Boruma - Irish by heritage, family by name

Over the weekend we published details regarding the St. Patrick’s Festival in Dublin and neglected to mention a series of contests which you can enter; one of which is sponsored by Ireland’s fantastic photo sharing site, Pix.ie.

Five sweepstakes in all, here are a few simple ones to warm you up:

Win Tickets to Lord of the Dance

Tickets are for Saturday 21st, 3 pm, performance in The Mahony Hall at the helix in Dublin.

Since its world premiere in Dublin in 19(??), it has broken records worldwide and is the biggest grossing tour in the history of Irish entertainment. Seen by over 50 million people, including myself a few years ago, it is a energetic show with universal appeal making Michael Flatley one of the modern day wonders of the world.

To be in with a chance to win one of two pairs of tickets to the Lord of the Dance simply email the answer the following question to info@stpatricksfestival.ie:

In what year did Michael Flatley open Lord of the Dance in Dublin?
A. 1986
B. 1996
C. 2006

State your name and answer and place DANCE in the subject line. Closing date midday Thursday 19th March.

For further information Tel: 01 700 7000. Tickets from €39.50

Win a TomTom Go 530

Featuring TomTom’s award-winning software, the latest navigation features and content including IQ Routes™, Advanced Lane Guidance and Map Share™, as well as Bluetooth® hands-free connectivity, TomTom is one of the world’s leading navigation providers.

To be in with a chance to win your very own TomTom GO 530, email the answer to the following question to info@stpatricksfestival.ie with your name and answer. Place TOMTOM in the subject line. Closing date midday Wednesday 18th March.

The TomTom GO 530 comes with pre-installed door-to-door maps of:
A. China
B. The North Pole
C. UK and Ireland

Win a memory foam molded Budda Bag

Budda Bags’, umm… fun?, furtniture is filled with an ultra comfortable memory foam that molds and shapes to your body.

Email the answer to the following question to info@stpatricksfestival.ie stating your name and answer and placing BUDDA in the subject line. Closing date midday Wednesday 18th March.

Budda Bags are filled with:
A. Ultra free love
B. Ultra comfortable memory foam
C. Ultra bouncy beans

Find more Budda Bags at 1 Jervis House New Millennium Walkway Dublin 1 Ph: (01) 873 4245 or email.

Sonas and Vicar St.

Finally, most pressing before we get to the big one from Pix.ie and Canon, is a unique night of entertainment at Vicar St. on March 12th. Submissions close earlier than the previous contest.

SONAS was formerly known as:
A. Club Oíche
B. Club Spraoi
C. Club Sult

Email your answers to info@stpatricksfestival.ie stating your name and answer and placing SONAS in the subject line. This closes March 12th so answer now!

Share St. Patrick’s Festival photos for a chance to win up to €1,800 worth of Canon camera equipment and accessories!

Share your 2009 St. Patrick’s Festival photos on Ireland’s most popular photosharing site and you’ll be automatically entered.

1st Prize – Canon EOS 1000D digital SLR camera, Selphy ES3 photo printer, 150 Euro photography training course, adding memory card and photo printing paper. Total value €1,050

2nd Prize – Powershot E1 digital camera and Selphy ES3 photo printer. Total Value €480

3rd Prize – Selphy ES3 photo printer. Total Value €240

To get started, visit The Official St Patrick’s Festival Photo Competition

Closing date to upload your Festival photos is Thursday 26th March 5pm.

All contests are hosted by the Dublin St. Patrick’s Festival so visit stpatricksfestival.ie for more details.

Feature an upcoming event with Boruma or Join a local pub crawl to get in on the action in town.

Welcome back, assuming you've joined us, find a group or start your own Irish blog.

We’re about a week away from St. Patrick’s festivities and as we thought of all the places ways to highlight the parties and festivals of St. Patrick’s Day we considered only one to be ideal for this site. We considered highlighting Boston or Chicago, famous in the United States for their own ingrained flavor of Erin. We could have shared with you some insight on where the old world meets the new in Savannah, Georgia. When all was said and done, it was to Ireland that we knew we needed to go, as the land of cead mile failte, no host could be as warm or as appropriate for such a celebration than that than that of the Irish and no festival better shared than Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day Festival.

March 12th really kick starts the Irish tourist season with an endless celebration brought about by street attractions, cultural events and performances.

The six-day Festival of performance, spectacle and participation is set to bring a formula for music and mirth to the streets and the Country as we celebrate our national holiday. Although times and purse strings are getting tighter no one knows how to have a great time for free better than the Irish and this year’s Festival programme promises to make FREE FUN the order of the day for the six-day Festival.

March 17, at noon, is a three kilometer parade, which has been known to attract 500 thousand spectators. Stake out a position on O’Connell Street on the north side or College Green outside Trinity on the south before 10 a.m. for a respectable view. Want something more comfortable? Grandstand seats available for €60. This year’s parade theme, ‘The Sky is the limit’, should serve to deliver the biggest and best yet. Irish street theatre companies, ceremonial groups and international marching bands will create a spectacular carnival atmosphere.

St. Patrick’s Festival 2009 marks the 14th following a request from the government in November 1995:

• Offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world
• Create energy and excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing the craic
• Provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations
• Project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal, as we approach the new Millennium.

The first St Patrick’s Day Festival was held on March 17th 1996 with only four months to prepare and barely a parade in place. The audience of the day drew an estimated 430,000. In 1997, they dropped “Day” to become “St. Patrick’s Festival”, a three day event entertaining over a million.

This year, the festival is broken up into categories helping attendees find the event that suits them best.

Families will find preceding the Parade on the 17th, The Spheres, a stunning performance by Australia based performing arts group <A HREF=”http://www.strangefruit.net.au/”Strange Fruit perched on giant, illuminated orbs at Docklands and the Funfair, a carnival featuring the 150-foot high Jubilee Wheel at Merrion Square.

The Best of the Fest, a comedy festival at Laughter Lounge runs Thursday the 12th through Saturday the 14th featuring the 5 greatest comedians working in Ireland today. Doors open at 7 with a free “Baby Guinness” until 7:30. Contact the box office 1800 COMEDY (266339) or from overseas +353 1 878 3003 or boxoffice@laughterlounge.com. The comedy festival culminates, in a way, on the night of the 14th, as one of the greatest fireworks displays will be unleashed over the River Suir to an amazing soundtrack from Mark McCabe.

St Patrick’s Festival’s Irish language celebration, Gaelspraoi, supported by Foras na Gaeilge, the body responsible for promoting the Irish language throughout Ireland, offers the greatest number of events, throughout the fest, for all age groups. Here’s a rare opportunity to experience Dublin in Irish (Gaelic) through cabarets and céilís, tours, workshops and much more. The calendar is in Irish so, unfortunately, I’m hard pressed to give you a run down; here’s the calendar to review the upcoming culture and craic.

That hardly covers the festivities with an official walk through Dublin, a race, endless concerts and live music, and even literary performances featuring one of Ireland’s great authors and a presentation of Darby O’Gill and the Little People.

For more, visit stpatricksfestival.ie

Hotel rooms in Dublin are pricey, usually charging per person rather than per room so insist on the room rate or keep looking. For discounts on extended stays, try the Irish Hotel Federation or if traveling alone, consider the famous B&Bs that are the best way too to see the countryside.

Feature an event of your own with Boruma or host a blog for your Irish club or organization.

Traveling to Ireland or merely considering as much? If there for family and culture, one can’t put in to words the experience you’ll have playing golf, shopping, or in the pubs catching a traditional music session. But as a tourist, Ireland has some of the most astounding landscape with attractions unmatched any where in the world. Combined with modern cities whose histories pass thousands of years, it is hard to know where to begin.

There is something to be said for a simple list to guide your way; we’re going to keep the list brief, as we’ll no doubt cover each of these topics in detail at some point, so to set you off on the right foot, here are the top 10 things to do in Ireland. Let’s start with Dublin and we’ll head clockwise around Erin to keep your bearings and plan your way:

1. Dublin: The largest city and capital; located near the middle of Ireland’s east coast, at the mouth of the River Liffey. Greek astronomer Ptolemy provides the earliest known reference to human habitation in the area having referred to a settlement called Eblana Civitas around A.D. 140. The settlement of ‘Dubh Linn’ seems to date back as far as the first century BC though the town is known to have been established in about 841 by the Vikings who planned the city carefully, laying out homes and streets with such attention to detail that it stands as a model of early urban development. The city has a world-famous literary history, having produced many prominent literary figures, including William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett and Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker and James Joyce. Home to reknowned heritage such as the Book of Kells as well as nightlife that rivals, well, maybe, Ibiza in Temple Bar. Dublin is as famous for its music as any in Ireland; perhaps more so having fostered U2, The Dubliners, The Boomtown Rats, Sinéad O’Connor, and Thin Lizzy at historic venues like the Point Theatre (sorry, the O2). We could go on and on about Dublin; needless to say, a trip to Dublin is a trip to Rome, Barcelona, London and Prague in one.
2. Glendalough: Heading south and bit west, we find a monestary built throughout the centuries of great Christian design, as much as the wonderous catholic cathedrals make one quake with awe, Glendalough will have you considering a future as a mock. Meaning ‘Glen of Two Lakes,’ Glendalough is in a glacial near mountain lakes in County Wicklow. Pictures speak a thousand words in the case of Glendalough.
3. Rock of Cashel: From the monestary to the seat of kings, we’ll find the Rock of Cashel west and north of Glendalough. This church and fortress, too a monestary, is easily the Emerald Isle’s most stunning reminder of medieval Ireland. The Rock of Cashel served as the traditional seat of the Kings of Munster for several hundred years prior to the Norse invasions. While unfortunate that few of the earliest structures survive, the extensive development that remains dates from the 12th and 13th centuries. Reminding us of the near impossibility of being untouched by an O’Brien, In 1647, Cashel was ravaged by English Parliamentarian troops under Murrough O’Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin. The Irish Confederate troops there were massacred, as were the Roman Catholic clergy. The earliest and tallest of the Cashel structures still found and worth catching is the round tower while the Chapel of King Cormac, Cormac’s Chapel, from 1127-1134, is an unusually sophisticated and decorated Irish church.
4. Ring of Kerry: The mountains, streams, and lakes of the Ring of Kerry, west of where we’ve been, are unique in all the world. The ring is a trail that the 170 km, circular road, starting from Killarney taking us through the Iveragh Peninsula and to Kenmare, Waterville, and Killorglin. While an island, with most of Ireland bringing you close the ocean and its bounty and character, it is in the Ring of Kerry where you feel most at home in Ireland’s harmony with the sea. Though centuries apart in age, Kerry has the comfort and expected familiarity of a Northeast United States fishing town (though saying as much doesn’t do it justice).
5. 5. Cliffs of Moher: Looking north to O’Brien’s Tower we find perhaps the most picturesque spot in Ireland at the 600 foot sea cliffs of Moher. O’Brien Tower, incidentally, is a stone crafted, round at about the midpoint of the cliffs. It was built by Sir Cornelius O’Brien, a descendant Brian Boru, in 1835. From atop the tower, one can view the Aran Islands and Galway Bay (we’ll get to both in a minute) as well as the Maum Turk Mountains to the north and Loop Head to the south.
6. Aran Islands: Curious what life in Ireland was like 100 years ago? These craggy islands off the west coast of Ireland give us a taste with culture almost untouched since the turn of the last century. The largest island is Inishmore (Árainn Mhór or Inis Mór), the middle and second-largest is Inishmaan (Inis Meáin / Inis Meadhóin) and the smallest and most eastern is Inisheer (Inis Thiar or Inis Oírr / Inis Oirthir). Irish, as you might suspect from the names, is the spoken language on all three islands, giving you a unique glipse at a rare culture responsible for the beautiful Aran Sweater. Distinguished by their use of complex, textured stitch patterns from unscoured wool, which gained world renowned in the 1950′s. While there, be sure to see O’Brien’s Castle on Inis Oírr which was built in the 14th century and taken from the O’Briens by the O’Flaherty clan of Connemara in 1582; I still hold a grudge.
7. Galway: North and east, almost directly west of Dublin, is the city that could be said to rival it. Not in size, but culture and energy (and growth), as the college town of Galway, home to the National University of Ireland, is nicknamed Ireland’s Cultural Heart (Croí Cultúrtha na hÉireann); renowned for its extensively active lifestyle with numerous festivals, celebrations and events. The university holds the UNESCO archive of spoken material for the Celtic languages and not for the impact of the University alone, Galway’s growth and dynamic culture is driven by its being the most central port on the West Coast of Ireland; in the eastern corner of Galway Bay.
8. Giant’s Causeway: There is no way to really explain this strange conglomeration of honeycomb shaped stones on the Antrim Coast of Ireland, north of our time in Galway. This 1768, Susanna Drury engraving perhaps best captures the wonder of 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of ancient volcanic eruptions. Legend has it that the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight Benandonner.
9. Belfast: Southeast of the causeway is the impressive architecture and culture of Belfast; capital of Northern Ireland and host of The Troubles. A city of industry devastated by the period of ethno / political conflict which spilled into England, the Republic of Ireland, and as far as mainland Europe from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. As a result of peace accords in the late 90′s, a trip to Belfast is as rich as any in Ireland, affording a glimpse of wonders such as Cavehill, thought to be the inspiration for Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels. Belfast’s industrial roots are best known as the home of the Titanic.
   
10. Newgrange: Finally, south to Newgrange where stone age tombs bring us full circle from the modern age of Dublin to the ancestry of Ireland found through places like Newgrange. Found along the Boyne River Valley, Newgrange is known as Ireland’s Stonehenge for good reason. Over 5000 years old Newgrange is one of the most famous prehistoric sites, remarkably built in such a way that at dawn on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, a narrow beam of sunlight illuminates the floor of the chamber at the end of the long passageway. Consisting of large neolithic mounds and megalithic art, Newgrange is now host to classic Irish mythology, as one of the sidhe, or fairy-mounds, where the Tuatha Dé Danann lived after conquering the island from the Fir Bolg.

Need more? Here’s a great list of things to do in Ireland (they make mention of a Hooker race in Galway which I have to read a bit more about… at least it validates Galway’s legacy). Have your own thoughts? Start an Irish travel blog with or plan an event with Boruma.