Linda Bonnar is a successful life coach and entrepreneur.  She's also a former educator, and has built her services around both her experiences in the teaching profession, and her teenager years with mental health struggles in her hometown of Ballinasloe in County Galway in Ireland.  During those fragile, formative years of her childhood she had the misfortune of being targeted by a clique of mean-spirited schoolgirls, which made her road to today all the more difficult.

But she has used that hard journey to be of service to others, through her coaching and her business, Upstrive.    We applaud her willingness to share her life story with us, and her focus on helping others.

And she continues to work on her own mental health constantly, as we all should. We need to do a regular check-in with our feelings, she advises us strongly. We need to work hard at our own self-awareness. 

Have a listen, and you'll also learn the positive role horses have played in Linda's life.  Horses (and a pony!) have been in Linda's life, and that of her family, for ever.  And learn too of Linda's adventures as a teacher in Qatar and Dubai.

Ballinasloe, by the way, is famous for its horse fair, where, legend has it, Napoleon himself bought a horse.  

Some links of note from Linda's story:

• Upstrive
• Ballinasloe Horse Fair
• Linda's LinkedIn profile, listing her coaching qualifications and achievements.

Thanks to Purple-Planet  for the Intro/Outro music, and to FreeSound for the sound FX, and some music too!

Take a moment to learn more about the Celtic Irish American Academy. Support its work by donating (in USD $, with tax exemption benefits) here: CIAA Scholastic.

Thank you to our sponsor, the Fox Lifestyle Hospitality Group. Pay a visit to one of their great restaurants.

A special shout out to Lochlainn Harte, Imaging Manager at Newstalk Radio, for extra, top class, audio mixing.  Recently Lochlainn has worked on As I Remember It: Bertie Ahern & The Good Friday Agreement.

This is our last episode of Season Three.  We'll take a little break now.  Leave a message here and we'll let you know when we'll be back.

Jennifer Muldowney, from Dublin’s fair city, in Ireland, is an author, a podcaster, and a member of that exclusive set of people who has given a TED Talk.

But for this vivacious young woman, all these glamorous activities are in support of her unique, creative, small-ish, and growing business, which, not to put too fine a point on it, services the industry of passing and death. 

Jennifer's work is as much a service to the living survivors, as it is to the departed.

If you don’t know Jennifer, stick around and have a listen, you’ll love her to death.  Pun definitely intended. Stick around anyway if you do know her, and love her to death, as you do.  She’s been giving this mortality stuff a lot of thought, and it's worth your time to pause and reflect.

Remember, as we all learned in school, what Emily Dickinson wrote: Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped  for me -

Some links of note from Jennifer's story:

• Jennifer's TED Talk
• The Glam Reaper Podcast
• Muldowney Memorials
• Dublin City University

Thanks to Purple-Planet  for the Intro/Outro music, and to FreeSound for the sound FX, and some music too!

Take a moment to learn more about the Celtic Irish American Academy. Support its work by donating (in USD $, with tax exemption benefits) here: CIAA Scholastic.

Thank you to our sponsor, the Fox Lifestyle Hospitality Group. Pay a visit to one of their great restaurants.

A special shout out to Lochlainn Harte, Imaging Manager at Newstalk Radio, for extra, top class, audio mixing.  Recently Lochlainn has worked on As I Remember It: Bertie Ahern & The Good Friday Agreement.

When it comes to experiences, life is an embarrassment of riches.  Even more so, if you're an adventurous, wandering type, which might be another way of saying 'if you're Irish'.

Certainly Denis Maguire is, although he has gone about it in his own quiet way.   As a thoughtful playwright, flimmaker and artist, boisterousness is not for him.  Raised in Galway City in Ireland, of rebel lineage, and later a college student in Dublin, he left his native Ireland and headed off to study in Moscow in his late teens.  This was right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the citizens of the Eastern Bloc were still feeling the fallout from a communist utopia. Only the most pioneering of souls would have made that journey in those days.  Oh, and he didn't speak a word of Russian.  Not then. But he does now.

By the time he returned to Ireland, almost six years later, he'd spent some very formative years in an entirely different culture to the one of his childhood.  It had shaped him, instilling in him a level of russification that took him some time to realize and acknowledge.   You can take the lad out of Russia, but you can't...

Ironically, and literally by chance, New York later became his home, the polar opposite of the Moscow of his day.  So it is not surprising that he now lives in the world famous Coney Island, Brooklyn, which is no longer an island as it was when it was named, but a peninsula, a place geographically neither disconnected nor fully connected to the American  bedrock.  Which could be the metaphor for Denis's inner muse.

One further irony: Denis and  Paul Finnegan, CenterPieceNY's host, lived only a couple of short streets apart in Galway City for several years in the 1970s.  An age gap meant they did not know each other, though they both knew many of the same people, and shared many similar experiences.  It was documentarian Heather Quinlan, a collaborator with Paul on another project, who brought Denis and Paul together for this interview. 

Fair play to you, Heather!

Further info:

• Denis's Moscow Alma Mater
• The Bish
• Scoil Chaitríona, Renmore
• Denis on Etsy
• Denis on YouTube
• Coney Island
• General Commanding Officer Tom Maguire's Story (see p.277)

Denis on Instagram: @deniscmaguire  and @deniscmaguireart

Thanks to Purple-Planet  for  Intro/Outro music, and to FreeSound for the sound FX, and some music too!

For tech reasons we weren't able this month to mention the Celtic Irish American Academy, but we'll be sure to do so next month.  Support its work by donating (in USD $, with tax exemption benefits) here: CIAA Scholastic.

Our sponsor is the Fox Lifestyle Hospitality Group. Pay a visit to one of their great restaurants.

A special shout out to Lochlainn Harte, Imaging Manager at Newstalk Radio, for extra, top class, audio mixing.