Project Children

"Show Us Your Life" favorite charity edition- Ireland is near and dear to the hearts of my parents ... as it is with many Irish-Americans. My grandfather told people he was Irish (born in New Jersey) even after he served his nation proudly in the European theater of WWII. I’m not sure what it is about the Irish in America, wether the circumstances that brought them here bind them to their ancestral homeland ... or is it possible that there is some truth to what I heard from the time I was very young, that Ireland was in my blood? A famine that starved millions brought the Irish to our shores in droves, and the escalation of a violent conflict that had waxed and waned for 800 years divided the country in the early 1920's. The aftermath of the division was sectarian violence, civil war and mahem.

As “the troubles” (as the conflict was called) raged out of control in the 1960's in Northern Ireland, Irish America watched closely and longed to help, to stem the tide of violence, to bring peace to their homeland. Some chose to involve themselves financially (both sides in the war were funded from private American donations) and then in 1975, as the nation decended into bombings and assinations, two brother’s who themselves had immigrated from Ireland to the United States came up with an idea. Denis and Patrick Mulcahy were New York City police officers and the situation in Northern Ireland broke their hearts. The plan that they came up with was to find families in America that would agree to take in Irish children from neighborhoods touched by violence for a summer. The first six children arrived in the summer of 1975 and stayed in Greenwood Lake, NY. They were careful to chose 3 Protestant children and 3 Catholic children to not only show them that there was a more peaceful place in the world, but that they could get along and befriend one another. A year later my parents volunteered to take in a child and Mark McAuley came to stay for the summer. There were others over the years, but Mark was loved by everyone in the small village my parents lived in. He came back three times, once the Fire Department raised the money to pay his way, and eventually he settled in New York City as and adult. He is my oldest brother as he was 8 when he came and my parents first born was only 9 months old. In the ensuing years Project Children has taken 14,000 children from the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, shown them another way of life and touched as many American Families as they have in Ireland. Their goal when it all began was to get the children away from the violence, their hope was that by removing them from it that they would become champions of peace. I do not think that it is a coincidence that 23 years after those first 6 children returned home that the first serious peace talks began and that those talks have evolved into a lasting peace. The children whose lives were touched by Denis and Patrick’s vision had come of age, and a new way of thinking and relating with “them” had dawned in Ireland. There are many charities that do great things, but Project Children touched my life and the lives of everyone in my family, it touched the McAuleys of Belfast, and it was an important part of ending a war that had raged for almost 900 years. Project Children continues to this day to break down walls in the minds of the Irish, they still bring over 600 children to America every summer, they sponsor internships for Irish university students on Capitol Hill and they put on programs that bring Protestant and Catholic families together in Northern Ireland. To read more, check out their web site HERE. And click HERE to check out Kelly's Korner who sponsors all this, and from there you can check out all the other favorite charities.