Ireland

In the early 1980s, when John "Whitey" Sullivan was in charge, Father Judge kicked off its football season with a two-hour drive to Wildwood, N.J., and a clash at Maxwell Field, just blocks from the beach, against St. John Neumann. Since the Beach Bowl days, the Crusaders mostly have stayed close to home in Week 1, usually playing a suburban foe such as Neshaminy or Council Rock North. Now, Judge, setting the season-opening bar for future years at an incredibly high level, will take a 7 1/2-hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean and play in Ireland.

Dominic Quinn, the colorful WWDB-FM talk-radio host who was as deft with the verbal broadsword as he was with the microphone, died yesterday at his home in Wayne. He was 73. WWDB general manager Dan Sullivan described Quinn as a man who enjoyed his work and the friendships he made in and out of the studio. Quinn began his radio career in 1948. Quinn joined WWDB (96.5 FM) in 1976, leaving the station in 1990, only to return a year later. Before joining WWDB, he hosted a radio program on WCAU-AM.

Visitors to the Sedgwick Cultural Center in Mount Airy will find themselves transported across the Atlantic this fall. To open its season, the neighborhood art center is staging a wide-ranging celebration of Ireland inspired by the work of four local artists who traveled to the Emerald Isle, and including a concert by Karan Casey, former lead singer of the acclaimed Irish American quintet Solas. Tonight's artists' reception, which is free and open to the public, marks the official opening of "Images of Ireland," featuring the work of tilemaker Kate Hochner and photographers Judith and Solomon Levy and Sandra C. Davis.

DUBLIN - Police yesterday arrested Ireland's most notorious Muslim convert over his reported death threats against President Obama. Police said the arrest of Khalid Kelly, 44, dubbed "Taliban Terry" by Dubliners, came 10 days before Obama's arrival in Ireland and four days after the British newspaper the Sunday Mirror printed an interview with Kelly. He is Ireland's most outspoken supporter of al Qaeda and its slain founder, Osama bin Laden. Kelly was quoted as telling the newspaper that he expected al Qaeda to kill Obama during his visit to Ireland in part because the country's police force is poorly armed.

The World Cup will be missing one of its best known coaches for a game. Jack Charlton, the flinty Englishman who has become a folk hero in Ireland for his successes coaching its national team, will have to watch his players try to reach the second round of the World Cup from the stands. Yesterday, Charlton became only the second coach in World Cup history to be suspended for a game, for his "unsporting conduct" and "ill-mannered behavior" during Friday's 2-1 loss to Mexico.

Echoes of Ireland will be performed at Upper Darby High School Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m. Saturday. Performing will be Mick Moloney, a Renaissance man of traditional Irish music; Eugene O'Donnell, an All-Ireland fiddle champion; Regan Wick, the North American Irish step dance champion, and Seamus Egan, master of the flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, banjo and mandolin. Reserved seats are $9, and general admission is $8. The center is at School Lane and Lansdowne Avenue, and the box office is open from 2:30 to 6 p.m. weekdays.

The Run of the Country is precariously perched on fissures and fault lines. It is a daring mix of comedy and tragedy that takes place along the border that partitions Ireland, but its strength lies in its consideration of the bitterness and guilt that can divide families. Shane Connaughton, who wrote the screenplay for My Left Foot, has adapted and markedly lightened his own novel. The blend of broad humor and far more serious material surely would not work outside Ireland, a place where wit and woe walk hand in hand.

The parks are closed. Bike trails, too. Fishing? Doubtful. And don't even think about playing the ponies. They aren't running. Bottom line? If you're bound for Britain, stick to the cities. And if you're heading to Ireland for St. Patrick's Day, you've got an excuse to lollygag in a pub: No parades. That's the advice that British and Irish tourism agencies are offering the hundreds of people who call each day, worried about how the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak will affect their vacations.

"Mom, what did that sign say? Which exit do we take to Athlone?" I had all I could handle driving a manual-shift car on the left side of the road through the narrow lanes of County Offaly, Ireland, and my 83-year-old mother was no help as a navigator. I soon learned I would have to get around the roundabouts and find the right exits on my own. My mother and I had visited Ireland once before, but we had not traveled to County Offaly, which is in the center of the country and a bit off the usual tourist routes.

Am I letting my imagination run rampant, or am I getting a signal, strong and clear? All during my witness of Novel Stages' "Romeo and Juliet" I picked up an almost subliminal message which went something like this: Omigod, David Bassuk is attempting to Ardenize his Shakespeare! The conceit is far from inconceivable. I've had the notion for some time that the hand on the tiller at Novel Stages is more than a little envious of the Arden Theater Co., which preceded it on the local scene by a mere few months, for the apparent ease with which the Ardens have transmuted the classics - Shakespeare, in particular - into terms that appeal greatly to a modern audience, and especially to the younger end of the demographic scale.

Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce is a perfect example of Marx's observation that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. " Inis Nua Theatre Company presents this very Irish, very theatrical play about families and violence and the endless acting out of the past at Off-Broad Street Theatre. Tom Reing directs and J. Alex Cordaro choreographs the fights, of which there are many. Two grown sons and their father live in a dilapidated 15th-floor walkup apartment on Walworth Road in London.

The Irish Heritage Theatre, a new company, is introducing itself to the city with Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! The play speaks to the Irish heritage of the city, about a young man who decides to leave his small town in Ireland to immigrate to Philadelphia. It's a story of excitement and fear that must have been repeated thousands and thousands of times all over Ireland. Friel is the Big Daddy of 20th-century Irish drama, and 1964's Philadelphia was his first success.

In the early 1980s, when John "Whitey" Sullivan was in charge, Father Judge kicked off its football season with a two-hour drive to Wildwood, N.J., and a clash at Maxwell Field, just blocks from the beach, against St. John Neumann. Since the Beach Bowl days, the Crusaders mostly have stayed close to home in Week 1, usually playing a suburban foe such as Neshaminy or Council Rock North. Now, Judge, setting the season-opening bar for future years at an incredibly high level, will take a 7 1/2-hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean and play in Ireland.

"Banjo" Barney McKenna, 72, the last original member of the Irish folk band the Dubliners, died Thursday while having a morning cup of tea with a friend. He had just marked his 50th year with the troupe. Irish classical guitarist Michael Howard, who was with Mr. McKenna when he died, said he was talking with his longtime friend at his kitchen table, when "all of a sudden Barney's head dropped down to his chest. It looked as if he'd nodded off. " Howard said paramedics over the phone talked him through emergency revival procedures, but Mr. McKenna "was pretty much gone.

DUBLIN - Somewhere in Ireland, a burglar has the heart of a saint. Officials at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin said yesterday that they're distraught and perplexed over the theft of the church's most precious relic: the preserved heart of St. Laurence O'Toole, patron saint of Dublin. O'Toole's heart had been displayed in the cathedral since the 13th century. It was stored in a heart-shaped wooden box and secured in a small, square iron cage on the wall of a chapel dedicated to his memory.

DUBLIN - Irish character actor David Kelly, who played Grandpa Joe in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and motorcycled naked in "Waking Ned Devine," has died. He was 82. His family and friends said Kelly died Sunday in Dublin after an acting career on stage, film, TV and radio that spanned a half-century. Kelly was known in Ireland for his large body of work as a Dublin stage actor in the 1950s and 1960s. British and Irish TV viewers also could recognize his face and bony frame from short, usually comedic turns on soaps and sitcoms, most memorably as a work-dodging Irish builder opposite John Cleese in a 1975 episode of "Fawlty Towers.

National Geographic has inspired legions of people to dream about grand adventures, but Ian Lacey, from County Wexford, Ireland, and Lee Saville, from Colorado, are spinning their dreams into action. Name: 350South.org What it does: Follows two young men on a post-college, 17,000-mile Pan-American bicycle journey from Alaska to Argentina. What's hot: They're not just doing it to attract new blog fans. Along the way, Lacey and Saville are hoping to meet and ride with Irish expatriates or those who claim Irish ancestry.

Britain and Ireland regained the Walker Cup from the United States for the first time since 2003 on Sunday, holding off the Americans in the afternoon singles for a 14-12 victory in Aberdeen, Scotland. . . . Ray Thompson of Drexel Hill shot a 2-under 142 to finish in a tie for fourth in stroke play in the U.S. Senior Men's Amateur at Kinloch Golf Club in Manakin-Sabot, Va., reaching match play, which starts Monday. Merion's Buddy Marucci tied for 27th . . . Liz Haines of Gladwyne qualified for match play tied for 59th in the U.S. Senior Women's Amateur at the Honors Course in Ooltewah, Tenn., with a two-round total of 163. . . . Top-ranked Yani Tseng successfully defended her title in the LPGA Tour's NW Arkansas Championship, beating Amy Yang with a four-foot birdie putt on the first hole of a playoff in Rogers, Ark. HORSE RACING: Betterthancheddar rallied to win the Cane Pace, beating Townslight Hanover by a neck at Pocono Downs on Saturday night in the first jewel of the pacing triple crown.

By Benjamin Black Henry Holt & Co. 310 pp. $25 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky John Banville distinguishes between the artistic pleasure he derives from the literary novels he writes under his own name and the craftsman's pleasure he gets from the crime fiction he writes as Benjamin Black. This makes it fair to ask a craftsman's questions about the Black books: How well do the parts fit together? How smoothly does Black execute them? Are they beautiful? Do they work?

Stories By Roddy Doyle Viking. 214 pp. $25.95 Reviewed by Scott Eyman Roddy Doyle's new book of stories focuses exclusively on middle-aged men, so you know it's not going to be a laugh riot. Add to that the national Irish hangover left when the Celtic Tiger turned into a mewling kitten and you have a recipe for low-grade depression. Doyle's relentless focus on modern Ireland and its inhabitants reveals how little the country and its men have changed.