Now that we have Halloween out of the way, what do we do with all those pumpkins that are strewn about the yard? Well never fear, Chef Gilligan is here to give you a few tips and to give you a jump start on your Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

U2 has confirmed its tour dates for 2010. The fantastic foursome will kick off the 2010 tour on June 6 in Anaheim, California.

Kelly: “I think that the invited American business leaders were very impressed with what they saw when they heard from Northern Ireland’s business leaders. I’m confident that over the medium to long term that will yield results for the economy in Northern Ireland.”

This Friday is Leif Erikson Day, celebrating the first European to set foot in the continent now known as America. In honor of this day and this Norwegian man, Chef Gilligan teaches you how to make smoked salmon quiche.

Welcome to Ireland’s revitalized North and Northwest! Even the hip Lonely Planet Bluelist proclaims Northern Ireland as the hot new destination, and cites Belfast as one of the top cities on the rise.

Slideshow / The Top 10 Natural Wonders of Ireland / Click here Ireland - like the U.S. - has some seriously stunning natural

Peter Quinn remembers Danny Cassidy.

  Introduction Ireland is an island on the western fringe of Europe between latitude 51 1/2 and 55 1/2 degrees north, and longitude 5 1/2 to 10 1/2 degrees west. Its greatest length, from Malin Head in the north to Mizen Head in the south, is 486 km and its greatest width from east to west is approximately 275

Nobody ever gets airs and graces in Ireland, no matter how big they get, says megastar Cillian Murphy – instead they just get made fun of.

Ireland’s most popular girlband B*Witched are in talks to make a big comeback. The “C’est La Vie” singers, who had a run of hit songs in Britain, Ireland and North America from 1998 to 2000, are looking to reform their band.

Famous Irish singer Daniel O’Donnell is in the midst of a North American tour and, if the latest photos are anything to go by, he looks in great form.

Concordia University has recently expanded their Irish studies program to benefit many students who have a desire to learn about their heritage. At Concordia University, Canadian Irish Studies have recently gone from a small undergraduate minor and certificate program to a full course of studies and renamed “The School of Canadian Irish Studies."

Bono may be a peacemaker, but apparently he’s no tree hugger. Environmentalists claim that U2’s 360 Tour, which consists of 44 stadium shows across the globe, will create enough carbon emissions to fly the Irish rock band all the way to Mars.

The Catskilll Mountains will once again ring melodically with the sound of Irish music as the 15th edition of the Catskills Irish Arts Week (CIAW) unfolds in all its abundance next week in the tiny hamlet of East Durham.

Massachusetts tourism officials have won the bid for their capital city to host the 2013 World Irish Dancing Championships.

A major row has broken out in Ireland over U2's upcoming shows. The band - who made an explosive start to their world tour in

The same virus that caused the potato blight in Ireland in the 1840s that decimated the population and drove thousands to these shores has been found in potato and tomato crops in Rhode Island.

One of the fascinating aspects of traditional Irish music is that it is a great magnet for making friends who may last your entire lifetime and band families together with the common bonds it engenders. This past weekend certainly was indicative of that as two separate and thoroughly enjoyable occasions came back to back on Friday and Saturday and were worth noting in this space.

A jovial Longford man who has never lost his accent, Mike Prunty is a vice-president of the United Irish Counties Association of New York, and he put a strong effort at the United Irish Counties Feis on Sunday, June 14. “It keeps the Irish heritage going,” he said. “I love being involved. And I love watching the kids dance.”

The thousands of concert-goers expected at Dublin’s Croke Park for U2’s concerts on July 24, 25 and 27 has caused the stadium to heighten security and go forth with plans to shut down its GAA museum for the three dates.

Ireland was named the Best Family Destination in Europe winner at the TravelAge West WAVE (Western Agents’ Votes of Excellence) Awards on June 4 in Beverly Hills.

Isaac Boss will lead Ireland A out in their opening Churchill Cup rugby match against Canada on June 10.

While the New York Fleadh held in Pearl River last weekend wouldn’t approximate the level of drama or attendance of the All-Ireland, there was a parallel revelry as the 2009 senior champions, the River Rogues, left the competition hall to perform nearby at Christy’s Pub full of exuberance and satisfaction over the achievements that not only reflected well of them but of the entire Pearl River community.

Montreal’s Irish walked in remembrance of immigrants who landed in the city dead or dying after traveling on disease-infested ships. The Canadian Irish community held their annual walk this past Sunday to commemorate the men, women and children who died escaping the Irish Famine.

Eugene Kyne with the lowdown on this weekend's fixtures at Gaelic park in the Bronx.

The annual New York Fleadh organized by the Mid-Atlantic Region of Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann is coming up on the weekend of May 29-31 in Pearl River, New York.

A tribute to Paddy Reynolds, a fine musician and an even finer man.

The seventh leg of the Volvo Ocean Race got off to a rocky start Saturday when a tanker almost collided with the racers as they left Boston Harbor for Galway Bay Luckily, the U.S. Coast Guard steered the hulking 700-foot tanker out of the fleet's way as they prepared to race 2,550 miles across the Atlantic for their arrival in Galway Bay on May 23.

Musicians are little noticed, but crucial to a feis. There’s a lot of demand for feiseanna in the U.S. – many parents bring their children to competitions several times a month. The Commission of Irish Dancing in Ireland rules that no more than six feiseanna can occur in North America on any weekend day, and no more than 10, max, over the weekend in all. This is because there aren’t enough qualified musicians to go around.

This Sunday, the Irish around the world will remember the country's greatest ever catastrophe - The Great Irish Famine, “An Gorta Mor.”

Rory Best will captain the Ireland squad for the summer international tour of North America at the end of May.

A controversial Web site that helps people have affairs is to launch in Ireland later this year

A public tasting of Cadbury's - the favorite chocolate in Ireland and Britain - and good old American-made Hershey's chocolate resulted in big win for the British-made sweet stuff. But was it an honest win?

The names O'Byrne and O'Beirne (or Byrne and Beirne), often regarded as variants of the same root, are, in fact, totally different. O'Byrne is derived from the Gaelic O'Broin meaning "descended from Bran", the 11th century King of Leinster. The O'Byrnes were chieftains of what is now County Kildare until the Norman invasion when they were driven from their lands into the mountains of County Wicklow.

New York will only embrace its new Archbishop if he is himself. But he's off to a good start.

More than 6,000 Irish dancers from all over the world are set for the start of the 2009 World championship Organizers. The excitement level is so high that participants in the first U.S.-based World Irish Dancing Championships are “like horses in the gate waiting for the race to start.”

It looks like Americans are just as anxious as the rest of the world to get their hands on U2 360 Tour concert tickets. Tickets for the Irish mega-band’s North American kickoff concert on September 12 at Chicago’s Soldier Field sold out immediately when they went on sale today at 10

The Big Apple Feis this weekend was largely the work of one person’s vision: Unateresa Gormley, a woman who has dedicated much of her life to Irish dancing. A few months back, she decided that it was time New York City, which surprisingly hadn’t had a feis in 25 years, should host a major Irish dancing competition.

The more that I am around the traditional music scene, the more apparent that it is a very special community that thrives on equal measures of commitment and craic, especially in the New York area when it seems like any weekend can be a very good one to enjoy it. All generations gladly participate with one another in the living tradition celebrating the past, present and future all at once, and they don't need to wait until the St. Patrick's season to boast about their heritage.

Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times columnist and drama critic, has taken a break from the theater to write an extraordinary new book about an important link between Ireland and America. The book is entitled "White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America." William Johnson was born into a Gaelic-speaking, Catholic family in Ireland but later converted and became a Protestant, the only choice for a boy with such great ambition.

Wake Forest University Press has taken quite a gamble. They have produced Volume 1 of what they call "The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry" and the names Heaney, Muldoon, Durcan or Yeats are nowhere to be found. As Jefferson Holdridge writes in the Preface, this series "is a representative anthology meant to introduce to a broader audience a number of Irish poets, some young, some in their prime, who have not appeared widely before in North America.

Producing a list of 20 books which every Irish-American should read was both joyous and painful. The joy, obviously, came as we pored over the many volumes, revisiting the beautiful sentences, the haunted memories. The pain, however, was knowing that, inevitably, some brilliant books would have to be excluded.

A the Green Fields of America Ensemble finished the Banquet entertainment program at the recent Ireland in Dixie Weekend in Atlanta, the capacity crowd rose to their feet with spontaneous joy at the marvelous music they had just witnessed.

It was a highlight of the Comhaltas annual gathering in North America, whose mission statement proscribes the preservation and promotion of Irish traditional music.

There can be no contesting CCE importance in Ireland itself since 1951.

THESE are exciting times for Irish arts in Manhattan. On the heels of the recent announcement of a new master's program in Irish American studies at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House comes word of a series of new play readings and two main stage productions by one of the most accomplished New York-based Irish theater companies, Origin Theatre.

The group was founded by Trinity College Dublin graduate George Heslin, the actor and director who first made a name for himself here starring in the Broadway national tour of hit shows like Stones in His Pockets and The Colleen Bawn at the Irish Repertory Theatre.

A YEAR ago Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern turned some sod on the Alfie Byrne Road across from the reclaimed land in Dublin Bay and near the Port Tunnel on Dublin's North Side to signal the long-anticipated beginning of Clasac, a traditional arts center. The symbolic gesture by the leader of the Irish nation at the invitation of the Clontarf branch of Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann followed the most ambitious plan of cooperation between the Irish government and one of the country's leading cultural movements devoted to traditional Irish music.

The multi-million euro project anticipates a launch later this year, but it's more likely to be fully completed in the new year based on a visit I made to the site in September.

ONE of the hoped-for outcomes when Compass Records, the leading record company for Celtic music in North America, acquired partial rights for the Green Linnet catalog a couple of years ago was that some of the material would emerge as re-released CDs if the demand were there.

An email advisory came to me recently that indicated that three such recordings have now been remastered and repackaged with enhanced graphics and the serious music listener or collector may want to update their library.

Originally on vinyl in 1981, Billy McComiskey's first original solo recording (he's making another one for Compass Records now) Making the Rounds gave early evidence of the form that helped him win the All-Ireland senior accordion championship in 1986.

ANOTHER family with an Armagh connection is the Quinn family of Long Island, whose patriarch, Louie Quinn, came from Newtownhamilton in Armagh.

Louie Senior was a very fine Irish fiddler who played a huge role in promoting and preserving traditional Irish music not only in New York but also around the country through his friendship with so many great musicians, and also his organization skills through the Irish Musicians Association, a forerunner in many places for Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann in North America.

He got his family involved in Irish music and dance in a big way out on Long Island, and the oldest boy, Sean, has continued to teach music both in the public school system and with Irish music pupils on the fiddle.

RECORD numbers of Irish are visiting the U.S. Lured by the tumbling dollar and steep markdowns in goods and services, no less than 491,000 Irish tourists visited in 2007, many for the first time, according to figures compiled by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Dublin.

Hard times are falling on communities across the country, and even in the affluent San Francisco area, belts are tightening and the economy is in decline. But on a recent December afternoon, Ireland's 2007 and 2008 Gaelic football All-Stars faced off against each other in front of over 2,000 fans, and San Francisco's Gaelic Athletic Association (SFGAA) had formally opened three new world-class fields.

Aer Lingus, in joint partnership with United Airlines, plans to provide daily flights between Washington, D.C. and Madrid commencing next year, taking advantage of the Open Skies Air Services Agreement between the European Union and the U.