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Monday, November 30, 2015

" What It Means to Me to Be Irish"

                   To be proud of our history, our culture and our music.
                   To love our language, but not go to any trouble to learn it or speak it among ourselves.
                   To be slightly embarrassed at the more maudlin of our ballads, but to like them all the
                    same.
                   To be glad your antecedents survived the Great Famine.
                   To love talking, telling stories and gossiping.
                   To want to know who everyone you meet is, who they're related to, and to poke your
                    nose into their business.
                   To love mixing and drinking, and mixing and mingling.
                   To have a small inferiority complex, because we're a small country.
                   To be proud of the achievements of our people in sports and arts and entertainment,
                    because we're such a small country.
                   To sometimes begrudge the success of our neighbours, because we think they're
                    "losing the run of themselves".
                   To smile and be happy, even in adverse circumstances.
                   To distrust and often mislead authority, because we still have issues with our
                     colonial past.
                   To stay in the pub until the publican finally throws us out.
                   To feel a little uneasy with wealth, because we're not used to it, and maybe it
                    won't last anyway.
                   To be very generous with charities and poor nations, abroad.
                   To think we are the smartest, wittiest, open-minded nation on earth, bar none.
                   To be surprised when visitors tell us how witty, smart and open-minded we are.
~ John Collins
Waterford, Ireland
~ Copyrighted material; November of 2015*

                   
   You can find John@Twitter.walkcork. 
~ Beannaichte'
30 November, 2015

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

"Postscript"



And some make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here or there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.  
~Seamus  Heaney
Ireland
~Beannaichte'
 17 November, 2015
@beanaichte.twitter.com