Irish Boston History & Heritage

On October 15, 1995, Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He accepted the award on December 7, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden. Read his Nobel lecture here . Heaney became the fourth Irish writer to receive the coveted Nobel Prize, following William Butler Yeats , George Bernard Shaw , and Samuel Beckett . Born in the village of Bellaghy, County Derry in 1939, Heaney’s family was engaged in farming and selling cattle. He was a pupil at the acclaimed St. Columb's Secondary School in Derry, attended by other literary figures including Brian Friel and Seamus Deane and by musicians Phil Coulter and Paul Brady. He studied at Queen’s University in Belfast and lectured there after graduating. In describing his work, the Nobel Committee wrote, “Seamus Heaney’s poetry is often down-to-earth. For Heaney, poetry was like the earth—something that must be plowed and turned. Often, he pa

Kindred Spirits in County Cork,  Photo courtesy of  Gavin Sheridan Irish rebel John Boyle O'Reilly arrived in Boston in January 1870, and almost immediately he became a powerful voice for the oppressed, including his own people of Ireland who were trying to break free of Britain, but also in the United States, Blacks, Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. O'Reilly saw the British conquest of the Irish and Native Americans as similar episodes of colonialism and exploitation. Native land had been stolen in both Ireland and America by the British, and O'Reilly's  sympathies were always with the oppressed and dispossessed.  Like everyone in Boston's Irish community, O'Reilly was aware of the extraordinary act of kindness that happened in 1847, when the Choctaw people raised more than $170 ($5000 today) to send to the people of Midleton, County Cork, during the height of the Irish Famine, a five-year potato crop failure that devastated the island. The Choctaws th