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Ireland has made headlines on major media organisations around the world – both print and digital – as a result of the historic ‘Yes’ vote in the same-sex marriage referendum.

Ireland has become the 20th world nation to legalise gay marriage – but it is the first country in the world to hold a popular vote on the issue. Figures from the referendum announced at Dublin Castle showed that 62.1 per cent of Irish voters said “yes.” Outside, watching the results announcement live in the castle’s cobblestoned courtyard, thousands of gay rights activists cheered, hugged and cried. Add a strong global stereotypical view of Ireland as “a religious and strongly Catholic country” and you have a rattling good story worth the travelling expenses.

Radio France International did not spare the intrigue. “The vote comes 22 years after homosexuality was decriminalised, in a country where Catholic Church influence, even if declining, remains strong,” their reporter, Sébastien Duval, said.

The reporter for ‘The New York Times’ was no less intrigued: “The country overall remains socially conservative, and some still see homosexuality as a sin – or something to mock. Yet Prime Minister Enda Kenny, a churchgoer, supports the amendments.”

“We’re the first country in the world to enshrine marriage equality in our constitution and do so by popular mandate,” Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s health minister who revealed he was gay during the campaign, told state broadcaster RTE. “That makes us a beacon, a light to the rest of the world of liberty and equality. It’s a very proud day to be Irish.”

Around the world, 18 countries have approved gay marriage nationwide, the majority of them in Europe. Others, such as the United States and Mexico, have approved it in certain regions. In the United States, 37 states have approved gay marriage and the Supreme Court is currently weighing the issue.

“This is a joyous day for Ireland and for LGBT people and our allies everywhere,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, a U.S.-based gay-advocacy group, said in a statement. “We are thankful for the leadership of the Irish people, and we hope that many countries, including the United States, follow suit by extending marriage to all their citizens.”

Rory McIlroy won the Wells Fargo Championship by seven strokes, setting a new tournament record score of 267.
The Northern Irish world number one, 26, finished on 21 under par with a final round 69 in North Carolina to earn his second win at Quail Hollow.

America’s Patrick Rodgers and Webb Simpson tied for second on 14 under.

“Everything is firing on all cylinders for me,” said McIlroy. “I’m a more controlled player these days. I’ve learned how to finish things off.”May 28-31, sees the upcoming Irish Open golf championship at Royal County Down.

McIlroy’s win was also a repeat in that the now 26-year-old’s first PGA victory was in the same tournament at the same venue in 2010.

The Irish Open is to be played at the fabled Royal County Down course and so will be as near a home game for McIlroy as his possible.

There will be an array of players who will include Rickie Fowler, Sergio Garcia, and Ernie Els, who has four golf Majors to match Rory’s total to date. Also in the field will be the other members of the Irish Majors club, Graeme McDowell, Darren Clarke and Padraig Harrington, a winner once again on the PGA tour this year.

Others making tracks for the first tee at Royal County Down include defending champion Mikko Ilonen of Finland, and former world number one, Lee Westwood.

More at www.irishopen.ie.

Fashion retailer Primark, known to Irish folk as Pennys, will open two more stores in Massachusetts. Irish people all over New England couldn’t be happier about this news! The Dublin-based fast-fashion store is leasing two more locations in the Bay State in part of its overhaul expansion into the United States.

The two standalone stores will be leased at the Burlington Mall and South Shore Plaza, Sears Holding Corp. announced. This September, Primark will debut its first-ever U.S. location in Boston at the 70,000 square-foot space in Downtown Crossing that was once the home of Filene’s.

For those unfamiliar, Primark is a huge establishment in Europe known for its colossal spaces in urban cities. Stocked with low-budget runway pieces, home supplies, kids’ clothes, holiday gear, and more, Primark is made for those who are looking for Top Shop apparel at Wal-Mart prices.

“We wanted to be in a cosmopolitan environment and Boston is a cosmopolitan and international city,” Jose Luis Martinez de Larramendi, Primark US president, told the Globe earlier this year. George Weston, CEO of Primark’s parent company Associated British Food, also said that Boston is an ideal place for Primark due to the city’s large Irish population (we’re the most Irish city in America, thanks), and the array of college kids in the area.

Check out Primark’s fashion line here!

Sinead-Morrissey (pictured) was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and has been writing poetry from a very early age. In 1990 she became the youngest poet ever to receive the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, and has since been honoured with numerous other awards, amongst them the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There(2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate.

Mary O’Donoghue is a novelist, poet, short story writer, and translator. Her work appears widely in the USA and Ireland: Georgia Review, the Irish Times, Agni, Literary Imagination, Salamander, Dublin Review, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Her first novel Before the House Burns was published in 2010 (Lilliput Press). She is one of the translators of Seán Ó Ríordáin’s Selected Poems(Yale University Press, 2014). She also collaborates with poet Louis de Paor on translations of his work, most recently in The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue (Bloodaxe Books, 2014).

Co-sponsored by BU Center for the Humanities, the Center for the Study of Europe, CITL at CGS and the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture.

Thursday April 30 at 6 p.m.

Katzenberg Center, 3rd floor, CGS

Boston University, 871 Commonwealth Avenue, MA

Free and open to the public, click here for more info.

Bill Brett’s latest book, “Boston, Irish,” is literally a labor of love, a work that offers an evocative and deeply layered examination of the city’s unique Irish history and heritage, from the high and mighty to those whose impact upon the community has been quieter but no less important.

The cornerstone, of course, is Brett’s photographic treasure trove of the Irish and Irish Americans his camera lens has captured over his five decades as an award-winning photojournalist at the Boston Globe (his 50th anniversary with the newspaper was in June 2014). With Carol Beggy’s incisive, keenly hewn prose accompanying the book’s 262 photographs, “Boston, Irish” is a work that belongs not only in the hands of anyone with even a passing interest in the city’s rich Irish tapestry, but also in those of anyone with an interest in the history of Irish America and Ireland itself.

Brett has dedicated the book to his late mother, Mary Ann Brett, an Irish immigrant whose devotion to her family and her faith were the bedrock of the Brett family’s success. Her family’s saga both on the “old sod” and in Boston (Dorchester, in the Bretts’ case) will ring familiar for countless readers of Boston Irish.