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June 2007

Sports

Investment in Talent Pays off in a Win

The Barrys are all ears for the coach, Gerard Dillon.

By Paul Schneider

So right up front, we have to give Tir na Nog credit. Don’t want to get the Kevin Barrys Gaelic footballers in trouble with the downtown eatery that’s their official sponsor and unofficial destination.

But with apologies to the folks at 16th and Arch, the key location in this story is Billy Murphy’s Pub in East Falls. Or more correctly, the gym behind Billy Murphy’s Pub in East Falls. That’s the winter home of what Gerard Dillon considers the future of Irish football in this country.

While squads that are well-stocked with players from overseas scatter in the off-season, Dillon’s mostly American-born squad, the Kevin Barrys, simply changes venue. After an Autumn of relaxation, they begin to gather in East Falls in mid-January to play basketball and indoor soccer, and to get a head start on being a team again.

“One of the advantages of having a lot of American players is that we have most of the club together all year round,” said Dillon after coaching the Kevin Barrys to a 1-7 to 0-4 victory over Tyrone in Bill Davis Cup play at Cardinal Dougherty High School last Sunday. “With other teams, you lose guys when they go home. Most of our players live here.”

For all of them, the transition from winter indoor workouts to outdoor drills and practices comes—fittingly enough—around St. Patrick’s Day. Over the next several months, there are two key objectives: to coax older players out of “retirement” for one more season and to hone teamwork among the growing group of young Americans.

Some of the latter, like cousins Kevin and Brendan Trainor, grew up with the game through the influence of their fathers. Others, like Horsham’s Dan Clark, participated in other sports as high schoolers, but have come to enjoy the fast pace and challenging play of Gaelic football. All of them, says Dillon, are the next generation of Gaelic football in this country.

“We’ve got to promote the American players,” said Dillon. “They don’t always have the background in the game that the Irish players have, but I think they work harder at learning it sometimes than the Irish. And when you have a good nucleus of American players, you have a team that is with you all year ‘round.”

June 7, 2007 by Guest

News

Hot Fun at the AOH Festival in Mont Clare

Reilly Ann and Poppy

The first person I ran into at the Ancient Order of Hibernians Irish Festival along in St. Michael Park in Mont Clare was an old friend, Verne Leedom, former pipe major for Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums.

Possibly the very next person I ran into was Verne’s granddaughter Reilly Ann.

Not long after that, I bumped into Sean Leedom, Verne’s son, near the horseshoe pits.

I was beginning to think that everybody at the festival on Saturday was a member of the Leedom family.

Not true, though. A hundred or so sun-shy Celts hunkered down in the shade of the picnic pavilion or browsed for Irish jewelry, hats, bumper stickers and other Hibernian tchochkes in the vendors’ tents. Most of the festival-goers, it turned out, actually belonged to other families.

That was the coolest part of an otherwise sweltering day—that so many families turned out for a day along the banks of the Schuylkill, just across the river from Phoenixville. From where I sat—at a picnic table, munching a sausage-and-pepper sandwich on a crusty Conshohocken roll and sipping an ice-cold Coke—it looked like they were having a great time.

Earlier in the day, Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums had performed, and Oliver McElhone as well. By the time I arrived, at mid-afternoon, Fisher and Maher were tearing up the place with a performance of Irish traditional music that was as hot as the day.

Emma Hanson Not long after they left the stage, Burning Bridget Cleary—two fiddlers and a guitarist from the Lehigh Valley—jacked up the energy level even more. (They’d confessed to having consumed large cups of iced coffee before arriving on the Festival grounds. But I heard them at the Valley Forge Scottish-Irish Festival in February. If that performance was any indication, coffee has nothing to do with it. They chug along just fine on their own inexhaustible energy source.)

A little later on, a bevy of Coyle school dancers also entertained the crowd with some high stepping to match their spirits.

For those who weren’t up for high-octane Irish music or dance, there was plenty of lazy summertime slacking off to do. The horseshoe pit, for example, was a pretty popular destination. So were the picnic tables nestled among a nearby stand of trees, where people nursed icy beers and quietly chatted.

Irish weather? No. But still, a great start to the summer for Philadelphia’s Irish.

June 5, 2007 by Jeff Meade

News, People

Philadelphia Says Goodbye to the Irish Ambassador

Chamber president Bill McLaughlin, left, Irish Ambassador Noel Fahy, and Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali at the farewell luncheon for the ambassador at the Union League.

One thing he discovered about Americans in his five years as Irish ambassador to the United States, Noel Fahy told a group of Philadelphia business leaders last week, is that they’re doers, not whiners.

“In Europe, we see a problem and say, oh my, that’s a very big problem,” he told the delighted crowd at the Union League in Philadelphia. “Americans see a problem and they genuinely try to solve it.

“I know that America has been criticized about Iraq, but beyond that criticism, we still look at all the contributions the United States has made to the world, to Ireland.”

Technically, the luncheon given in his honor was a farewell party from the Irish-American Chamber and Business Network, a non-profit membership organization in Philadelphia that promotes the development of economic, commercial, financial and educational relationships between the United States and Ireland. Fahy was recently named Ireland’s ambassador to the Vatican. But in his goodbye speech, Fahy waxed more patriotic than many Americans about the place that was his home for half a decade.

“The US role in the new shared government in Northern Ireland was crucial,” he said. In fact, former US Senator George Mitchell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999 for the pivotal role he played in convincing Protestant and Catholic leaders to sign what is known as The Good Friday Accord, which paved the way for peace in the war-ravaged North.

“The US government and private American groups have contributed nearly $1 billion for reconciliation projects in Northern Ireland. President Clinton was there when we needed him, and in the run up to the final stages in March, President Bush did make some phone calls,” said Fahy.

As a parting gift, Chamber President Bill McLaughlin gave Fahy a bound copy of the manuscript of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” from the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, which houses an original. Accepting the two-book set, Fahy joked, “I don’t know if I’ll have time in the Vatican to enjoy ‘Ulysses’ for the second time.”

June 4, 2007 by Denise Foley

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