Important to an active Irish community is a local radio show which can help spotlight events and performers and also keep listeners in the know about developing trends and touring bands.

Philadelphia-area listeners counted on Tommy Moffitt for years in that role and in recent years, Marianne MacDonald, deeply immersed in Irish music and dance events herself, assumed the role of the weekly presenter through her own radio show called Come West Along the Road.

The weekly offering airs on WTMR-AM 800 from noon to 1 p.m. can now be heard live on the Internet and also shows will now be archived for listening when you want at www.tradtours.com.

Also at the site is information about the tours that Marianne develops for fans of Celtic music and dance that promise access to all the right spots for the craic, including an upcoming June tour to Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton and Halifax, Nova Scotia which is selling out quickly . . .

CONDOLENCES go out to the family of the late Fred Rice, the Offaly fiddler who was a fixture around the Irish Arts Center and at local sessions in the New York-New Jersey area for a number of years before retiring back to Ireland.

He passed away in a Dublin hospital on January 11 and was buried in his native Tullamore on Sunday, January 13. His brother Noel Rice is one of the mainstays of the Chicago Irish music scene . . .

A PROUD native of Ballyvaskin, Miltown Malbay, Nora Flanagan (nee Whelan) passed away at the age of 92 at St. Patrick's Home in the Bronx on Wednesday, January 9 and was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery in Queens alongside her late husband Timothy, also from Miltown Malbay.

She was the mother of fiddler Mike Flanagan, who played for many years for the New Jersey Gaelic League ceilithe, and mother-in-law of Rose Conway Flanagan and grandmother of Maeve Flanagan, also well-known fiddlers in the area. A gaelgoier who held onto her mother tongue here in America and also loved Irish music, she was also the sister of Jack Whelan of Mineola, the long-time leader in Comhaltas and Clare circles.