Kelly's Corner

Let's face it. When Ireland can do something better than America, you know you're in trouble.

Private health care in Ireland costs, on average, about $60 a month for a single person.

A lovely story about Donald Keough, the former head of Coca Cola and supporter of all things Irish, reached us yesterday via Jim Dwyer's column in the New York Times.

The year was 1995, the venue was New York's storied Tavern on the Green, and Keough was all set to present then U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith with a giant piece of Waterford Crystal when disaster struck.

There's something strange happening in the waters off Ireland as you can see from these stunning photographs of a humpback whale doing an acrobatic display.

The whale was photographed "breaching" off the east coast of Ireland near Wexford.

Irish immigrants should get a housing quota in Stuy Town according to Ciaran Lynch (above) of the Irish Labor Party.

Keeping his tongue firmly in cheek, Lynch says that "a certain proportion of apartments...should be made available to Irish emigrants who have just arrived in the city and who are trying to find their feet.

It's got to be one of the great ironies of the global property crash.

Allied Irish Bank, already hobbled with toxic debt from Irish property buyers, is now the partial landlord of some 25,000 people in 11,227 units in New York.

Ah well. Conan O'Brien stole my heart last night with his insane Irish jig with Robin Williams.

Pity it's too late. Like many other people I only started watching Conan O'Brien the past few nights to see what all the fuss was about.

Irish citizens are still being refused social welfare in Ireland if they are returning from abroad.

In 2009, 738 citizens, many of whom were returned emigrants, were refused such payments as disability allowance, carers allowance, jobseekers' benefit and even the old-age pension, because they had not lived in the State for the two years prior to the claim.

Immigration centers in the U.S. have long warned of the unintended consequences of the so-called habitual residency requirements which they said would unfairly exclude Irish citizens from social welfare.

Activists for the undocumented Irish were in poor spirits Wednesday in the wake of Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts.

However, as the polls closed last night, a seasoned immigration campaigner told me that immigration reform was by no means dead.

Rumor reaches us that the Irish bookie Paddy Power has paid out early on Republican Scott Brown winning the special election in Massachusetts for the late Ted Kennedy's seat.

It's hard to tell if they have or not because there's no record of any such bets on their website (although they are quoting Brown at 20/1 to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.)

However, if the stories are true and they have in fact paid out, this could be very good news for Democrat Martha Coakley.

"Haiti needs 100 Bernard McNamaras." So said Digicel CEO Denis O'Brien from Haiti this morning.

He's not wrong.

The Irish aid agency Concern is leading the way in showing how non-profits can benefit from Twitter.

Aid worker Dominic McSorley is tweeting from Haiti at twitter.com/aidwkr

The White House has been quietly reaching out to immigration activists over the past number of weeks.

Just yesterday, Friday, a group of influential Irish Americans were invited to the White House for a briefing on immigration and also security in the North of Ireland.

Earlier, officials at the White House spoke with Latino advocates to reassure them that the administration is intent on bringing in an immigration bill this year.

Noam Chomsky is a man of many different hats. He's a Professor of Linguistics at MIT but he's probably better known worldwide for his incisive criticism of big media and US foreign policy (although not necessarily in that order).

Now he's wearing yet another hat as co-president (with former Tyrone player Peter Canavan) of the new GAA club in Gaza.

Yes, that Gaza.

Celeb gossip-monger Perez Hilton has gone way too far calling Iris Robinson (above) a whore.

In his recent post, entitled "Northern Ireland's First Lady Is A Whore" Perez dubs Irish the "Celtic Cougar," and says she was involved in "a sex scandal with the 19 year old son of her former butcher!"

Iris, as you probably know, is the wife of Northern Ireland's First Minister Peter Robinson and her extra-marital exploits have been all over the media over the past few days.

Sobering news from Australia today with the story that 12 Irish people have been deported over the past two weeks for trying to overstay their visa.

It looks as if it is the tip of an iceberg as there are record numbers of Irish entering Australia on one-year working visas who want to stay on.

For some, their only option was to fake an application for the second-year working visa.

You'd think, if you were running for the Senate, that you'd make sure you spelled the state's name correctly.

Not so for the Coakley campaign up in Massachusetts which has released an ad spelling the state as Massachusettes.

A single house in Drogheda in County Louth sums up the dizzying boom-to-bust of the Irish property market.

This house, at 39 Hand Street, has been on the market for several years.

It's an older style semi-detached terrace house (with the highly-sought-after Irish thing of a "side entrance.")

This video is becoming a YouTube phenomenon showing, as it does, what happens when you try to walk too fast on ice.

I can only hope the poor guy's all right.

He was clearly trying to get away from the cameras and ended up being the unintentional star of the RTE news.

Isn't this a great picture?

The satellite image shows the big freeze over Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.

England, Scotland and Wales are almost entirely frozen while you can see the southwest of Ireland is showing some green.

Galway has been voted one of the Top Five cities for single women to visit - the only Irish place to feature in the list.

The Top Five Cities for Single Women was compiled by Single Minded Women and includes (are you ready?) Galway, New York, Sedona, Key West and Paris.

It's difficult to see how Galway could compete with the likes of Paris or Key West, but there you are.

Hospitals across Ireland are stretched to the limit coping with the influx of broken bones caused by slips and falls on icy roads and footpaths.

The casualties include my brother (arm) and my sister's neighbor (hip) both of whom fell victim to the recent icy snap which has seen roads and paths turn into glassy death traps.

My sister's neighbor lay on the ground for half an hour as the emergency services had to send to a neighboring county (Meath) for an ambulance. The local ambulance service was already backed up trying to pick people up the people in Louth and ferry them, slowly, to the ER.

Bono is under fire on Twitter after calling for more control on illegal downloads.

Listing his top 10 for 2010, Bono argued in The New York Times that online file sharing was killing music and movies.

"The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we're just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of '24' in 24 seconds," he wrote.

And finally, some good news.

The man who coined that cursed phrase "Celtic Tiger" says the worst might be over for Ireland.

I'm not the happiest of fliers which is why, a la Rain Man, I prefer to fly Aer Lingus, the Irish version of Qantas. Anyway, coming back from Ireland Monday I found a whole new way of dealing with my fear of flying. Take photographs! I was so busy trying to capture Ireland from the air that I didn't flinch when the plane banked. Next time I hope to have a proper camera with me to get better pictures.
These shots are over Dublin.