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In lieu of a birthday card
Our friendship began on a flight to New York in the Fall of 2003. I had hired her that summer even the interview committee was unimpressed with her one page resume. A recent university graduate in a black suit with a too-bright yellow blouse that drew attention to the dullness of the other candidates – and the members of the committee – she was open and earnest with an obvious passion for the teaching profession. She couldn’t wait to be part of it. If you’re a school principal, she’s the teacher you dream of, the kind whose classroom door is always open. She was humble and asked for advice and…
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Birthdays, bombing, IRA, John Hewitt, Loughinisland, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Peace, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF, W.B. Yeats
Justice Delayed, Justice Denied
“It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.” – Martin Luther King Jr. After almost 25 years, the British government has announced it will hold an independent statutory inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing that claimed 29 lives and injured hundreds in the County Tyrone market town on 15 August 1998. For the families affected, this is a momentous decision that comes two years after a High Court judge ruled there were “plausible arguments” that there existed a “real prospect” of preventing the atrocity. As they brace themselves for next steps and at least two…
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"Crediting Poetry" - Nobel Lecture 1995, British Army, Dispatch from the Diaspora, IRA, Kingsmill Road Massacre, Northern Ireland, Ruefrex, Sectarianism, The Troubles, Themes of childhood
“the music of what happens”
It is January 5, 1976 at the end of a work day, and sixteen men are in a red minibus on their way home from the Glenane textile factory Four of them get out at Whitecross. and the van continues on to Bessbrook. The craic turns to football and whether Manchester United or Liverpool will make it to the top of the First Division, but it is tempered by what happened the day before when six local Catholics were murdered – brothers John Martin, Brian and Anthony Reavey, and brothers Declan and Barry O’Dowd and their uncle Joe shot dead by the Glenanne gang near Gilford. Naturally, the way none of us would…
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Dispatches from the Diaspora, Friendship, Happy New Year, Milestones, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Time
A Place Called Hope – Happy New Year
Dangerous pavements… But this year I face the ice with my father’s stick~ Seamus Heaney On New Year’s Eve, two years ago, health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Since then – as we all now know – the virus spread to nearly every country, killing over 6.6 million people and decimating the world’s economies. Amid fireworks and countdowns on this last day of 2022, China is again battling a surge of infections nationwide, after it recently – and abruptly – rolled back the stringent zero-COVID policy it had in place for almost three years. There are widespread reports…
