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Displaying items by tag: Lisheen

#fishing – A small fishing community in West Cork is hitting the video headlines this week following the intervention of a five times US Grammy Award winner about a song of hers they recorded to raise money for a local charity writes Tom MacSweeney.
The children of Lisheen National School, led by their teacher Niamh McCarthy, near Skibbereen in West Cork, recorded a CD to raise funds for the local transport scheme taking cancer patients to Cork for treatment. They appeared on RTE Nationwide, this week, after which a viewer and a fan of the renowned American singer/songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, sent a note to her that the children had recorded her song 'Come Darkness, Come Light' for their Christmas CD and a video to go along with it, which is on YouTube.
Mary Chapin Carpenter looked it up sent out a Tweet and re-tweeted a link to the video, with the message: 'Best early xmas gift...children of Lisheen Nat'l School (West Cork) performing Come Darkness, Come Light."
Mary Chapin Carpenter is a five-time winner of Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012.
The teacher, Niamh McCarthy, said: "Imagine, she is a five-times Grammy Award winner and she liked what the children in Lisheen, a school in West Cork, what our kids did. It is unreal the reaction. The video has gone viral as a result. It is worth going onto her Facebook page to read the comments from her fans about our children! Unreal. Our video is gone viral and we have had CD sales to the States as a result. Just posted to Alaska and Minnesota this morning!
The pupils recorded the CD of Christmas Carols to raise money for the community's Cancer Connect charity which is a local transport scheme taking cancer patients to Cork for treatment. The video tells the story of the day of the CD recording in the local church.

Published in Fishing

The Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) Information

The creation of the Irish Cruiser Racing Association (ICRA) began in a very low key way in the autumn of 2002 with an exploratory meeting between Denis Kiely, Jim Donegan and Fintan Cairns in the Granville Hotel in Waterford, and the first conference was held in February 2003 in Kilkenny.

While numbers of cruiser-racers were large, their specific locations were widespread, but there was simply no denying the numerical strength and majority power of the Cork-Dublin axis. To get what was then a very novel concept up and running, this strength of numbers had to be acknowledged, and the first National Championship in 2003 reflected this, as it was staged in Howth.

ICRA was run by a dedicated group of volunteers each of whom brought their special talents to the organisation. Jim Donegan, the elder statesman, was so much more interested in the wellbeing of the new organisation than in personal advancement that he insisted on Fintan Cairns being the first Commodore, while the distinguished Cork sailor was more than content to be Vice Commodore.

ICRA National Championships

Initially, the highlight of the ICRA season was the National Championship, which is essentially self-limiting, as it is restricted to boats which have or would be eligible for an IRC Rating. Boats not actually rated but eligible were catered for by ICRA’s ace number-cruncher Denis Kiely, who took Ireland’s long-established native rating system ECHO to new heights, thereby providing for extra entries which brought fleet numbers at most annual national championships to comfortably above the hundred mark, particularly at the height of the boom years. 

ICRA Boat of the Year (Winners 2004-2019)