Ireland is believed to be a magical place of faeries and spirits, saints and scholars, poets and writers, musicians and dancers. Some of the 7 million visitors drawn to Ireland each year come for the pubs and the Guinness. Others for the conviviality and craic. And still others seek the natural beauty of Ireland's coast and countryside. On September 3, 2013, Anne Driscoll arrived in Dublin, utterly alone. She was there as a Fulbright Scholar to teach the law students at the Irish Innocence Project how to use a journalist’s interviewing and investigative skills to unearth evidence of wrongful convictions. She ended up chronicling her adventures and misadventures in a mini-memoir of that academic year, now published as Irish You Were Here: Volume One.
She counted herself lucky enough to be invited back the following September and arrived exactly one year to the day after she first arrived. She had no idea how her life would unfold but some of the highlights of that second year in Ireland included faking her way through a radio interview in Irish, hearing a banshee wail and finding a holy water font in the doorway of a pub. She has been charmed by Ireland's 50 shades of green: she raced currachs in Cork and nearly crashed into a giant green tanker, she found a magic green marble in a toilet stall at the Palace Bar and she watched the bobbing green bathing caps of hundreds of swimmers in the annual Liffey Swim.
In Ireland, there is the tradition of the seanchaí, the time-honored Gaelic storytellers/historians and, as a journalist, Anne Driscoll thrills to be in a country that practically invented storytelling. She has both collected and shared stories on the page and on the stage, including at a Moth MainSTAGE event in Dublin aired to an audience of 1.8 million podcast listeners.
Read Irish You Were Here: Volume Two and experience the Ireland you won't find described in the tour books. You will be enchanted.
She counted herself lucky enough to be invited back the following September and arrived exactly one year to the day after she first arrived. She had no idea how her life would unfold but some of the highlights of that second year in Ireland included faking her way through a radio interview in Irish, hearing a banshee wail and finding a holy water font in the doorway of a pub. She has been charmed by Ireland's 50 shades of green: she raced currachs in Cork and nearly crashed into a giant green tanker, she found a magic green marble in a toilet stall at the Palace Bar and she watched the bobbing green bathing caps of hundreds of swimmers in the annual Liffey Swim.
In Ireland, there is the tradition of the seanchaí, the time-honored Gaelic storytellers/historians and, as a journalist, Anne Driscoll thrills to be in a country that practically invented storytelling. She has both collected and shared stories on the page and on the stage, including at a Moth MainSTAGE event in Dublin aired to an audience of 1.8 million podcast listeners.
Read Irish You Were Here: Volume Two and experience the Ireland you won't find described in the tour books. You will be enchanted.
