"A Clann Díbeartha"

To follow-up my previous entry on the Irish in Montana, here's a link to the Indiegogo crowdfunding project. This is to help generate income for three documentary films proposed by the local historians. This is a worthy endeavor to document the contributions to Irish culture from its Western heartland, part of Big Sky dynamism.

Information about the three films is here. There's one on Thomas Francis Meagher, the Fenian felon turned famed escapee, then Civil War veteran, and finally two-time Territorial Governor. There's another on Marcus Daly, who rose from poverty in Co. Cavan as the Anaconda mining magnate and one of America's richest men. Finally, there's a tribute to two founders of the Gaelic League in Butte, Seán Ó Súilleabháin and Séamus Ó Muircheartaigh, who inspired today's transmitters there of a renewal for an teanga beo. The Friends of the Irish West sustains this energy.

I encourage you to support this enterprise. I saw in Missoula at last month's ACIS-West conference the RTÉ documentary by Breandán Feiritéar, Scéal ar Butte, a bilingual presentation of three brothers in the copper mines, and their fates. The same director plans to make these films in Gaeilge + Béarla.

The blog entry title today is "her exiled children." This phrase resonates for the diaspora, as these words are taken from the 1916 Proclamation of Irish independence. They remind us that the call for freedom spanned the seas, and that many, as this exhibit displays, responded to that cause from here.