Living My Irish Dream

Is it just me, or are Facebook Petitions more powerful these days than real-life protests?

Take, for example, a Facebook group created this past Tuesday, “Petition – N21 Barnagh Road Layout” – aimed at drawing attention to a dangerous stretch of road between Abbeyfeale and Newcastle West, Co. Limerick.

“Four people were killed on this road in four weeks,” explains one of the petition’s co-founders , Brian Murphy, of Templeglantine, Co. Limerick.

SNOG BRACELETS: The name on the bag of perhaps 20 brightly colored, thin rubber bracelets was as menacing as its insanely cheap price tag: 1 EURO.

I saw the little pouch dangling from a shelf in a local discount store, and I immediately decided to investigate what these bracelets are all about.

“Oh Shag Bands, you mean,” a teenager named Aoife tells me. “You wear them and if somebody snaps one, that means you have to do whatever the color means.”

Words to live by, indeed. A good beginning can make all the difference. Maybe sometimes, a good beginning is just possessing those old Irish phrases that will be there for us when we need them, along the way.

I’m officially obsessed with a dj. Well, not a dj really, but his music.

It started a few weeks ago on Dame Street in Dublin’s city center.

What was turning out to be one of those painfully quiet nights in a local pub took a turn for the extraordinary thanks to a jaunt to the bathroom. As my sister and I walked down the stairs to the basement toilets, a shock of steel drums, distinctively African rhythms and choral vocals seeped out from behind the door and instinctively set our hips and limbs a-moving. Almost involuntarily.