Coming Home

Sunny Ballybunion in May 2025

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Returning to the Land of her Ancestors

Yesterday I brought you Leah Glasheen’s email. In response to my request she told us a little more about herself and about her recent visit. Her ancestors left Asdee for Quebec in 1849.

“Mary, here are my fourth great grandparents, Patrick and Mary (Scanlon) O’Rielly. They spent (roughly) one third of their lives in north County Kerry, one third in Canada, and one third the United States, finally settling in Union County, Dakota Territory, now South Dakota.

I’ve also included a photo of six of their children who survived into their adulthood. Left to right, front: Brothers Patrick, John and Robert

Back: Sisters Bridget, Kitty (Katherine) and Johanna. John, Patrick and Bridget Ann were born when the family lived in Asdee; the others were born in Canada.

Leah also sent some photos taken on her recent visit to North Kerry.

Attached are pictures of myself in Asdee, my husband as he is about to tuck into a delicious lunch at Listowel’s Lizzy’s Little Kitchen. The last shows the two of us with our daughter, a public school math teacher, at Newgrange.

Isn’t it lovely to see people come back to reconnect with the home of their forebears. Their return to the land their ancestors fled in poverty shows us our close links with America, where so many Irish emigrants have thrived and contributed.

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Aoife’s Visit

Aoife loves Listowel Town Park

Her favourite spot is the swings. So often when she has visited in the past, it’s been raining and all the equipment is wet. Not so on May 16 2025, when the temperature was 22 degrees,

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R.I.P. Paul Durcan

Mark Holan wrote a heartfelt tribute to the great poet who passed away at the age of 80.

Mark’s Irish American blog is at this link

By Mark Holan on May 17, 2025

Irish poet Paul Durcan has died in Dublin. He was 80. His “contribution to the performed poem was of enormous importance to the appreciation of poetry in Ireland,” Irish President Michael D. Higgins said.

In his introduction to the poet’s 80th birthday collection, 80 at 80, Irish writer Colm Tóibín said Durcan’s “voice as he read from his work and spoke about poetry could be both deadpan and dead serious; it could also be wildly comic and brilliantly indignant.” Tobin continued:

I loved the undercurrent of anarchy playing against moral seriousness and I began to go to his readings. These were extraordinary performances where many parts were acted out, and where the comedy was undermined by anger sometimes, or pure melancholy, or raw quirkiness, or a sympathy for pain or loss or loneliness.

My wife and I attended a Durcan reading at the 2012 Listowel Writers’ Week, the year he published Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being. The reading occurred in a ballroom at the historic Listowel Arms Hotel on the town’s main square. Durcan sat with his back to a large bank of windows, beyond which the lovely River Feale shimmered in the long, lingering dusk of the approaching summer solstice.

Durcan read from his new collection, including “On the First Day of June,” which happened to be the date of the performance. He exclaimed:

I was walking behind Junior Daly’s coffin
Up a narrow winding terraced street
In Cork city in the rain on the first day of June …

The poem describes how Daly and his friend John Moriarty had died 12 minutes apart, each from “the same Rottweiler of cancer,” and now their spirts stood together watching the mourners inside Cork city’s North Cathedral. “Christ Jesus, Junior, wouldn’t you want to lift up their poor heads in your hands like new baby potatoes and demonstrate them to the world,” Moriarty says. The poem concludes:

… Outside in the streets and the meadows
In Cork and Kerry
On the first day of June on the island of Ireland
Through the black rain the sun shown.

This poem about the swiftness of life and the suddenness of death still brings a shudder of emotion to me, a watering of the eye. It is not his best poem; was not selected for 80 at 80. But the delightful serendipity of hearing Durcan read the poem on the date of its title, in such a lovely setting, made this one of my favorite moments in Ireland. it remains so seven visits and 13 years later.

After Durcan’s performance I stood in line for nearly 30 minutes to have the poet sign–and date–a copy of his new volume, which I purchased for my wife. I was anxious to join her and some dear cousins in the hotel bar. But I am grateful that my patience prevailed.

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A Fact

13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India.

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