Ireland

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.

Politicians make such strange bedfellows. An interesting article written by Jimmy Breslin appeared on the Nov. 13 Op- ed Page. A 79-year-old man was arrested in 1981 for trying to buy guns for his side of the Irish problem. He was arrested and acquitted. Being a local folk hero he led the New York parade on St. Patrick's Day. Cardinal Terence Cooke refused to stand on the steps when the parade, with him a leader, passed by. And, to quote the author, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.)

It's just past noon on Saturday. You switch to the AM radio dial and decide not to listen to the all-talk, yack-yack stations, the raucous top-40 stations or the hyper sports play-by-play stations. So you tune to WVCH (AM/740) and listen to the low, dulcet tones of Will Regan. From noon until 2 p.m. on Saturdays, Regan replaces the Gospel format of WVCH with "The Irish Hours. " It's a program of popular Irish music mixed in with Regan's soft patter about the wonderful music, the wonderful singers, the wonderful Irish people.

Over the centuries, the Irish have dispersed like clover in the wind, alighting in lands far from their native soil. This year, the Emerald Isle is calling them back to their roots. The Gathering, launched last year by government officials, is an extended family reunion of Ireland's diaspora. (Quick migration lesson: 70 million people worldwide claim Irish lineage, including 40 million in the United States.) More than 3,000 activities, held throughout the year in all 32 counties, including a few in Northern Ireland, salute the pillars of Irish culture: art, music, literature, food, drink, sports, community, and camaraderie.

DUBLIN - European Union finance ministers agreed Friday to grant Ireland and Portugal seven more years to pay their bailout loans, easing the burden on their economies and paving the way for a quicker return to sustainable growth. In their attempts to stabilize the economy of the 17 nations sharing the euro currency, the ministers also approved a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) loan package to stop Cyprus from sliding into bankruptcy. But the rescue comes at a heavy price for the Mediterranean island country.

DUBLIN, Ireland - A chilly, damp Dublin celebrated St. Patrick's Day with artistic flair Sunday as the focal point for a weekend of Irish celebrations worldwide. More than 250,000 revelers braved the occasionally snowy, sleety skies to line the streets for the traditional holiday parade, a two-mile jaunt through the city's heart involving performers from 46 countries. Unusually, 8,000 tourists in town for the festivities led the procession in a "people's parade. " Many donned leprechaun costumes or deployed banners and flags of their home nations or U.S. states, with the Texans making the biggest impression, sporting "Happy St. Paddy's Day, Y'All!"

Irish celebrity chef Clodagh McKenna has fond memories of celebrating St. Patrick's Day while she was growing up in County Cork. "We would be looking forward to it for weeks," she said in a phone interview from Dublin. "In school, we would be studying the history of Ireland, making Irish flags, then on the day before, we would make brooches with fresh shamrocks, blessed by the priest, and tied with a white ribbon," she said. On St. Patrick's Day, she and her sisters would put on their best dresses for Mass with the family.

Egyptian rallies mark uprising CAIRO - Egyptian security forces fired tear gas, and protesters hurled stones and Molotov cocktails in a daylong demonstration Thursday, raising fears of a violent anniversary of the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak. Youth activists and opposition groups have called for large rallies on the anniversary Friday in Cairo's Tahrir Square and in front of the presidential palace in the upscale suburb, Heliopolis. The protests, which left dozens injured, began before dawn in central Cairo when protesters tried to tear down a concrete wall built to prevent them from reaching the parliament and the cabinet building.

SAN FRANCISCO - Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service now owned by Facebook, said Tuesday that it will remove language from its new terms of service suggesting that users' photos could appear in advertisements. The language in question had appeared in updated policies announced Monday and scheduled to take effect Jan. 16. After an outcry on social-media and privacy- rights blogs, the company clarified that it has no plans to put users' photos in ads. What had riled users and privacy advocates was Instagram's assertion that it may now receive payments from businesses to use its members' photos, user name and other data "in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation" to them.

DUBLIN, Ireland - Northern Ireland leaders appealed for calm Thursday after Protestant militants attacked offices and a home connected to the most compromise-minded political party over its support for reducing the display of British flags on government buildings. The overnight violence in two Belfast suburbs came on the eve of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's planned visit Friday to the capital of the British territory. It underscored how divided Northern Ireland remains despite the broad success of a peace process that has stopped paramilitary violence but done little to bring down barriers between rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic communities.

SEAN O'NEILL JR. has gotten into a lifetime's worth of legal trouble in his 23 years, and now authorities confirm that he's skipped probation and fled to the Emerald Isle to join his dear deported dad. The younger O'Neill first made headlines in 2006, when he killed his friend while drunkenly playing with a gun at age 17. Then his father, a Northern Ireland native, was found guilty of citizenship, firearms and tax crimes, and deported to...

Sean Owen O'Neill Jr., the Chester County man who absconded after violating the terms of his parole on a DUI charge, has fled to Ireland, county authorities said Wednesday. O'Neill served jail time this year after crashing his vehicle into a house in 2011 while intoxicated. In 2006, he shot and killed his best friend at an underage drinking party, was tried as a juvenile, and was sentenced to a residential treatment program. After serving a short prison term on the DUI offense, he was required to wear a SCRAM alcohol monitor, but officials lost contact with him this month after he tested positive for alcohol and drugs, a violation of his parole.