The first person I met when we arrived for the first concert in the big ice hockey venue in Port Hawkesbury was a Derry man born in Letterkenny, Declan O'Doherty. He's been living in Canada for the past 30 years and is a well-known musician and producer. He was stage-managing this big production, which played to more than 1,500 people including the Canadian Minister for Defence. I see from his MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/declanod that he's worked as an engineer, arranger or producer with the likes of Paul McCartney & Wings, Cat Stevens and Gerry Rafferty.
He was one of a number of people with North West connections encountered on the trip, including a Strabane-born MC who's had a radio show in Canada for almost 30 years and the Derry-born wife of another Celtic music radio DJ.
The redoubtable Joella Foulds, who heads up the pretty massive operation that is the Celtic Colours festival in Cape Breton these days. She visited Buncrana's Dr Liz Doherty and the North West a few months back.
Cape Breton has the same population as County Donegal, around 147k, but is about twice the size and seems to be coming down with fiddlers, piano players and dancers. Remarkably there are still a few elderly people whose first language is Scots Gaelic. The Scots in particular have had a major impact on the culture of the island, arising mostly from the arrival of tens of thousands of them on Cape Breton at the time of the Highland Clearances from the 1750s to the 1850s (estimates seem to vary from 25,000 to 50,000).
The Irish also had an impact, as you might expect, and a trip around the graveyard at Port Hawkesbury saw a good few Irish names come into view. Some villages are known as 'Irish' areas.
We weren't long on Canadian soil before Cape Breton's major story came up - the local Catholic bishop has been charged with having images of child porn after being stopped at an airport. You can imagine the sensation that has caused on the island.
Back in Derry it's been sad to hear of the death of local girl Orla O'Kane from complications arising from swine flu, and of the controversy surrounding the fact that her family weren't told she had the condition until last Friday, two days after her funeral. The health minister Michael McGimpsey has apologised to the family, and said Orla's death has also highlight the particular vulnerability of children in special schools to the complications of swine flu.
Our Sunday Journal team was first to cover this story.
Anyway, must go - a mountain of emails awaiting discovery!
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