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By Neil Hickey, Contributor The year is 1980. A former movie actor, Ronald Reagan, whose great-grandfather was an emigrant from the village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, is the newly-elected, 40th president of the United States. That same year another emigrant, Ciarán O’Reilly from County Cavan, was performing in an off-Broadway play called Summer by the Irish writer Hugh Leonard, where he met an actress, Charlotte Moore – granddaughter of expatriates from County Wexford – who was a fellow member of the cast. Thus begins the origin story of the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the most renowned theater company in the U.S., devoted exclusively to staging “the works of Irish and Irish-American classic and contemporary playwrights” (according to its mission statement) and providing a hearth and a home for audiences to savor the work of dramatists from Goldsmith, Synge, Wilde, and Yeats, to Beckett, Shaw, Friel, and Behan, as well as musicals with an ....
– Sean O’Casey on the death of Thomas Ashe. ℘℘℘ Just as I was getting annoyed that no one on the Larry King tribute to Gregory Peck mentioned the actor’s Irishness, he mentioned it himself. “It must be that Irish stubborn streak in me,” Peck said suddenly filling the screen in a film clip from an earlier TV interview. Gregory Peck was, of course, universal. He was loved by audiences the world over. “I thought he was Jewish,” a neighbor of mine said, recalling the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement, in which Peck’s character is a journalist who exposes anti-Semitism by pretending to be Jewish. And to African-Americans he will always be the heroic lawyer Atticus Finch who defends a black man in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). ....