April 2014

Last year’s Easter Rising ceremony at the grave of Luke Dillon in Yeadon.

Only about a week till the Philadelphia Fleadh—15 bands, five stages, and a feis, all in the beautiful surroundings of Pennypack Park in Philadelphia on May 3. Most of your favorite local bands will be there—both trad and Celtic rock—along with food and vendors. So grab your blanket and your baby but forget the bucket of beer—there will be Irish and other beers for sale. Oh, and you’re Irish—bring sunscreen.

But before that happens. . . .

There’s a great event on our calendar called the “Dames Dash,” which sounds vaguely risqué but isn’t in the least. Well, we hope. It’s a citywide scavenger hunt (with after-party) on Saturday that anyone can join in and it’s all to raise money for the Notre Dame Ladies Gaelic Football Club. It all starts at Tir na Nog at 16th and Arch in Philadelphia—and that’s where it ends up too. You can register on the spot and you’ll be part of a team.

The remarkable piper Paddy Keenan will be doing a concert on Saturday night at the Irish Center. This is uillean piping at its best.

On Sunday morning, you can see the Division 2 final between Donegal and Dublin on pay-per-view at the Irish Center at 9 AM, followed by the Division 1 final between Derry and Dublin. There’s also a buffet dinner later in the day, after the meetings of the Mayo and Donegal Associations.

In between you can head to Holy Cross Cemetery on Bally Road in Yeadon for the annual Easter Rising Commemoration to honor Joseph McGarrity, financier of the Irish republican movement, and “Dynamite” Luke Dillon, who took part in a bombing campaign in England to force Britain to grant Ireland home rule. Both men are buried in the cemetery. (I’ll be making a few remarks at the grave of Luke Dillon, a man who loved Ireland though he’d never been there. Descendants of Dillon, who was an upholsterer in Philadelphia, are expected to attend.) There will be a social following the ceremony at Briarcliff American Legion Hall in Glenolden.

At 4 PM on Sunday, the Theresa Flanagan Band is playing at JD McGillicuddy’s in
Upper Darby, where you can dance the night away.

On Monday, there will be a free Irish Tay-Sachs screening at Arcadia University n Glenside. It’s part of a research study attempting to determine the incidence of carriers of the Tay-Sachs gene in the Irish population. Even if you’re not of childbearing years, getting tested may help scientists determine whether people of Irish descent need to be tested routinely for the inherited disease, which is fatal to young children. There have been three cases in the Philadelphia area involving parents of Irish descent. The disease, while rare, is most common in Ashkenazi Jews, French Canadians, Cajuns, and the Amish.

On Tuesday, Irish Network-Philadelphia will be hosting a “Go Green” event at Maloneys Pub in Ardmore, with Sue Cordes of Delaware County’s Recycling Department. If you bring an old cellphone to recycle, you’ll get a free drink. Tuesday is session night at Maloney’s, and we hear this one is hopping.

Also on Tuesday night, see the new documentary, “Wages of Spin II,” by local Irish-American filmmaker Shawn Swords, at the Bryn Mawr Theater in Bryn Mawr. It explores the payola scandals of the 1950s.

Thursday ushers in the merry month of May, and the group, Open the Door for Three– Kieran O’Hare on uilleann pipes, whistles and flute; Liz Knowles on fiddle, and Pat Broaders on bouzouki and vocals—will be performing at the Blue Ball Barn in Alapocas Run State Park in Wilmington. Kids under 17 get in free.

Looking ahead: On May 3, there will be a day-long exhibit on the life of Irish patriot and union activist, James Connolly, focusing on the eight years he spent in the US that influenced his actions during the Dublin Lockout of 1913. And if this all means nothing to you, go to the exhibit at the American Catholic Historical Society and find out about the lockout, which was a prelude to the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin.

May 3 is turning into quite a busy day. Local record producer and performer Gabriel Donohue will be celebrating the 25 years of his company, Cove Island Productions, at a gala at New York’s Irish Center featuring many of the top-drawer musicians he’s worked with including Joannie Madden, Eileen Ivers, James Keane, Cathy Maguire, Liz McNicholl, Donie Carroll, members of Girsa, Brian Conway, and others, including his wife, singer Marian Makins. Donohue moved from North Jersey to Philadelphia several years ago and continues to produce CDs at his relocated recording studio.

Check our calendar for more details on all these events.

Aisling Travers and her friend, Jose.

Aisling Travers was always taken with the homilies delivered by Father Dennis O’Donnell, a visiting priest at her parish, St. Patrick’s, in Malvern. Father O’Donnell, past rector at Malvern Retreat House, along with Anthony Granese, a Villanova engineering graduate, and Granese’s wife, Christine co-founded of Amigos de Jesus, a Malvern-based nonprofit that helps to operate a home for impoverished children in Honduras.

“He would always incorporate the kids into his homilies and it would make us all feel like we were there with them,” says the 21-year-old West Chester University education major. “I always said to my mom, ‘I’m going to go there one of these days.’”

That day came last summer, when she was one of 20 people who flew to Central America for a short-term mission, one week with the boys and girls at the 200-acre property in the Santa Barbara area of Honduras. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but Father O’Donnell set the volunteers straight on the flight down.

“He said, ‘You’re not here to fix the children. They will fix you,’” recalls Aisling, a vibrant redhead and the daughter of Irish immigrants. “’I’m telling you now,’ he said, ‘you’re all caught up in feeding them, teaching them, saving them, being all they need and more, but you’ll find that you’re the ones who are really in need.’ I thought, ookaaay. I have no idea what’s ahead of me.”

She knows now and is ready for her June 28 return trip, this time with her younger sister, Ciara, and boyfriend, Joey Smith. “Some people go to check something off on their bucket list then go back to their old life,” she says. “Others, like me, found that Amigos de Jesus becomes a part of your life and you leave a part of you there. You leave so much of your heart there.”

That’s why Aisling has been juggling school and event planning for the last few weeks. She’s organized a fundraiser for Amigos de Jesus on Sunday, May 4, at St. Declan’s Well Irish Pub and Restaurant, 3131 Walnut Street, in Philadelphia. The choice of venue was a no-brainer: The pub is owned by her uncle, Aidan Travers, and Marty Spellman, whose daughter, Elizabeth, a former Philadelphia Rose of Tralee, spent two years teaching at the Amigos de Jesus orphanage.

“Our worlds seem to have come together,” says Aisling of Elizabeth Spellman. Aisling was the 2014 recipient of the Mary O’Connor Spirit Award, given annually at the Rose of Tralee selection event, which took place this year on April 11.

And she wants to bring other worlds together. “It continues to blow my mind how generous the Irish community in Philadelphia is,” she says. “I thought it would be good to get them behind this. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say Jose is being sponsored by the Irish in Philadelphia?”

Ah, Jose. That’s the name of the eight-year old who greeted her as she got off the bus at the orphanage with her name written on a piece of cardboard suspended by string around his neck. And he is holding on to the part of her heart she left behind.

“Oh my, he was the cutest little boy I ever met,” she gushes. “There I was, getting off the bus, which had armed guard on board, thinking, this is going to be awkward since I don’t know anybody, and he came up to me. We fell in love. Every time I looked around he was at my hip. Every day we had a prayer circle when we would all meet and hold hands in a big circle, and he would make sure he was next to me holding my hand. During reflection times, he would sit on my, and fall asleep on my lap during Mass. Many nights I would carry him to bed. I wanted to take him home with me!”

Though Jose had a 1000-watt smile—as did most of the children—Aisling said she knew he had “a horrific” back story. While some of the children are orphans, most have parents who were either not financially able—or emotionally able—to care for them.

“I thought all the children were like little Oliver Twists with no moms and dads, but that was wrong. A lot of them were abandoned by their parents, or mistreated and they government got involved. They all carry some kind of scar. But I have to say it’s the happiest sad place you’ll ever go. These kids don’t have luxuries, they come from awful backgrounds, but they’re the happiest kids you’ll ever meet because they found this happy place and they feel safe.”

Aisling is no stranger to volunteer work. While still a student at Great Valley High School, she started a program called Kid2Kid which brought 150 teen volunteers to work with sick kids at Nemours/Alfred I. Dupont Hospital for Children in Wilmington. She also launched a drive called Pencils for Peace which enlisted middle school children to provide children in Africa and Afghanistan with needed school supplies. But her Amigos de Jesus experience was different.

“Everybody has the potential to give back to society in their own bubble here in America. I needed to step out of this bubble to see what this world had to offer,” she says.

She wasn’t deterred by her lack of Spanish, though she knew enough words to translate the nickname given to her by one of the kids at the orphanage. “He called me ‘Mucha Blanca.’ I knew blanca meant white and mucho meant very, so my nickname was ‘Very white,’” she says, laughing. “It wouldn’t have been so bad but it spread like wildfire around the orphanage and Father O’Donnell picked up on it. During one of our reflections, he was talking about the Holy Spirit, and how you can find it in the dark, or how if you’re out in a field you can see it, ‘kinda like Mucha Blanca over there.’”

She bought the Rosetta Stone Spanish language program so she should be slightly more fluent in June, she says. But it really won’t matter much. “As long as you can open your heart and love those kids, “ she says, “you don’t need to know Spanish.”

The Amigos de Jesus fundraiser runs from noon to 4 PM on Sunday, May 4, and features live music, the McDade-Cara Irish dancers, and food for your $15 admission. There will be drink specials and raffle baskets. It’s the day of the Broad Street Run, so check local traffic for detours.

Fullset, fully booked

It started on February 25. The Philadelphia Ceili Group needed a tidy pile of cash in order to book the Irish music supergroup FullSet for the organization’s big September festival. The goal: $4,000. The deadline: April 11.

The deadline passed a week ago, but the Ceili Group exceeded its goal on the crowd-funding site indiegogo.com long before that. The final tally: $5,690—fully 142 percent of the goal.

We chatted with the Ceili Group’s Rosie McGill about the successful fund drive, and how much it means for one of the region’s preeminent Irish cultural organizations.

Q. How many days did it take you, exactly, until you hit your goal?

A. Thirty-five. We had a date of April 1st for the $4,000 goal, because we had to get back to FullSet by then to lock them in for September 13th, but we set the Indiegogo campaign to last 45 days, so we had until April 11th to surpass our goal.

Q. It feels to me like it took a few days to gain momentum, but then, once it did, it really did start to take off. Is that a pretty fair assessment?

A. It seemed like funds trickled in at first, and then we got a steady momentum of a few a day once we got about 2 weeks from the April 1st date.

Q. When you start a fundraising drive like this, you’re really going on something like hope and a prayer. Did it ever cross your mind—did it ever cross the minds of anyone on the PCG board—that you might not make it? That you were biting off more than you could chew?

A. When I originally came to the board with the idea, there was some dissent concerning the campaign, that it would be more work than our volunteer board could handle. There were also people who were unsure of how it would work, being unfamiliar with that form of fundraising, and people who were concerned it wouldn’t work because so many people are asking for money that way these days. Even my own father was concerned about using a crowd-funding site to get donations, because we lose a percentage of the funds to use the platform.

I am really glad we took the chance to bring in the additional band and fund it through the crowd-funding, because we never would have been able to book the band otherwise, and now we have already gotten so much support for the festival, as well as the added benefit of everyone talking about us and the event, I really can’t wait to see how it shapes this year’s 40th Festival.

Q. And you’ve exceed your goal by a lot. Did you have any reason at the beginning to expect that kind of generosity? And what, if anything, do you think that means about the Ceili Group, and what people think of it?

A. I was hoping for it. I grew up in the Ceili Group, these people are like family to me. I didn’t doubt they would come through and support that community that has been going strong for 40+ years.

Q. So I assume you’re excited at the prospect of being able to bring FullSet to the Irish Center in September?

A. YEP! I can’t wait to see them perform! As you know, I run the workshops at the Festival, and I am most excited to have them teach workshops during the day on Saturday. Here’s a link to their teaching bios: http://www.rgmbooking.com/artists/fullset/fullset-teaching-bios/view Stay tuned to the event page on Facebook for the festival, or www.philadelphiaceiligroup.org

Q. Given that you’ve raised more than you needed to hire FullSet and Sean Keane, what else can you do—are you planning to do—with the extra?

A. Extra publicity for sure! It takes a lot to run a festival, including Sound men and equipment, accommodation costs, radio and newspaper ads, to name a few.

Q. What does it actually cost to put the festival on? How much of a dent does the $5,690 make in the overall cost? Does it give you a bit of breathing room that you wouldn’t have had otherwise?

A. Every year, our budget is based off what we brought in the door from the previous year. The main reason we did this campaign is to bring in FullSet in an attempt to bring more people to the festival and expand more from year to year. The bit of extra money we fund-raised over what we already spent on FullSet will be giving us more money to advertise, a rare opportunity to get the word out to as many potential audience members in an effort to rebuild the audience for our festival.

Q. Given the success, is crowd funding something you’re likely to try again, maybe next year?

A. I have been wondering the same thing. I set up a survey for people to give me feedback on that very subject, and also on the festival. I guess we will see what everyone says!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YC7HBVL

Not soccer, Gaelic football!

If you’ve given up on the Phillies already, why not try some Gaelic sports? The University Gaelic Football and Hurling Tournament is in Philadelphia on Saturday. Hosted by St. Joseph’s University Gaelic Football Club, the match between a dozen or so college-level Gaelic footballers and hurlers will take place at Monsignor Bonner High School, 403 N. Lansdowne Avenue in Drexel Hill, starting at 1 PM and going till sundown.

If you’ve never been up close and personal with Gaelic football and hurling, we can promise you an action-packed day.

Then on Sunday, head over to Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote for an open house with the Glenside Gaelic Athletic Association, the latest club for youngsters interested in football, hurling, and camogie (the ladies’ version of hurling). It’s a way for kids to have fun, get exercise, and help carry on Irish culture in America.

On Saturday night, Jamison provides the music for the AOH Black Jack Kehoe Div. 4’s annual fundraiser at the Regal Banquet Hall in Prospect Park. All proceeds benefit AOH charities, such as the Hibernian Hunger Project, which provides food to the needy.

On Sunday, the Derry Society is holding its annual spring social at the Irish Center. There will be music (The Shantys and the Derry Brigade), a DJ playing music for the kids—the social is always very kid-centric. Of course, there’s food and Irish dancers.

On Monday, the Teetotallers—the extraordinary fiddler Martin Hayes, multi-instrumentalist Kevin Crawford (Lunasa) and guitarist John Doyle—will be performing at Ware Recital Hall in the Swope Building on the West Chester University campus. These are world-class Irish musicians (and Kevin Crawford is really funny).

On Wednesday, the individuals and groups that won awards in the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade will be honored at an event at Finnigan’s Wake, 3rd and Spring Garden Streets in Philadelphia. The $25 price includes a buffet dinner, beverages and entertainment. And you don’t have to be an award winner to attend. The CBS3 parade team often shows up.

On Thursday, the Irish Pub at 20th and Walnut Streets in Philadephia is holding its annual Gathering of Heroes to benefit the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, founded in 1995 to provide support for children of Marines and federal law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty or under exceptional circumstances. This year, four Medal of Honor recipients will be in attendance, all veterans of the Vietnam War. There will be opportunities to meet and talk to these men—two Navy Seal veterans, one Army vet, and a Marine—who will also sign autographs and pose for photos.

Also on Thursday night, there will be a free screening of the documentary “Embrace the Brutality: A Continental Divide Adventure,” by local film maker Shane O’Donnell at the McSwiney Club in Jenkintown. The film, about a group of hikers who hit the trail from Mexico to Monday, features the music of local group RUNA, the John Byrne Band, Rorey Carroll, and others.

And a real treat for you Saw Doctors and Water Boys lovers—you know who you are. Leo Moran of the Saw Doctors and Anthony Thistlethwaite of The Water Boys will be performing together on stage at the Tin Angel on Second Street in Philadelphia on Friday night. Opening for them, half of the John Byrne Band: John Byrne and Maura Dwyer. (We don’t know where Rob Shaffer is, but Andy Keenan is touring with Amos Lee.) To get reserved seating at the concert at this tiny venue, you need to make a reservation for dinner at Serrano, the restaurant downstairs. And you have to eat there—they only honor reservations for actual diners. (You folks who made reservations and didn’t show up for dinner—shame on you!)

It’s not too late to get tickets for the annual Charlie Dunlop Memorial Fundraiser, slated for next Saturday, April 19. Named for a beloved Delaware County man with roots in Tyrone, the Charlie Dunlop Memorial Fund carries on the work of the man who died too young—offering a helping hand to those in crisis. Look for more information on this event and others on our calendar.