Your weekly dose of Irish ☘️🎥☀️
Jun 25, 2022 12:48 pm
Hi there,
Here's your weekly dose of Irish for June 25th 2022...
Three things you might not know about Ireland:
- An Irish man wrote the novel Dracula! Abraham “Bram” Stoker was an Irish author known today for his 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula, born in Clontarf, Dublin.
- The term “boycott” originated in Co. Mayo, Ireland. Charles Cunningham Boycott was an English land agent whose ostracism by his local community in Ireland gave the English language the verb “to boycott”.
- Ireland was the last country in the European Union without a postcode system.
- Irish wisdom: A kind word never broke anyone’s mouth.
Latest updates:
- I hope you are having a great Saturday! I am back in Cork at long last, and boy is it wet! I am currently looking out on a cold, damp afternoon, but it is good to be back.
- Do you send money abroad often? Sign up with OFX here and get free transfers for life over $1000! They are my number 1 recommended money transfer company, and I have used them since 2013. They work worldwide! The best rates you will find online and fantastic support. Plus, with the link above, you will get an even lower rate than normal.
This week's posts:
🗒️ Poem: Among School Children By William Butler Yeats
This week I picked number 28 from the top 100 Irish poems list.
Another feature yet again from the great Yeats.
🎥 Irish Video – The Biggest Ever Street Performance Of The Iconic “Galway Girl”
I love when people reach out to me and share a video with me.
😃 100 Facts About Ireland That You Should Know
Are you looking for some facts about Ireland?
Well, I have put together the most extensive collection of Irish facts and things that you need to know about Ireland.
☀️ Irish People Talking About Where They Are Going On Holidays In 1973
Did you ever wonder how much a holiday from Ireland used to cost?
Well, I found this incredible footage from C.R’s vault again.
- Invite your friends or family to join this email list at irisharoundtheworld.com/join
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This week's Irish jokes
The new man is hired at a building site. Every day he arrives in a top-spec Mercedes. The other builders are wondering how he could afford it and start hassling the foreman, thinking he must be getting better pay. After a few days of hassle, the foreman asks him what the story is.
Foreman: How can you afford that car?
New man: I’m a gambler. If I thought I'd make money, I’d gamble on two flies going up a wall.
Foreman: But how can you make money? Surely you must lose every now and then?
New man: Nope! I always make money. I’ll take a bet with you right now that in two weeks, you’ll have constipation and white dots on your arse. €200, what do you say?
So the foreman takes the bet. And he’s careful. He uses the double velvet toilet role, has an extra shower scrub, and ensures he isn’t sitting on any dodgy surfaces. After the fortnight is up, he goes to collect his money.
New man: I have to check, don’t I? Can’t just take your word for it.
The foreman isn’t pleased, but he wants the €200, so he allows an inspection. The new guy uses a trowel to part the arse cheeks while he is investigating. After an inspection, he agrees there is no constipation and no white dots, so he pays up the €200 as agreed.
Foreman: How do you make money??!! Taking a stupid bet like that. How the heck does that work?
New man: I didn’t tell you this, but I took a bet with every man on the site I’d have your arse on a trowel today……! 😅🤣🤣
So what is this week's top Irish poem?
This week I picked number 28 from the top 100 Irish poems list. Another feature yet again from the great Yeats. Yeats wrote this in the latter half of his life. When writing this poem, Yeats was in his 60's and wrote it after a visit to a Convent School at Waterford for children between the ages of four to seven years in 1926.
Like other poems by Yeats, such as 'The Ballad Of Father Gilligan', he spent a lot of time reflecting on his older life. I think that the visit to the school helped Yeats see life as a whole or circle that most of us all go through in some shape or form.
It's a rather long poem. I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to comment below with what you thought about it.
Among School Children
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage—
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind—
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
What did you think about this powerful Irish poem?
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About the founder of Irish Around The World:
Okay, some of you might be wondering.
Just who runs this Irish Around The World website??
Or maybe you don't care, haha.
My name is Stephen Palmer from Co. Cork and I have been involved in many Irish-related projects over the years.
While it may seem this website is run by a whole team of highly skilled Irishmen, it is just run by myself.
So I want to thank you again for taking the time to subscribe and participate in the community.
So how did you start a website about Irish people around the world Stephen?
Where it all began:
I created a website in 2013 to help Irish people who are moving to Australia, and recently a new group to help Irish ex-pats who are returning to Ireland.
I have always enjoyed reading about Irish heritage and how connected Irish people are around the world.
But I felt that the websites did not connect the people to the information. Instead, they just published daily articles regardless of whether people cared about them or not.
So I decided to change it and create my own Facebook community called Irish Around The World.
It expanded to an Irish Around The World group, now with over 70k members!
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Stephen Palmer
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