy Fitzgerald’s CD launch, Mark and Lisa McDonnell’s Slow Session, Tutors Concert, Blackboard Concert, Spud Poets Night, Stars on The … Continue reading