Commercial fishing and seafaring are challenging occupations. Although creature comforts have improved, forecasting is much better, and rescue services are more proficient, accidents still occur. This Christmas blog looks at a different era, two very different...
Christmas is just another time of the year for seafarers. The oceans and seas of the world carry much of the goods that we consider essential but this desire never ceases. This was just as true in the days of sail and to give a sense of the struggles faced by...
Occasionally a blog falls literally into my lap. So it was with this account when a partial and very faded 19th-century sailing ship log was handed to me recently. But what would the tattered pages of the document reveal? An incredible amount as it happens...
Traditionally Christmas has been a time of excess when whatever you were celebrating was marked by feasting and making merry. Turkey originated in Europe with the early explorers returning from America with breeding pairs. The large bird became a favourite for...
Well, 2020 has been a strange one, to say the least. A year where we saw Irish politics altered in a government formed of consonants and contrarians that was just missing a Big Brother/Love Island narrator. A pandemic that saw us hit pause in our schedules but...
I would like to thank Myles Courtney for passing this along to me for Christmas. I shared it with my facebook followers yesterday so this is just for those blog followers who are not on social media to enjoy. Wishing you a happy Christmas. Andrew via New Ross Street...
Since I started blogging in 2014 I have set aside a blog for Christmas. It's a break from my normal fare, but isn't Christmas a break from routine too! At least for those of us lucky enough to have a job that doesn't involve pulling a shift over it. So for this year I...
I would like to wish all my readers a happy and peaceful Christmas and hope everyone will have a healthy, prosperous and productive 2020. Looking forward to more blogs and of course the publication of my second book in April. Take care for now.
The last guest blog of 2018 comes from the River Barrow and brings us back to simpler times in the company of the Connollys of Aylwardstown via the pen of Brian Forristal. The area of Aylwardstown is beside the river Barrow close to Glenmore on the Kilkenny side and...
It was Christmas eve morning 1985. Home, a small council house in the Mount Avenue, Cheekpoint, a mad house. Our father and mother, Bob and Mary looked on with mild amusement as we readied ourselves for a trip to town. Young adults with thoughts of friends, drinks...
On this years Late Late Toy show the television moment of the year was said to have been the unwrapping of Sergeant Graham Burke by his kids. He was, up to hours previously, serving with Irish peacekeepers in Mali, Africa. The host, Ryan Tubridy, became emotional at...
To celebrate Christmas this year, I thought I'd bring you the words across the Irish sea, an emigrant's lament, a cousin of mine from the Russianside, but one of my grandmother's generation. Fr Tom Doyle was one of two brothers to enter the priesthood and both spent...
Christmas time in my Grandmothers was marked by a hunt. It was her search for addresses for friends both at home and abroad, addresses she had scribbled on scraps of paper or cut from an envelope and squirrelled away. Some were in the glass case, others in her box of...
I've covered the Herring Drift Net Fishery in several parts these last few weeks, and today in the run up to Christmas, I wanted to recount an incident that made Christmas a little more poignant for me in the mid 1980's. We were selling directly at the time to Polish...
One of the enduring memories of elections in our house was my fathers quip "vote early, vote often". Whether it was a local, national, EU, presidential or referendum, Bob would be wound up with the run in to the day and was positively buzzing when it came to the...
For me, if Christmas is about anything, it's about family and about family traditions. I think it's how a family keeps Christmas that effectively gives it meaning, creates memories and makes it a special time of year. Christmas was a much simpler affair around the...
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