"Will you hold my hand?" asked Lauren Murphy as she braced herself to greet her husband's mourners. Lauren was speaking to Paddy Moloney, founder of the Chieftains, the Grammy award winning musical ambassadors of Ireland.

The weather is perfect today. Just like it was then. We all remember the absolutely perfect weather in New York eight years ago, but it was almost exactly the same here. Eight years is a long time. Just trying to think how much has happened makes my head spin. Children growing up, family members dying, career changes - so much. Then there's the wider world: wars, natural disasters, economic collapses, elections and new governments. It's actually been a good while.

Based on family names and individual stories, there are many hundreds of American dead with Irish heritage, including Americans who through parents or grandparents had become Irish citizens. 

This is a tribute to several of these brave Irish men and women.

Given that his music career is on the downturn, Jim Corr, he of the photogenic Irish sibling band The Corrs, has clearly got a lot of time on his hands. Actually, you might say that Jim has moved from his native County Louth to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Sinn Fein asked United States ambassador Richard Egan to attend the party's September ard fheis to signal to the rank and file that the US did not intend to shut them out of the negotiating

Paul Hill: The sacrifice of the heroes of 9/11 must not be used as a justification for torture.

ON August 7, 1974 a man stepped out on a thin high wire tied between Manhattan’s famous Twin Towers. Phillipe Petit, a skinny French tightrope walker, cast a rope between the two buildings of the World Trade Center with a bow and arrow in the night, and his illegal, crazy but ultimately successful walk between the two iconic buildings would eventually come to be called the art crime of the century. For Dublin-born writer Colum McCann, 44, Petit’s daring 1974 tightrope walk was a jumping off point, irony intended, a way to talk about New York, the Twin Towers and the people of the city and what they mean to him, without instantly conjuring up images of sirens and dust and devastation.

Meet Sachman Singh, a seven-year-old Sikh. He understands Punjabi but speaks English – with a distinct Irish lilt.

From Dennis Lehane to Samantha Power, the best of the best Irish-American writers and Irish writers in America

Guinan's bar was the subject of a memoir by a Wall Street Journal writer

Telling an as-yet-untold story about the heroic FDNY mission of September 11, Terry Golway writes: "Lieutenant Bob Bohack faced the dilemma of his career. He had his orders: He was to help extinguish the fire on the 79th floor. But those orders were given before he heard rumors of missiles, of more airplanes heading for New York.

Less than two months after losing so many residents to the World Trade Center attacks, the Rockaway section of Queens, New York, suffered another devastating blow: a plane bound for the Dominican Republic fell from the sky, killing over 200 passengers on board, as well as six members of the community of Belle Harbor. The loss of life, for Rockaway residents, could have been far worse. But it was yet another blow to this resilient community which, as Kevin Boyle's excellent new book indicates, has been taking hard knocks for over a century.

Eamon J. McEneaney was in the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. He emerged from the frightening conflagration as a hero.

Pete Hamill reckons that he has lived in 14 different Manhattan apartments. That fact alone might make him an expert on the idiosyncrasies of the great metropolis, the colorful nooks and crannies that rarely make the tourist guides or history books. But, of course, Hamill is not merely a Manhattan resident.

LOWER River Inhabi-tants, Cape Breton Island-The journey by road on this most picturesque isle in the Canadian Maritimes is considerably easier these days than it would have been for generations of Irish people who settled this part of the world down through the years as part of the Celtic tribes up here. Some of the history and sentimentality was captured in one of the series of extraordinary concerts that make up the annual Celtic Colors International Festival that I am attending for the very first time.

Billed as the "A Touch of the Irish," the Monday night event brought together three distinctive acts that signify the diversity of talent assembled for this impressive gathering of the clans, so to speak, up here at the festival.

What are your Irish roots? “I was born and raised in the Bronx. My grandparents were originally from Kilkenny and Galway. They both came to America in 1929 for a better way of life. I am the youngest of four children and a graduate of Christopher Columbus High School. It was in high school that I meet the love of my life, Stephen P. Driscoll.

The House of Representatives passed a $410 billion Omnibus Appropriations Bill on Wednesday, February 25 for the 2009 fiscal year, which includes allocation of $285,000 for a Father Mychal Judge Center for Irish Exchange and Understanding at