A drunk Irish citizen was arrested in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania after breaking a window and illegally entering the Palace of the Romanian Parliament. During police interrogation, it turned out that the man mistook the building for a hotel, writes The Times.
The joke about Australia is that it was founded by a bunch of criminals. True enough, from 1788 until 1868, The English ruling caste did send roughly 164,000 convicts to the land down under. America’s dirty little secret? The same exact thing was happening in the United States. In fact, experts estimate that over 52,000 British prisoners were shipped off to colonial America.
Did you know that over 80% of Irish men can trace their genetic origins to a group of nomadic tribes who lived on the Pontic Steppe (north of the Black Sea in modern Ukraine) over 5000 years ago?
Four Green Fields is a 1967 folk poem and song by Irish musician Tommy Makem, described as a hallowed Irish leave-us-alone-with-our-beauty ballad. Of Makem’s many compositions, it has become the most familiar and is part of the common repertoire of Irish folk musicians.
One of the fishermen feared dead when a Spanish fishing vessel sank off the Newfoundland coast earlier this week was the sole survivor of another maritime tragedy in Galway Bay over two decades ago. In October 2000, Ricardo Arias Garcia, a native of Marin in Spain, was plucked from the Skerd Rocks in outer Galway Bay by the Irish Coast Guard helicopter operating from Shannon.
The village of Cloughmills in County Antrim, in Northern Ireland, has a small model replica of their village displayed in their village hall. But unlike many miniature models, theirs is made of wool.
This deserted village on Achill Island on the west coast of Ireland is a lonely reminder of the most tragic event in Irish history, the contrived population reduction otherwise known as The Great Hunger of the 1840s, The Great Famine, is sometimes referred to as the Irish Holocaust, such is the emotion it evokes.
When British TV viewers watched a drama about the true horrors of the Irish famine, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing and took to social media in horror and disgust.
January 1973 was an eventful month. It saw both the UK and Ireland joining the EEC, the forerunner to the European Union. In British Occupied Ireland it also saw Loyalist paramilitaries bringing the Northern conflict to the streets of Dublin, where a car bomb exploded in Sackville Place, killing Thomas Douglas and injuring 17 others.
It is a bit late to be celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day but such is the Irish presence on the world stage it seems every day is an occasion for an Irish celebration. Despite being one of the world’s smallest nations the Irish presence punches well above its weight.
Michael Walsh Stories and Books 
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