Screw green beer and all that...

[SoxFan]

THIS is what it means to be Irish:

A Tribute to an Irish Mother
By Joseph R. Biden
Vice President of the United States

My mother Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden is the soul, spirit, and essence of what it means to be an Irish American. She honors tradition and understands the thickest of all substances is blood.

She has taught her children, and all children who flocked to her hearth in my neighborhood, that you are defined by your sense of honor and you are redeemed by your loyalty.

She is the quintessential combination of pragmatism and optimism.

She also understands as my friend Pat Moynihan once said, there is no "point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually."

But she is more. She measures success in how quickly you get up after you have been knocked down. She believes bravery lives in every heart, and her expectation is that it will be summoned.

Failure at some point in everyone's life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable. As long as you are alive you have an obligation to strive. And you are not dead until you've seen the face of God.

My mother, I believe, is a living portrait of what it means to be Irish -- proud on the edge of defiance. Generous to a fault; committed to the end. She not only made me believe in myself, but scores of my friends and acquaintances believe in themselves.

As a child I stuttered, and she said it was because I was so bright I couldn't get the thoughts out quickly enough. When my face was dirty, and I was not as well dressed as others, she told me how handsome I was.

When my wife and daughter were killed, she told me God sends no cross a man is not able to bear.

And when I triumphed, she reminded me it was because of others.

I remember her watching through the kitchen window as I got knocked down by two bigger guys behind my grandfather's house, and she sent me back out and demanded that I, to use their phrase, bloody their nose, so I could walk down that alley the next day.

When my father quit his job on the spot because his abusive boss threw a bucket full of silver dollars on the floor of a car dealership to make a point about his employees, she told him how proud she was.

No one is better than you. You are every man's equal and everyone is equal to you. You must be a man of your words, for without your words you're not a man.

Her pragmatism showed up when I was in eighth grade, a lieutenant on the safety patrol. My job was to keep order on the bus. My sister and best friend Valerie acted up. At dinner that night I told my mother and father I had a dilemma. I had to turn my sister in as a matter of honor. My parents said that was not my only option. The next day I turned my badge in.

I believe the traits that make my mother a remarkable woman mirror the traits that make the Irish a remarkable people. Bent, but never bowed. Economically deprived, but spiritually enriched. Denied an education, but a land of scholars and poets.

When I think of my mother I think of the Irish poem 'Any Woman' by Katherine Tynan:
"I am the pillars of the house; The keystone of the arch am I. Take me away, and roof and wall Would fall to ruin utterly. I am the fire upon the hearth, I am the light of the good sun, I am the heat that warms the earth, Which else were colder than a stone."

[Maeve]

1. A toast to great Irish women

May we honor them,
May we become them,
May we raise them!
:beer:

[SoxFan]

2. Slainte

:toast:

[tk2kewl]

3. Another good one in todays Daily News...

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2009/03/17/2009-03-17_ma_always_fought_hard_for_peace.html

Ma always fought hard for peace

Dennis Hammil


I was raised in an Irish Republican family.

In our home, St. Patrick's Day never was represented by Tin Pan Alley songs, dancing leprechauns, plastic green derbies or green beer. Instead, there were songs of Irish freedom sung by the Clancy Brothers, and harrowing tales of religious persecution against Catholics like my parents in Northern Ireland.

When I was a child, my mother marched every year in the St. Patrick's Day parade with County Antrim, a nonpolitical group. But by the 1970s, Annie Devlin Hamill paraded with Northern Aid, the Irish-American organization that supported Irish Republican causes in Northern Ireland. (Not to be confused with American Republicans, who overwhelmingly opposed the cause of Irish republicanism.)

<snip>

You could not have found a more nonviolent woman on the planet than my devoutly Catholic mother. I only heard her admit to hating two people in her lifetime - Ian Paisley, the vile bigoted Protestant leader in Northern Ireland, and Margaret Thatcher, whom my mother called "Attila the Hen," the prime minister who set loose goon squads in Northern Ireland, sanctioning torture of prisoners, internment without trial, and who watched smugly as brave men like Bobby Sands and Frankie Hughes died on hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison to protest the British tyranny on Irish soil.

<more>
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2009/03/17/2009-03-17_ma_always_fought_hard_for_peace.html

[Captain Hilts]

5. This is great. Forget the beer swillin'. nt

[tk2kewl]

6. Well...

You can get I will still have a beer or two when I take off early today.
:toast:

[ananda]

7. I like your mother.

My mother raised us Irish Catholic. Her
ancestors came from County Limerick during
the potato famine.

It's from her that my Texas family got our
liberal, truly compassionate roots.

[Critters2]

10. My Irish mother left Catholicism and never looked back.

I didn't even know she had been Catholic until I was 10 or 11.

[havocmom]

4. A grand tribute to a grand woman! Her lessons were a what my mom taught too.

Here is my daughter's favorite poem, the 'party piece' she learned to recite at gatherings of her Irish friends. It was written by an Australian, John O'Brien, who had the great good fortune to be born to an Irish woman.

THE LITTLE IRISH MOTHER by John O'Brien

Have you seen the tidy cottage in the straggling, dusty street,
Where the roses swing their censers by the door?
Haveyou heard the happy prattle and the tramp of tiny feet
As the sturdy youngsters romp around the floor?
Did you wonder why the wiree comes to sing his sweetest song?
Did the subtle charm of home upon you fall?
Did you puzzle why it haunted you the while you passed along? -
There's a Little Irish Mother there; that's all.


When you watched the children toiling at their lessons in the school,
Did you pick a winsome girleen from the rest,
With her wealth of curl a-cluster as she smiled upon the stool,
In a simple Monday-morning neatness dressed?
Did you mark the manly bearing of a healthy-hearted boy
As he stood erect his well-conned task to tell?
Did you revel in the freshness with a pulse of wholesome joy? -
There's a Little Irish Mother there as well.


There's a Little Irish Mother that a lonely vigil keeps
In the settler's hut where seldom stranger comes,
Watching by the home-made cradle where one more Australian sleeps
While the breezes whisper weird things to the gums,
Where the settlers battle gamely, beaten down to rise again,
And the brave bush wives the toil and silence share,
Where the nation is a-building in the hearts of splendid men -
There's a Little Irish Mother always there.


There's a Little Irish Mother - and her head is bowed and gray.
And she's lonesome when the evening shadows fall;
Near the fire she "do be thinkin'," all the "childer" are away,
And their silent pictures watch her from the wall.
For the world has claimed them from her; they are men and women now,
In their thinning hair the tell-tale silver gleams;
But she runs her fingers, dozing, o'er a tousled baby brow -
It is "little Con" or "Bridgie" in her dreams.


There's a Little Irish Mother sleeping softly now at last
Where the tangled grass is creeping all around;
And the shades of unsung heroes troop about her from the past
While the moonlights scatters diamonds on the mound.
And a good Australian's toiling in the world of busy men
Where the strife and sordid grinding cramp and kill;
But his eyes are sometimes misted, and his heart grows brave again -
She's the Little Irish Mother to him still.


When at last the books are balanced in the settling-up to be,
And our idols on the rubbish-heap are hurled,
Then the judge shall call to honour - not the "stars," it seems to me,
Who have posed behind the footlights of the world;
But the king shall doff his purple, and the queen lay by her crown,
And the great ones of the earth shall stand aside
While a Little Irish Mother in her tattered, faded gown
Shall receive the crown too long to her denied.

The "wiree" is also known as the Chocloate Wiree (pronounced "wiry"): a very fine songster, called by ornithologist "Rufous-breasted Whistler".

[peace frog]

8. Stop, you're making me cry

On this St Paddy's Day 2009, may I say God bless my little Irish grandmother, Mary Fidelis Reilly. She was the kindest, most loving person in the world, and it was a great privilege to be her granddaughter, God rest her soul.

[Itchinjim]

9. A toast to the memory of my mother Margaret Mary McGuire

She and dad were FDR Democrats and raised their eight children as Catholic, Irish, and Democrat, in that order. Here's to ya Mom.:toast:

[timtom]

11. Excellent!

Go raibh maith agat.