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WE ALL LIKE to catch up with old friends when we go abroad, but tonight former US President Bill Clinton went one better than the rest of us.
While in town for official engagements, he went out for dinner at a Dublin city centre restaurant Fire on Dawson St… and caught up with none other than Bono (who surely must be due the title of Official One-Man Irish Celeb Welcoming Committee any day now) and golfer Rory McIlroy.
We don’t know if they were all seated together, but if they were, we’d love to have earwigged while they chatted over dinner.
Thanks to Alan Andrews/Coffee Culture for the kind permission to use this photograph.
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From the sample pages here, it looks like a lovely, well-produced book:
https://andalus.ie/books/1588-the-spanish-armada-and-the-24-ships-lost-on-irelands-shores/
Saw it in my local bookshop the other day. Looked good. I was tempted! I might treat myself at Christmas.
Our own romantic version of the shipwrected Spanish sailors being protected by the people in the West is another fib.
The locals butchered them as they were washed ashore robbed, stripped them, then claimed the bounties from the local British governor.
@H Woo: True about Mayo, Sligo and Kerry but there was a major exception in Donegal where the McSweeney clan did welcome the Armada survivors and gave them a haven in Killybegs.
The McSweeneys territory was independent of the British and so was that of the O’Rourke’s and neither of them had British governors to worry about but thevO’Rourke territory was not maritime and had a merely peripheral link with the Armada.
By the way, a great number of the sailors were not Spanish or Portuguese bu mercenary Slavs from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik in Croatia).
It’s not widely known that in 1589 the English gathered an Armada of their and sailed to Portugal and Spain where they got their ar5es handed to them.
@brendan hackett: Yes: ‘The English Armada was larger than the Spanish, and from many points of view it was an even greater disaster. This fact, however, is completely overlooked. It is never mentioned in the history courses taught in British schools and a majority of British history teachers have never even heard of it.’
@brendan hackett:
Known as the white armada.
Not widely known about in England
It was a most ferocious battle. Many sailor’s lives lost unfortunately against the merciless Spanish barbarians.
@Buster Lawless: You forgot to insert woke into the sentence.
@Clare Power: he/it is also totally clueless on the subject, obviously.
@Dermot Blaine: it’s like every time he says, “Woke on the journal, he gets paid 10 cent…
@Clare Power: leave politics and your silly wokism out of this piece of history please.
The McSweeney territory in Donegal was an exception to your suggestion that Armada survivors were slaughtered. The McSweeneys gave refuge to the survivors, and Killybegs became a haven for Armada ships. They stayed there to repair their damaged ships, some of them then set out for Scotland, which was then independent of England.
There is a tradition in three families in the area of descent from Armada survivors but not necessarily dark-haired Spaniards. Many of the sailors were Slavic mercenaries from Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik).
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