Fr Gary Donegan: ‘Once you put your head above the parapet, there comes a cost’.
A quarter of a century after first arriving in north Belfast, Fr Gary Donegan tells Denzil McDaniel about walking a ‘crooked line’ through troubled times.
Fr Gary Donegan pictured at the Passionist Monastery at Tobar Mhuire in Crossgar, Co Down.
February 15, 2026 at 6:00am GMT
WHEN Father Gary Donegan first felt the calling to be a priest as a Fermanagh teenager, he had a blunt reply for God: “Forget it, big lad.”
“There were girls in my class who had a better chance than me of becoming a priest,” he recalls with his familiar sense of humour, as he sits in his office in the grounds of Mercy Primary School on Belfast’s Crumlin Road.
The Passionist priest admits that his younger self struggled with resentment towards God over a series of tragedies in his deeply religious Fermanagh home.
“God took a battering. I would go down to the chapel and fight with God about some of the things that had happened.”
Providence dictated that his fight was only beginning, except that the man a documentary once dubbed “the priest in the jeans” would battle for rather than against his faith, and bravely stand to lead others through dark times.
It’s 25 years last month since Donegan arrived in Ardoyne, just 80 miles from his upbringing in Newtownbutler but a world away from his “idyllic childhood”.
He’s the second of five siblings, there were 13 in his father’s family, and in the wide, close-knit circle “there was never a cross word”.
Despite the conflict in the border area, there were great relationships between Protestants and Catholics and the large Donegan family got on well with everybody.
He recalls a Belfast woman accusing him of hating Protestants and shocking her into silence by telling her about his Protestant relatives.
“I was very blessed,” he says.
For a self-confessed “culchie”, it was a major change finding himself on the streets of north Belfast.
“I was sent here in 2001, and I use the term ‘sent’ deliberately because I didn’t want to come to the city. I saw the raw sectarianism, it was a shock.”
But he soon found the real people of the area.
“Ardoyne people are the salt of the earth, there’s nobody like them. You hear the term they’d give you the bit out of their mouth,” he says, talking in the heartland of Ardoyne in an office where he commutes to most days despite being based in Crossgar, Co Down.
For a quarter of a century, Donegan has literally walked the walk for the people he so admires.
Despite death threats, he and Father Aidan Troy led the Holy Cross children past loyalist protesters to school day after day in 2001, bearing the brunt of “vitriolic abuse”.
He was also on the streets every night for three years to help defuse tension during the Twaddell Avenue protests when Orange parades were denied a return along the Crumlin Road; and he faced down republican dissidents opposed to an eventual deal.
There’s a famous scene where he’s being verbally attacked by them and he steps forward, points the finger and comes out with the line: “I’ve been here every night for three years, where were you?”
On another occasion, he spoke out publicly as the scourge of illegal drugs resulted in suicides among the area’s youth, encouraging local people to also find their voice.
It wasn’t easy, and he recalls incidents such as being spat at in a restaurant and being hit by water cannon while helping to stop rioting.
“When you’re a peacemaker, you walk a very fine line at times. Once you put your head above the parapet, there comes a cost,” he says.
But he jokes that a mental toughness was already developed on the Gaelic football field: you couldn’t afford to take a backward step against St Pat’s of Donagh, the neighbouring parish to Newtownbutler First Fermanaghs, he says.
Donegan approached it all with a mixture of courage, a desire to break down barriers, humour, and empathy for others.
His resilience was forged in the fire of loss during his youth.
He recalls in 1979 a horrendous accident near his home in Fermanagh when seven people were killed in a car crash, including four members of the O’Harte family, with whom he was close.
His closest friend, Fergal O’Harte, survived because he was in Clones selling programs at the Ulster football final.
But it was merely a reprieve for the 15-year-old.
Donegan recalls with clarity the day he and Fergal were helping out with farm work and sat down by the stump of a tree.
“Fergal says ‘I don’t feel well, I’m really tired’ and he pointed to this thing on his neck. I said ‘It’ll not kill you’. I remember saying that line. Little did I realise that that Fergal developed a rare form of cancer.”
Despite a widely-publicised mercy mission when an RAF helicopter landed at the isolated border farmhouse to bring the boy to Glasgow for a revolutionary treatment called Interferon, Gary’s young friend died.
“I used to go to Fergal’s grave and talk to him,” says Donegan. “I’d say to God how could you, as a God, allow a family to be wiped out and and this widow left with a special needs daughter and a 90-year-old granny. How could you let that happen?
“At the same time Mammy’s sister, Tess, was dying of cancer. I think she was 39. One night Father William from the Graan came in to visit and her whole countenance changed.
“And this feeling came over me. This is what God wants me to do.”
Initially he resisted. “I just wanted to box for Ulster, play for Fermanagh. I want the wife, the five snottery children, an Audi 80 and a nice bungalow. I didn’t want much,” he jokes.
“But the more I would fight it, the more it was happening.”
So, Gary Donegan entered the priesthood at the Graan, the Passionist Retreat near Enniskillen, in October 1983, not yet 20 years old.
Why the Passionists?
”The Passionists’ first vow is to preach Christ crucified, taken from St Paul’s scripture. So, our first vow is to be with the modern-day crucified. I saw the guys in the Graan and I saw their empathy with the suffering.”
Donegan’s background in Fermanagh was key to the inner strength he showed in the turmoil of Ardoyne’s troubles, and he says his faith is underpinned by liberation theology and “the church of the street”.
The documentary “The Priest with the Jeans” was about him hearing as many confessions down entries or along the street, when he was joined by Brian McKee, his “wing man”.
He points to a photo of the two of them, and jokes: “You wouldn’t buy a used car off that boy!”
Donegan has rightly gained respect and plaudits for his peace and reconciliation work. He’s travelled far and wide, working with British, Irish and Amercan governments, in addition to being in places such as Estonia and South Africa.
In his office there’s photo of him speaking at the United Nations.
Often he travels with his good friend Bill Shaw, the Presbyterian minister he met during interface trouble, and he’s travelled to Dublin with loyalist leaders.
He works across communities with numerous people trying to make a difference.
All the above just scratch the surface of the work which has gained him honorary doctorates at Ulster University and Queen’s University, awards such as Community Relations Council person of the year, Aisling Centre man of the year, recognition in America and more.
At its heart, though, is the work he’s done among his own people, and it may seem remarkable that an area which has suffered so much becomes the inspiration for peace and reconciliation.
“Ardoyne was the epicentre of loss,” he says. “It had the largest loss of life of any parish in what we euphemistically call the Troubles. To put it into context, the 99 lives lost is the equivalent of 50,000 people dying in LA or 4.2 million dying in the United States.”
A book called “Ardoyne: The Untold Truth” was published in 2002 by a local project, which Donegan says “tells the stories of the 99 souls in a non-hierarchal way”.
The book details accounts of people killed by loyalist paramilitaries, state forces and republicans.
“I am on record as having condemned any form of violence. But what you had to do when you came here was to try to understand why somebody would take on a cause or defend a cause that would give up their liberty, give up faith, give up what drove them.
“You’re trying to get inside the mindset of why would someone actually do that on both sides,” he says, and points out that a lot of republican paramilitaries were Marxists and “hated the church and priests with a passion”.
He remembers during work he was doing with loyalists and republicans when “the republican prisoner was giving it to me in the neck and the loyalist guy couldn’t get over this and said ‘we were brought up thinking you were out to get us for Rome’.”
“I said ‘Would you take a look at that boy there; we have difficulty hold on to the ones we have!’”
Being a peacemaker can mean ploughing a lonely furrow, or as Father Gary Donegan puts it, “walking a crooked line”.
Essentially, if he was on any side it was that of the hard-pressed people caught in the middle of the conflict.
“You have to work with your own community before you can reach out. You have to win their trust,” he says, and ironically the role he and Father Aidan Troy played in standing up for the Holy Cross children gave them a credibility that years of traditional church work would never have done.
He recalls a vigil for Michael McGibbon, shot dead in church grounds, and the 1986 killing by the UVF of Raymond Mooney, murdered as he was leaving after chairing a meeting of the Holy Cross “living church” group.
The decision was taken to name the centre the Raymond Mooney Peace and Reconciliation office.
Peacemaking in troubled times was often subject to intimidation, such as constant blowing of car horns as he spoke at vigils or public meetings.
He recalls at one point standing up and saying to local people: “This is your area. I’m willing to give my life for you but I’m a blow-in. I love this place, but it’s your home. You need to take charge of this.”
Today, Ardoyne is a much better place but while the war is over, the efforts for peace and reconciliation go on at the Houben Centre, named after Father Charles Houben, a Dutch Passionist who returned to Ireland in his healing ministry.
Later he would be canonised as St Charles of Mount Argus.
Gary Donegan continues his peace efforts, despite personal setbacks in recent times.
Now aged 61, his health issues include significant loss of vision in one eye, and in January last year the passing of his beloved mother, Christina, hit him hard.
He was incredibly close to her, so close he felt unable to speak at her funeral. During our interview, he becomes emotional and quiet for a time as he recalls her memory, including the day she saved his brother’s life when fire engulfed their Newtown butler home.
“She was hanging out the clothes, and she heard the screams of Mark. She raced down; in those days women wore aprons and she threw the apron over her face and ran through the flames and pulled him out to save him.”
The story was covered in the press and media, describing her as “Ireland’s national heroine”.
Mark survived but would later develop MS and has been in a wheelchair most of his adult life.
“He’s my hero, he’s as happy as Larry and an inspiration to everybody,” says Donegan.
It seems to pass him by that his life of service also makes him a hero and inspiration to many in Ardoyne, across Ireland and further afield.
The Scanlon Family, 1943: Remembering the old times, weekends on the Irish Riviera of the Rockaways. Michael Scanlon.
An extract from Michael Scanlon’s book on his life growing up in Irish America, “Rolling Up the Rug: An American Irish Story.”
“They were ever so happy, they were ever so sad,
To grow old in a new world, through good times and bad.
All the parties and weddings, the Ceilis and Wakes,
When New York was Irish, full of joy and heartbreaks.”
~ Terence Winch
A bright summer’s afternoon in 1948. Our Irish parents took us kids to the Feis – the Gaelic dance and music festival – at Fordham University in the Bronx. As we followed the lilting sound of Irish music to a stage filled with step dancers, a group of distinguished men passed by.
A well-built man in a tan suit walked in the middle of the group. My father called out to him with gusto, “How’re doin’ Bill?” The man, not recognizing my father, gave a little wave and a smile and continued on his way.
“Who was that, Dad?” I asked.
“That was the Mayor of New York City, Bill O’Dwyer!” my father beamed. “He’s from the west of Ireland just like me. God bless him!”
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William O’Dwyer, the 100th mayor of the New York City, born in Bohola, County Mayo, had immigrated to the United States in 1910 after abandoning studies for the priesthood. He worked as a laborer, a New York City police officer, Brooklyn District Attorney, and in 1941 he joined the United States Army and achieved the rank of brigadier general. O’Dwyer was elected Mayor in 1945 and at his inauguration, he celebrated with the song, “It’s a Great Day for the Irish!”
His victory was emblematic of Irish power in New York City at that time. Nobody doubted it was Irish voters in parishes all over the city who handed O’Dwyer his rousing victory.
My family lived in one of those parishes in the Bronx. Our neighborhood, Highbridge, was named after a footbridge high over the Harlem River. Built in 1848, it is the oldest bridge in New York City and was considered a wonder of the world at the time. Modeled after ancient Roman aqueducts, it carried water from the upstate Croton reservoir to the people of the city. The men who built it were mostly Irish immigrants, many of whom settled nearby and were the first to give the neighborhood its Irish character.
I recall many a summer’s afternoons standing on that bridge and looking down the river into the hazy distance where skyscrapers rose in Manhattan. At such a sight it was easy enough to believe what our Irish parents never ceased to tell us: “We live in the greatest city in the world.”
Highbridge was set high on a bluff with streets called Summit and Woodycrest reflecting its elevated location. Our neighborhood was friendly and working class in those days, with Irish and Jewish families and a sprinkling of Italian and German Americans. Men like my father went off to work in the transit, called the “railroad,” while others worked in the construction trades, the garment district or as policemen and firemen.
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Most families lived in five- or six-story apartment houses built in the 1930s teeming with children of all ages. Catholic children attended Sacred Heart School – the boys educated by the De La Salle Brothers and the girls by the Sisters of Mercy. We were a thriving school in a thriving parish. “Red and white, Fight! Fight! Fight!” was our rallying cry at basketball games and at track meets that we won more often than not.
Catholic school was free in those days because the prosperous parish supported the school. On Sundays, Sacred Heart Church fairly burst at the seams with hourly Masses beginning at 6 a.m. and not ending until the early afternoon. The hard-working men and women who filled these Sunday Masses felt pride in their parish and gave generously with their dimes, quarters and dollars which poured into the collection baskets every week.
Sacred Heart Church was a mighty fortress with its large blue, red, and green stained glass windows, the shining golden altar, and two side altars dedicated to the Blessed Mother and to St. Joseph. A huge, wooden crucifix hung from the high ceiling with Jesus, his hands nailed to the cross, a crown of thorns piercing his head.
Our flourishing parish became the envy of neighboring pastors who referred to Sacred Heart Church as “Humphrey’s Hilton” – after the grand hotel and our elderly and sometimes testy pastor, Monsignor William Humphrey, a convert to Catholicism.
In those days we identified ourselves by the parish we lived in. When meeting a new Catholic boy or girl we never asked, “Where do you live?” But rather, “What parish are you from?” St. Nicholas of Tolentine? Incarnation? Good Shepherd? Christ the King? Ascension? St. Jerome’s? Holy Name? Our Lady of Perpetual Help? This was probably no different than when our Irish parents met another Irish person for the first time and asked, “And what county in Ireland are you from?”
When I grew up in the1940s and 50s, Highbridge was a safe and predictable neighborhood where daily life held few surprises. The path awaiting a child as he entered Sacred Heart School was well-trodden by older brothers, sisters, cousins or neighbors who all blazed the trail showing us the way.
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Our teachers declared that the United States of America was a Protestant country, but the only Protestants I knew was just one family of Glaswegian Presbyterians. In cosmopolitan New York we lived in our own separate Catholic world with Catholic men’s lodges such as The Holy Name Society and The Knights of Columbus.
Every summer my father got a few weeks vacation from the IRT and we took the Long Island railroad from the old Penn Station to “The Irish Riviera” –Rockaway Beach. Like many other Irish-American families from the neighborhoods of Inwood or Washington Heights in Manhattan, or Woodside and Sunnyside in Queens, or Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, the Scanlon family trekked down from the Bronx to spend a couple of weeks at Frain’s boarding house at Beach 113th street.
At that time the most rollicking and lively block in Rockaway was Beach 103rd Street called “Irish Town.” One Irish bar after another lined this sprawling street. Fiddle and accordion music – with a mixture of America’s top hits – spilled out from the bars onto the cheery and carefree streets. Men and women, freshly sunburned from the day at the beach, strolled from one bar to the other with drinks in hand. It reminded me of the Wild West saloons I saw in movies. I most vividly recall The Sligo House and The Leitrim Hotel, the two home counties of my parents which faced one another across the street.
One sweltering evening in the late 1940s Mom and Pop took me along with them as we entered a big noisy pub with a huge circular bar with a stage inside it, “Ah, look at them, Gus!” my mother smiled as she poked my father, “Up on the stage, it’s the McNulty family!” And here was Mrs.McNulty, an older woman all powdery and shining, sitting on a chair playing the accordion, while her grown daughter and son in top hats and tails sang and tap danced to the song:
Johnny get up from the fire, get up
and give the man a seat
Don’t you see it’s Mr. McGuire and
he’s courtin’ your sister Kate
You know very well he owns a farm a
wee bit out of the town
So get up out of there and be takin’ the
air and let Mr. McGuire sit down!
Irish Town provided a great and enjoyable summer refuge from the hot apartments of pre-air-conditioned New York City. And if spending nights taking in the sights and sounds of Irish town wasn’t enough, Playland was nearby on 98th street, an amusement park like Coney Island with the sweet smell of cotton candy, hot dogs with relish, the penny arcade, a shooting gallery, a roller coaster, and most especially the bumper cars.
As teenagers, we rode the ocean waves, played “dog ball” on the beach. Some afternoons we stopped by Beach 108th street playground to watch local Rockaway boys, the brothers Dick and Al McGuire – both players for the New York Knicks – play basketball. At night we went to Mamey’s ice cream parlor, which was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting and a far cry from the tiny candy stores we had back in the Bronx.
We held parties among the boys and girls. For a boy educated in classrooms filled only with boys, it was a great treat to meet girls my age. And so it happened in the summer of 1955 that I became utterly smitten and hopelessly besotted with one Patty Cassidy – a golden blond, freckled-faced, pony-tailed Bronx Irish Catholic goddess.
At the ripe old age of 15, I wanted nothing more than to marry her. I listened endlessly to the popular song at the time, “They tried to tell us we’re too young, too young to really fall in love …”
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Over twenty years would pass before we happened to meet again after that golden summer. By that time, we had each come to live in different worlds. As Patty walked away after our brief encounter that day, I reflected on how much we both had changed, and how little we had to say to one another beyond the pleasantries.
It called to mind the old saying, “The only thing constant about life is change.” That truth was brought home most dramatically when I visited my old neighborhood of Highbridge twenty years after I left, and I came away with a heavy heart. The sense of village had vanished. Apartment houses on Woodycrest Avenue that used to sing with the life of bustling Irish families had become burnt-out tombs. The library on Shakespeare Avenue was sealed over like a war-torn bunker with protective fences. And, although our church of Sacred Heart still stood like a mighty fortress in faded white splendor, it was now locked shut after the morning Mass.
Most of the sons and daughters of the Irish who settled in Highbridge before and after World War II had abandoned the neighborhood by the 1970s. We Highbridge kids recognized — even as early as first grade when reading about “Dick and Jane” with their cozy little homes with a green lawn and picket fence, a car, and a big, fluffy dog — that a better world awaited us beyond the borders of the Bronx. As we grew older, the urge to move out and move up followed. In 1962, at age 23, I left to become an officer in the United States Navy and never came back.
As the Irish departed, the new immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Africa, the West Indies, and Blacks from the South came seeking the same passage to America that our parents sought a generation before. By the late 1960s, an epidemic of drugs took root and infested neighborhoods all over the city. Highbridge was hit especially hard by the scourge of heroin and crack.
As dismaying as this was, the old neighborhood still owned a part of me I could not fully explain. An urge to somehow reclaim my early years stirred quietly within me. And so – after a 35-year absence – I did come back. I became an English teacher at Bronx Community College on the old New York University campus, blocks away from where I once had lived.
I left the community as a son of immigrants and came full circle to return as an older teacher to the new immigrants. Along the way, I discovered the hard truth of the adage: You can never really go home again. But I also learned that in spite of the passage of time, some things did remain the same.
On a visit to Sacred Heart Grammar School, I found it as clean and orderly as the day I left. It had survived as a community sanctuary – the single shining example of constancy and stability amid the blight and decay of the surrounding neighborhood. Inside, the walls were unmarked, the brightly-colored classrooms as organized as I remembered them. The smiling, alert boys and girls were dressed in neat maroon and white uniforms. Many of these young students were not Catholic, most of them Hispanic or African American, and yet I saw myself in them.
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New York had changed greatly from the days of my youth when “the boy from Bohola” Bill O’Dwyer ruled City Hall. But during the ten years I taught at Bronx Community College I also came to realize that my little corner of the Bronx was just another example of the long and changing and ever-unfolding story of America itself.
Leocadia Rodriguez, a student of mine, age 28, lives on the same block where I was born and raised. She writes an essay about the day she arrived alone in America from the Dominican Republic, a 16-year-old girl, hopeful one day to become a nurse but fearful about her prospects. As I read this, I see my own mother who left her home in County Leitrim Ireland in 1927 at age 16, never to see her parents again. Mom arrived in New York with the same hope of becoming a nurse in America. During the depression, she struggled just to survive and sent whatever meager money she made back home to Ireland to help bring over her brother and sister to join her. In the years to come, she went on to live a long and triumphant life in New York City. She never did finish those courses to become a nurse.
Alongside Patrick and Columba, Brigid is one of the most important Irish saints. Yet you would be hard-pressed to know it.
John Duncan’s Saint Bride hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland
By Tom Collins February 03, 2026 at 6:00am GMT
ONE of my favourite paintings is by the Scottish artist John Duncan.
Painted just a century ago, Duncan drew on ancient artistic techniques that would have been familiar to monks working on ancient illuminated manuscripts.
Tempera uses that most basic of natural materials, the yolk of an egg. Mixed with pigments, it produces colours of stunning luminosity which retain their potency across centuries.
Duncan’s choice of tempera, oil and gold leaf, fitted his subject perfectly. It depicts St Bride – Brigid – being carried by angels to Bethlehem from the holy island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides.
It is said that St Brigid attended the birth of Jesus, some feat given she lived 500 years after that event. But who am I to doubt it? There is much in this world I do not understand.
Her feast day was Sunday. February 1 marks the beginning of the Irish spring (Spring? With the cold and rain it’s as difficult to believe as Brigid’s attendance at the Nativity, I know).
Alongside Patrick and Columba, she is one of the most important Irish saints. Yet you would be hard-pressed to know it.
Alongside Patrick and Columba, Brigid is one of the most important Irish saints. Yet you would be hard-pressed to know it
Hands up everyone who saw her feast day pass without notice? Compared with Patrick, Brigid is neglected.
Once again, our civilisation finds a way of writing the woman out of the story. Yet this ‘mother saint’ of Ireland has much to say to us today.
While Patrick was hobnobbing with chieftains and using his mystical powers to rid Ireland of snakes, Brigid was feeding the poor and healing the sick.
It was her concern with ordinary people’s lives that made her so revered in the centuries after her death; and her association with spring, and the turning of the seasons, gave hope to our ancestors that out of the darkness would come light, renewal and hope for the future.
In his poem St Brigid’s Girdle, Seamus Heaney writes about a St Brigid’s Day in County Wicklow where the first snowdrops are growing: “… and this a Brigid’s Girdle I’m plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop (like one of those old crinolines they’d trindle), twisted straw that lifted in a circle to handsel and to heal, a rite of spring”.
Handsel is an archaic word for gift. I learned it from my father who carried on the practice of gifting us a coin on the first Monday of every new year, with the promise that if we kept it safe we would never be penniless.
Passing through the girdle secures a gift of sorts from St Brigid: her blessing which bestows protection and brings with it health and fertility.
The girdle links us to another important facet of St Brigid’s being – the way she links us through to the ancients who peopled this land before Christianity made its mark. She does so in a way Patrick and Columba cannot.
It’s said her father was an Irish chieftain, but her cult has also been linked to a Celtic goddess of the same name, and her feast day falls on the ancient pagan festival of Imbolc, said to be linked to the lambing season.
While our species has benefitted enormously from the march of civilization, it is increasingly clear that one of the things we have lost is our connection with the natural world – a world our ancestors, the worshippers of Brigid the Goddess and Brigid the Saint, were very much aware of, not least because their lives depended on it.
As is becoming increasingly clear, nature, so long neglected, is beginning to reassert itself. Climate change is its response to our desecration of the land and the plundering of our planet for fossil fuels, minerals, and over-production of food.
In just over a month’s time, we will be celebrating our Irishness by turning rivers green, decking ourselves in greens, whites and oranges. We will be donning leprechaun hats and drinking green Guinness, and our leaders will be paying homage to the Orange Man-Baby at the Court of King Donald in the White House.
That excess of ‘oirishry’ is not a fair reflection of Ireland today, nor will it meet its needs.
Let us take refuge instead in the folds of St Brigid’s cloak, pass through her girdle and contemplate her simple cross of woven reeds.
Let this embodiment of our Christian and pagan heritage mediate with our ancient ancestors lying beneath dolmens or buried in ancient mounds, and let us channel her love of learning, her spirit of creativity, and her compassion for those who really need our help.
Above all else let us celebrate the fact that this island would be nothing but for women like Brigid, women who have held life together while Ireland’s men have been doing all they can to tear things apart.
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Northern Ireland’s first minister has stated what she believes the deadline for a referendum on Irish Unity should be.
Colum Motherway
Feb 02, 2026
Michelle O’Neill appeared on the Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips show this weekend, discussing the highly debated political topic.
O’Neill believes that it is an opportunity for the Northern Irish people to “take control of our own fortunes”.
She said that she “absolutely can” see a unity referendum in her time as first minister, adding that her ‘party’s view’ is to have it held by 2030.
“I don’t want done to the people here what was done in relation to Brexit.
“Brexit was an economic self-harm, a massive act of economic self-harm. It was done against the wishes of the people.”
She added: “We have an ability to take control of our own fortunes. I encourage all political leaders to reach for that together.”
The first minister’s comments directly contradict previous comments made by Micheál Martin, who doesn’t believe a unity referendum is in Ireland’s near future.
Back in September, the Taoiseach remarked that “there won’t be a border poll before 2030”.
Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister also appeared on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips and had a differing opinion.
Emma Little-Pengelly claimed that nationalist and republican movements in Northern Ireland have not increased their vote share since the devolution from Westminster.
She stated: “I’m a unionist, we have a Sinn Féin first minister. But I think it’s important to say that in Northern Ireland nationalism and republicanism haven’t increased their vote from 1998.
“Despite democratic change, they’re sitting on and around the same percentage that they had in 1998. I think those who want to see the breakup of the union do try to constantly get this momentum.
“I have no doubt that you will hear that again because, of course, to serve their purpose is to try to get that sense of momentum towards that. That doesn’t exist in Northern Ireland.”
Brigid’s Day, also known as Imbolc, is February 1 and marks the beginning of spring – learn more about St. Brigid’s Day traditions here!
Maireid Sullivan @IrishCentral Feb 01, 2026
Brigid\’s Holy Well in Co Kildare.Brigid’s Holy Well in Co Kildare. Ireland’s Content Pool The Feast of Brigid, also known as Imbolc, marks the arrival of longer, warmer days and the early signs of spring on February 1.
Imbolc is one of the four major “fire” festivals or quarter days, referred to in Irish mythology from medieval Irish texts. The other three festivals on the old Irish calendar are Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain.
The word Imbolc means literally “in the belly” in the old Irish Neolithic language, referring to the pregnancy of ewes.
In ancient Irish mythology, Brigid was a fire goddess. Nowadays, her canonization is celebrated with a perpetual flame at her shrine in Co Kildare.
Celebrate the spirit of St. Brigid: Ireland’s festival of Spring What is St. Brigid the patron saint of?
St. Brigid is the patron saint of babies, blacksmiths, boatmen, cattle farmers, children whose parents are not married, children whose mothers are mistreated by the children’s fathers, Clan Douglas, dairymaids, dairy workers, fugitives, Ireland, Leinster, mariners, midwives, milkmaids, nuns, poets, the poor, poultry farmers, poultry raisers, printing presses, sailors, scholars, travelers, and watermen.
Here’s a busy saint!
St. Brigid’s Day traditions and customs One folk tradition that continues in some homes on St. Brigid’s Day (or Imbolc) is that of the Brigid’s Bed.
The girls and young unmarried women of the household or village create a corn dolly to represent Brigid, called the Brideog (“little Brigid” or “young Brigid”), adorning it with ribbons and baubles like shells or stones. They make a bed for the Brideog to lie in.
On St. Brigid’s Eve (January 31), the girls and young women gather together in one house to stay up all night with the Brideog, and are later visited by all the young men of the community who must ask permission to enter the home, and then treat them and the corn dolly with respect.
Brigid is said to walk the earth on Imbolc eve. Before going to bed, each member of the household may leave a piece of clothing or strip of cloth outside for Brigid to bless. The head of the household will smother (or “smoor”) the fire and rake the ashes smooth.
In the morning, they look for some kind of mark on the ashes, a sign that Brigid has passed that way in the night or morning. The clothes or strips of cloth are brought inside and believed to now have powers of healing and protection.
The following day, the girls carry the Brideog through the village or neighborhood, from house to house, where this representation of the saint/goddess is welcomed with great honor.
Adult women – those who are married or who run a household – stay home to welcome the Brigid procession, perhaps with an offering of coins or a snack. Since Brigid represents the light half of the year and the power that will bring people from the dark season of winter into spring, her presence is very important at this time of year.
Today’s Imbolc celebrations
Neopagans of diverse traditions observe this holiday in a variety of ways, celebrating Brigid’s divine femininity. As forms of neopaganism can be quite different and have very different origins, these representations can vary considerably despite the shared name.
Some celebrate in a manner as close as possible to how the ancient Celts are believed to have observed the festival, as well as how these customs have been maintained in the living Celtic cultures. Other neopagans observe the holiday with rituals taken from numerous other unrelated sources, Celtic cultures being only one of the sources used.
Imbolc is usually celebrated by modern Pagans on February 1 or 2 in the Northern Hemisphere, and August 1 or 2 in the Southern Hemisphere, or at the solar midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox, which now falls later in the first week or two of February.
As of February 2023, Ireland has a Bank Holiday to celebrate St. Brigid’s Day. The new Irish Bank Holiday will be observed on the first Monday in February, except where St Brigid’s Day, the first day of February, happens to fall on a Friday, in which case that Friday, February 1 will be a public holiday.
