Search Results for 'Margaret Craven'

There was a famous fight in this town in the state of Maine, once upon a time. Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay — later Muhammed Ali — came to Lewiston to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. John Delahunty remembers the excitement in town. He now runs a legal firm. On this evening of November 4 2008 he is working in a voluntary capacity. He is keeping an eye on election polling stations for the Democrats. “Right across there in the town sports centre. That’s where it all happened,” says John. “It was the mid 1960s.”

It was a twofold mission — to do the best you could for yourself and to do the best you could for the folks at home. Margaret Craven was talking about emigration from Ireland the way it used to be in the 1960s. She knows. She left her native Letterard in Connemara as a teenager. She was then Margaret Connolly and, like thousands of others of her generation, the bells of emigration were tolling for her early in her life. She was speaking in Portland in the state of Maine in America last week. She is now a state representative for the Democrats in the state parliament in Maine; next week she will almost certainly be a state senator. She has an election next Tuesday and the bells are tolling for her Republican opponent. But last Monday it was the bells in the Church of St Dominick in Portland that tolled and told the story of the Irish in the state of Maine. And it brought together many elements of the Irish diaspora.