Irish America magazine - Oct/Nov '05 issue: Mo Mowlam, Eileen Collins, Changes in Irish America, 20 Great Interviews, 20 Moments In History, 20 Best Movies About Irish-Americans, Beer, Patrick Fitzgerald, Billy Bob Thornton

Mortas Cine
I will be forever grateful to this magazine for the incredible opportunities it has given to me over the past twenty years to meet, interview and become friends with some of the most amazing people on this earth. “I am a part of all that I have met,” Tennyson wrote, and in my case it has made me a much better person.  more...

Discovery’s Down to Earth Commander
For Eileen Collins, outer space means a chance to really see the world. Back home after a fourteen-day mission to the International Space Station, Collins and her husband Pat Youngs talk to Georgina Brennan about their love of Ireland, their children and the future of space travel. All photos courtesy of NASA.  more...

Changes
In eleven years we will reach the centenary of the 1916 Rising, the revolutionary crucible of present-day Ireland. Independence did not arrive until 1922 — along with partition and the seeds of Northern conflict — but at this stage we are at least four generations into modern statehood. Shouldn’t 83 years be long enough for us to know where we are and, even possibly, where we’re going?  more...

Changes in Irish America
At the end of this past July, bands, dancers and others gathered at Terrace Park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota for the town’s annual Irish Festival. Despite temperatures running close to 100 degrees, organizers told the local newspaper that a good time was had by all who attended.  more...

An Irishman Named English
I open with this seemingly insignificant detail for one simple reason: All my life I’ve been taking a ribbing for being a proud Irish-American named English. Some people have a hard time believing that the name has Hibernian roots.  more...

The Tunnel, and how one thing led to another...
Jim Sheridan came over to my table at the Lion’s Head Bar and asked if I’d be interested in acting in a new play by a young man from Belfast, Terry George. Jim was artistic director at the Irish Arts Center and I knew him from my time performing A Couple of Blaguards there with my brother, Malachy. The play, The Tunnel, was about a group of IRA prisoners trying to escape from a Long Kesh type of jail in the North.  more...

Our Legacy
In 1964, I had my first real experience of our eight-hundred-year-old war in Ireland. I was an eleven-year-old schoolboy in Belfast when the Reverend Ian Paisley decided that an Irish tricolor displayed at the election office of a Sinn Féin candidate called Billy McMillan should be removed.  more...

Banishing Misfortune
Monday’s work done, I throw my instruments into the car, head out of Woodstock and north on Route 32 towards Greene County, heart of the Catskills.  more...

20 Great Interviews
Justice William Brennan, Jr. , Maureen Dowd , Colin Farrell , Chuck Feeney , Michael Flatley , Seamus Heaney , Mary Higgins Clark , John Huston , Gene Kelly , Donald Keough , Frank McCourt , Alice McDermott , George Mitchell , Bill Murray , Edna O’Brien , John Cardinal O’Connor , Maureen O’Hara , Gregory Peck , Martin Sheen , Jack Welch.  more...

20 Moments In History
1688: Witch Hunt , 1776: Declaration of Independence , 1775-1781: The Revolutionary , 1822: Andrew Jackson Elected President , 1825 - 1832: The Erie Canal , 1845-1851: The Famine Irish , 1861–1865: The Civil War , 1859: The Comstock Lode , 1879: The Unions , 1865-1869: Working on the Railroads , 1869-1883: The Brooklyn Bridge , 1914-1918: World War I , 1935: Braddock Wins Heavyweight Championship , 1876: The Molly Maguires , 1941-1945: World War II , 1961-1963: John F. Kennedy Presidency , 1965: Immigration Act Passed , 1980s: Donnelly and Morrison Visas , 1992–2000: The Clinton Years , 2001: 9/11.  more...

Top Traditional Music CDs
Irish America has long exercised an outsized influence on Irish traditional music. Massive Irish immigration to these shores and the concentration of those immigrants in America’s large cities made New York and Chicago as important, if not more important, than Dublin and Cork as incubators of Irish music talent for many years.  more...