My grandfather, Pádraig MacSeáin, born in Teelin, Co. Donegal in 1895. He started work as a primary school teacher in 1915, and became a “cigire” – a schools inspector – in 1932.

It was my grandfather who originally bought the car that is featured on this Fiat1100.net website that I’m working on with my dad.

Bizarrely, it was through an advert on that website that I came across this Ainm.ie website. This project is a collection of biographies of 1693 people deemed to have had a key input into the Irish language throughout the country from the year 1560 until today.

It was on this site that I discovered biography number 563, my grandfather.

Here’s a translation of the article published in Irish on the Ainm.ie website:

He was born in an area of rich traditions, and he deeply respected the heritage that went before him. It was he that encouraged an interest in folklore in his nephew, Dr. Seán Haughey.

He identified himself as an expert on Irish folklore and the Irish language of his native area and was an advisor to the scholar Dr. Heinrich Wagner while he was writing “Gaeilge Theilinn: foghraidheacht, gramadach, téacsanna” in 1959.

I’ll update this in the coming days with the rest of the article translation.

Use the wool from multi-coloured sheep.

A friend of mine from Atlanta, Georgia and his wife visited Ireland in August of last year. In about 10 days they visited every corner of the country – Donegal, Wexford, Galway, Kerry and Dublin. I took them on a tour of my favourite parts of south-west Donegal over a couple of days.

This picture was taken at the Silver Strand at Malin Beg, near Glencolmcille.

Thanks to my mate Steve in London for the only Royal wedding memorabilia I’ll ever need / want. And it’s not even a week late , despite the date – the souvenir Hello edition arrived in the house today.

I’m posting a batch of McArdles pictures that I had on the TwitPic website linked to the ValueIreland.com site before the changed their copyright rules. Since spending time in a small village in Wexford, I’ve discovered the pleasures of pint bottles of McArdles (from the fridge) in a pint glass.

It reminds me a lot of the kind of dark beer that I used to love while I lived in America – Sam Adams for example, or Sierra Nevada, or Anchor Steam from San Francisco.

We recently moved house here in Dublin. This is how the house looked on our first Halloween. We had loads of people calling doing their “trick’r'treating” – including a couple of kids who maybe had a few tears of fear. What you’re not getting from this picture here is the scary sounds that we had playing in the front room at the same time.