Politicians from both sides of the Irish border will be in Washington tomorrow to help President Obama celebrate a belated St Patrick's Day. A symbol of the progress since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, but back home divisions still run deep. Few are willing to confess the role they might have played in past violence. But former Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries are looking for a way forward, a journey that's taken them to the townships of South Africa.
We’ve heard a lot about President Obama’s ethnic background since the 2008 election: his father from Kenya, his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. Few of us remember that the President's mother’s family came to the U.S. from Ireland. But the tiny village of Moneygall, Ireland hasn’t forgotten. Today they’re getting ready to celebrate the president as he visits his ancestral hometown for the first time. Barry Williams is a Moneygall resident - he says that many presidents have come through Ireland looking for ancestral roots.
Voters in Ireland go to the polls today to decide who should lead a country wrenching from near-economic collapse. The fallout from the banking crisis there is driving unemployment to 13 percent and forcing thousands to flee. The country's statistics office says 100,000 people will emigrate over the next two years — that's two percent of the whole population. But in this election, those people who left get no say in who runs the country. Ireland is one of the few nations that does not give the to vote to citizens living abroad.
To make this point, a website site called BallotBox.ie is letting Irish expats vote in a kind of shadow election. The site was created by John Byrne and Brian Reynolds, who emigrated from Dublin last year.
The Irish government is in the unprecedented situation of having a leader of parliament who does not head up his own party. On Saturday, Taoiseach (leader) Brian Cowen stepped down as head of the ruling party, Fianna Fail, after the resignation of key ministers a few days earlier. And yesterday, the government's coalition partner, the Green Party, withdrew its support. Now elections that were scheduled for mid-March will most likely happen in the next few weeks. And the fate of a finance bill that was to complete the IMF bailout is uncertain.
A newly disclosed Vatican document reveals that officials instructed Ireland’s bishops not to report all suspected child abuse cases to the police. David Clohessy, director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, says that the 1997 letter undermines persistent Vatican claims that Rome never instructed bishops to withhold evidence. Joe Rigert is a journalist and author of "An Irish Tragedy: How Sex Abuse by Irish Priests Helped Cripple the Catholic Church," and puts this new development in context.
The International Monetary Fund’s $140 billion bailout for Ireland has been set in motion, but some economists are talking about a better option for the Emerald Isle: defaulting on their debt. What’s so bad about asking investors to suffer the consequences of over lending?
Ireland's bailout moves forward, as the country takes a $140 billion from the International Monetary Fund. The move has postponed some looming problems for Portugal, which the E.U. also worries is in need of large-scale financial help. But questions remain about whether the bailout of Ireland will create the necessary stability in the Euro single currency zone or not. The BBC's Theo Leggett joins us for more.
Until several years ago an economic success story, Ireland has been told that it should accept financial help, from Britain and the rest of the European Union, and perhaps from the International Monetary Fund as well. With a financial bailout would come some loss of control, and politicians in the current Irish government say they will resist raising their famously-low corporate tax rates, which many credit with attracting foreign companies to Ireland. The country's long been fiercely independent — it's arguably part of Ireland's national identity. Many Irish people are heartsick over the country's financial woes and the loss of sovereignty a bailout would entail.
After Greece's financial bailout by the European Union earlier this year, Ireland and Portugal could be next. Why? In part, because the European Union's economically stronger countries are sometimes obliged to take care of the economically weak, so a feared economic downturn doesn't spread. But when countries like Ireland and Portugal ask for help, there's an immediate problem: Their own interests don't necessarily align with the interests of the countries bailing them out.
Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for The New York Times, has the latest in this potential economic rescue.
Few countries have been hit harder by the Great Recession than Ireland. But unlike some of their fellow Europeans in Paris or Athens, the Irish have responded to the stringent austerity programs imposed by their government with resignation, as opposed to protests or violence. We take a look at Irish perseverance and stoicism in the face of a global recession.
The day that became known in Northern Ireland’s history as Bloody Sunday – when thirteen civilians were shot dead by British soldiers at a civil rights march in Londonderry on January 30, 1972 – remains a controversial flashpoint in Northern Ireland’s history. It triggered three decades of bitter and sectarian violence known as the Troubles, which claimed more than 3,600 lives.
But on Tuesday, the longest and most expensive legal inquiry in British history found all thirteen civilians innocent. British Prime Minister David Cameron said the deaths were “both unjustified and unjustifiable.”
Hundreds of sexual abuse cases against Catholic priests have been surfacing in Ireland over the past weeks and the Pope said he will address the crisis in a repentance letter tomorrow.
But his efforts could be undermined by a scandal of his own. Last week, a senior church official said when the Pope was Archdiocese of Munich, he made “serious mistakes” in handling one specific priest accused of molesting boys back in the early 1980s.
As President Barack Obama has become a symbol for millions in his father's homeland, Kenya, the Kennedy family was a symbol of success for millions in Ireland. Throughout his career, Senator Edward Kennedy fought hard to maintain those bonds. Kennedy used his position to facilitate diplomatic inroads for any Irish leaders visiting our country, and he was instrumental in securing the Good Friday Agreement under President Clinton in 1995.
We are joined by Niall O’Dowd, founder and editor of Irish Voice newspaper and IrishCentral.Com. O'Dowd was extensively involved in the negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreemement.
In nearly 50 years in the U.S. Senate, Kennedy compiled an impressive list of legislative achievements: on health care, civil rights, education and immigration. From outside the Kennedy's house on Cape Cod, we're joined again by Sean Corcoran, senior reporter for WCAI. The Kennedy family legacy is far from exclusively American, however – it extends across the Atlantic to Ireland. We're joined by Irish politician and former Kennedy intern Mark Durkan, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Ireland, and one of the leaders of the power-sharing governments in Northern Ireland.
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