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Media release from the Celtic League:

Celtic League call for international  negotiation to resolve Rockall dispute

News from the Celtic League:

The Celtic League has called for international negotiation in regard to the Rockall fishing dispute:

CELTIC LEAGUE CALLS FOR INTERNATIONAL NEGOTIATION TO RESOLVE ROCKALL DISPUTE

There has been some comment in the press recently about threats to those fishing within the area of Rockall. Rockall is an uninhabitable granite isle and is the eroded rump of an extinct volcano  located in the north of the Atlantic Ocean. It stands to a height of about 56.3ft ( 17.15 m), is some 80ft (25 m) wide and is 100ft ( 31 m) long at its base. The United Kingdom claimed Rockall in 1955 and incorporated it as a part of Scotland in 1972.

There has been much in the news today, marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day. This was the Allied landings in Normandy on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 during World War II (1939 to 1945). The operation began the liberation of German-occupied France (and later western Europe) from Nazi control. However, four years before this operation, it was expected that the invasion force would have been coming in the opposite direction. At that time the German invasion of Britain had seemed inevitable. 

Irish Gaelic is a language that is “threatened” according to most linguists.  Ethnologue, the web page which specializes in monitoring the status of the world’s languages, breaks down the Irish speakers into two groups. There are the native speakers whose first language is Irish (141,000) and those speakers who learn the language in school (1,620,000).

Irish Languague News:

Some say that you have to be married to a person to know what they are really like. Perhaps this is particularly the case when the marriage is to the ghost of a 300 hundred year old pirate. A recent article in the newspaper The Irish Post reports that: "A woman who claims she married the ghost of a 300-year-old Haitian pirate says she needed an exorcism after their relationship turned sour."

Last year's inaugural Oie Voaldyn Manx Fire Festival in Peel was literally a spectacular success which returned with an even bigger display during the early May bank holiday weekend.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has called for a new Scottish independence referendum in the second half of 2020. She made the statement when on a visit to Ireland this week where she met the Taoiseach (Ireland's prime minister) in Dublin (Irish: Baile Átha Cliath).

Irish Gaelic is a language that is “threatened” according to most linguists.  However, the numbers don’t seem to support that conclusion at first glance. In 2016 the Irish Government’s Central Statistics Office estimated that 1,761,420 Irishmen over the age of 3 could speak Gaelic, statistically a scant change from the 2011.

Belfast (Irish: Béal Feirste) now has a new Mayor, Sinn Féin Cllr John Finucane. He is the son of murdered Irish human rights lawyer Pat Finucane. In 1989 Pat Finucane (39) was shot dead by loyalists at his home in north Belfast, in front of his wife Geraldine, who was also injured, and their children Michael, Katherine and John.  It was found that loyalist paramilitaries acting in collusion with the British government intelligence service MI5 were involved in the murder.