Diasporational Part Seven: The Irish Revolutionary Who Wooed Hollywood Leading Ladies

Big, broad, brawny, with a warm speaking voice, he was popular with his audience and his leading ladies. As an actor he might have been merely adequate, but he gained quite a reputation for his Hollywood conquests. Married five times, he had affairs with Bette Davis and Jane Powell, among others. He was quoted as saying “no woman will ever own me, I own myself.”

Diasporational Part Five – James Joyce: Poster Boy for Irish Emigration

The question, of course, facing Joyce’s legacy of exile, is what would have happened to him had he stayed? Could he have written his masterwork had he stayed in Ireland “where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove”?

Diasporational Part Three: The Irishman Who Taught Churchill Oratory

Winston Churchill is for many the epitome of English statesman, scholar and orator. With his V for Victory sign, his cigars and his bulldog frame, he stands as the Imperial Briton, the Victorian English gentleman who helped deliver the world from the Nazis.

It is ironic, therefore that this most English of leaders, famed for his speechmaking, borrowed much of his oratorical style from an Irishman.

Diasporational part two: The Irishman and the Zulus

kwaJimu: The Irishman and the Zulus, by Niall McArdle note: a version of this first appeared at WorldIrish “Rorke’s Drift? It would take an Irishman to give his name to a rotten stinking middle o’ nowhere hole like this.” Private Henry Hook, 1879. Every time I watch the magnificent Zulu, the epic account of the […]

Diasporational: Stories from the Irish Diaspora

MOTHER JONES: THE MINERS’ ANGEL a version of this story was originally published in The Irish Times Generation Emigration By Niall McArdle The Union Miners’ Cemetery in the small town of Mount Olive, Illinois is not a place you would expect to find the grave of a hero, still […]

Am I Still Part of the Irish Nation?

None of us wanted to leave, but some of us would like to return, and we’d like the chance to help shape what the place will be like for us if and when we get back. Besides, isn’t it sort of embarrassing that a so-called developed country refuses to let some of its citizens vote? Isn’t that in breach of our civil rights?

The Fluff Is Raging

Flufferings on Arts, Culture and the Perpetual Allure of Uma Thurman by an Irish ex-pat currently at large in Canada