McPeake School of Irish Music Opens in Belfast, Helps Host Belfast Fest

The Francis McPeake School of Music, incorporating an International Summer School and the first World Championships of Irish Music, was launched recently in Belfast’s City Centre. The School which opened its doors on Jan. 7 to students from all backgrounds across Northern Ireland’s religious and political divide will signify for the first time a center for creative learning of Irish culture in the capital.

The school, with esteemed past pupils such as Brian Kennedy, currently offers instruction in all levels of instruments including the fiddle, flute and pipes, to mention but a few. Renowned exponents of Irish music will deliver classes in Belfast’s City Centre and there will be additional outreach centers in West, East and North Belfast, providing neutral places of learning.

The Francis McPeake School of Music, which was set up in 1977, has contributed over the years to the world’s shared love for Irish music and tradition. The school instructs on all levels in fiddle, uileann pipes, accordion, flute, tin whistle, guitar, bouzouki, banjo, bodhran, singing and set dancing.

In this light, Belfast will host numerous talented Irish musicians when it stages an International Summer School and the first "World Championships of Irish Music" in July 19-25, 2004. 

Pupils attending the International Summer School can take set dancing classes, Irish language tuition, instrumental classes and an exclusive music business course. The championships will offer musicians from throughout the world the first opportunity to compete on a global stage, in an "open" competition.

The talented winner will receive several prestigious prizes that will help catapult their music career to new international heights. The coveted prize includes studio time, a record contract and distribution with Wren records and Outlet Distribution. Wren will also release a compilation of the best musicians in the competition. 

In addition to these accolades, the Senior Set Dancing champions will win a trip to the Ibiza Fleadh.

The Francis McPeake School of Music is the latest addition to the legacy of the McPeake Family, which began with the birth of Francis McPeake I in 1885. The school of music has a worldwide reputation in providing tuition of the highest caliber, delivered by a team of experts teachers of Irish music.

Pupils of the school are regularly invited to perform in the public domain. Notably, five pupils from the school were the only musicians chosen to represent Northern Ireland in the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Musician of the Year award in 2002.

For additional information: 
info@mcpeakeschool.fsnet.co.uk
Website: www.francismcpeake.com
Phone: 028 9024 6006

Irish poet Michael Coady will receive the eighth annual Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry of the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies. 

Coady will read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 2, in the auditorium (Room 126) of John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts on St.Thomas' St. Paul campus. The reading, free and open to the public, will cap a week of events, classroom visits and public appearances by the poet.

Coady also will participate in a public conversation with University of Minnesota Regents Prof. of Creative Writing Patricia Hampl on "Writing,Place and Memory." The event begins at 7 p.m. Monday, March 29, in the auditorium of the Highland Park Branch Library, 1974 Ford Pkwy., St. Paul.

Both events are co-sponsored by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. 

Coady also will be the featured speaker at the St. Thomas Alumni Association's First Friday Luncheon from noon to 1:15 p.m. Friday, April 2, at The Depot, 225 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis. His presentation is titled "Ireland and America: Bridges of Memory." Cost is $20 per person; reservations are due Monday, March 29. For information and reservations, call (651) 962-6430 or make reservations online at the alumni association's Web site, http://www.stthomas.edu/alumni .

The $5,000 O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, established in 1997, honors Irish poets. The award is named for Lawrence O'Shaughnessy, who taught English at St. Thomas from 1948 to 1950, served on the university's board of trustees and heads the St. Paul-based I.A. O'Shaughnessy Foundation.

Coady was born in 1939 in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, where he has lived his entire life. There he has worked as a schoolteacher and on his poetry collections: Two For a Woman, Three for a Man (1980); Oven Lane (1987); All Souls (1997); and a new book, One Another, released in December 2003. All of his poetry collections have been published by Gallery Press of Oldcastle, County Meath. A collection of his journalism and other short writings, Full Tide, was published by Relay Press in 1998. 

A past winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for first books, of Arts Council of Ireland grants, and of prizes at the Listowel Writers Week, Coady was elected to Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1998.

Coady's recent work has experimented with blending poetry and fiction, memoir and photography, a project he began with his 1997 work, All Souls, which tells the story of how his grandfather abandoned the family in Ireland and vanished into the Philadelphia slums 150 years ago. One of the crucial chapters of that story is told in a poem, "The Letter," that has been performed by Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers folk group.

Previous winners of the O'Shaughnessy Eavan Boland, John Deane, Peter Sirr, Louis de Paor, Moya Cannon, Frank Ormsby and Thomas McCarthy.

The University of St. Thomas is Minnesota's largest private university, enrolling more than 11,000 students at campuses in St. Paul, Minneapolis and Owatonna, Minn., and Rome, Italy.

Writer Touches on New Ireland in Expat Book

"Oh come ye back to Ireland?" Perhaps not, says native-Irish novelist Áine Greaney. 

When wealthy expatriate 50-year-old John McHugh returns from London to a west-of-Ireland village, he hasn’t anticipated the new, 21st-century country. Purchasing the ultimate homecoming prize: a derelict British landlord’s mansion and estate, he plans to demolish the building for his New Wave bachelor pad. 

But McHugh hasn’t bargained for the opposition of the village’s dot-com, blow-in community and the parish's new-found drive toward historical preservation. Neither has he bargained for the chance encounter with Susan Brown-Whitaker, the recently divorced granddaughter of the last British agent to occupy the house. 

McHugh and his repatriation are the fictional creations of Irish-Newburyport author Greaney whose debut novel, The Big House, is being released in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster on March 16. The novel, first published in Ireland and the U.K. this past June, topped the bestsellers list at Kenny’s bookshop, Galway.

Four years ago, Greaney got her idea for the story when she was suddenly reading about Ireland’s Celtic-Tiger economic boom, the software start-ups and the bull markets and Europe’s highest-GNP growth rate. 

Thirteen years previously, Greaney had left an economically static and socially conservative Ireland for the U.S. At that time, an estimated 30,000-plus Irish immigrants had arrived in Boston-,with New York, San Francisco and Chicago welcoming their own share of "the new Irish" in America. But by the late 1990s, "the Auld Sod‚" had become "the Silicon Valley of Europe with multinationals and Irish indigenous companies vying to attract the Irish-abroad back home. 

So in that summer of 2000, and for the first time since immigrating, Greaney wondered, "Why don’t I pack up the kitchen table, the computer and just go home?" But first, she used that computer to create her McHugh character and the fictional village of Rathloe, with all its rivalries between the newcomers and natives. 

"My McHugh character was my pigeon down the mines to pre-test the air quality," says Greaney. "Consciously or not, every expatriate goes back with an agenda, a re-entrance exam for the homeland he once left. Can that new country pass the test? I had great fun finding out." 

And, Greaney points out -- four years later and now working on her second novel, one set in Massachusetts and County Mayo -- she’s still living on the North Shore.

Greaney came from a small village of 14 houses in Co. Mayo and taught elementary school in the Irish Midlands before moving to the U.S. in 1986 where she completed a master’s in English and writing and was accepted to the New York State Writers Institute Fiction workshop. A frequent public speaker, she has also participated in radio and newspaper interviews in Ireland and Greater Boston.

Greaney has published short fiction, essays, reviews and travel features for literary, trade and news publications such as The Literary Review, Books Ireland, The Larcom Review, The Sunday Albany Times Union, The Irish Voice, The Irish Independent and Creative Nonfiction. 

Among her writing awards was the 2000 grand prize winner of the Frank O’Connor Short Fiction Award. 

Chicago Gaelic Park Seeking Queen Competitors

Chicago Gaelic Park is seeking applicants for its 2004 Irish Festival Queen Contest. The winner will be announced at a special Celtic supper on March 7 at the Park, 6119 W. 147th St. Candidates must be single, between 18 to 26 years old and of Irish heritage. There is a $10 registration fee. For information, call Gaelic Park at 708-687-9323.

Headstone to Be Dedicated to Irish War Hero

A headstone in honor of an Irish soldier who won the Victoria Cross in 1857 will be dedicated in August at the Aughavale Cemetery in Westport, Ireland. The memory of the much dedicated Sgt. Major Coughland deserves better recognition, according to retired Irish Army Capt. Donal Buckley of Castlebar, organizer of Military Heritage Tours, Inc.

Coughland live on Altamount Street in Westport for more than 40 years until his death in 1915. He had served in the British Army with the Gordon Highlanders, winning the Victoria Cross for rescuing a fellow soldier while under fire during a battle with insurgents in India. 

Although he was given a ceremonial burial, Coughlan’s grave was unmarked since 1917. 

For more information, contact Buckley, dbuckley@anu.ie, or call 353 94 903 1344.