"Three of the men with us had been with Aisling on previous trips but none had been back to their home counties in many years. We often find that returnees need their first trip to be well away from their home town or even their home county and the three had wanted to stay well away from home on the first trip but had begun to have thoughts of going home in the time since. Tom was the fourth man, an Arlington House [hostel] resident who had dropped out of sight of his family, as many of the men there do.

"The crossing was a bit rocky but safe and we arrived at the cottages in Courtown safely and even managed to make it to the local shop to stock up on supplies before it shut at nine. Before we set off, the Irish centre in Camden had asked us if we could give a lift to a client of theirs whose mother was very ill and needed to get back to Kildare. When we collected him at the centre in the morning his brother and the brothers’ girlfriend were there as well and they were all pretty drunk, it seemed, after an all-night session.

Thanks to the very wonderful Wylie O'Hagan art collective [ www.wyllieohagan.com ], the Aisling project has received HUGE exposure [and much positive feedback] on YouTube.com.

More than 39,000 views!

We know lots of our supporters were expecting a comedy show this Spring [2008], in support of Aisling. Unfortunately we have not been able to organise one as yet... but Aisling hopes to be putting on a major benefit later in the year.

This SafeStart video covers many of the issues the Aisling Return to Ireland Project also has to contend with - the severe disadvantage of many elderly Irish migrants in Britain.

From today, we'll be using a new Content Management System to publish regularly updated news content to Aisling.org.uk.

If you link to http://www.aisling.org.uk/drupal/?q=rss.xml - our RSS feed, you can publish automatically updated Aisling News Stories on your own site.

Older news articles can still be found on this site at http://www.aisling.org.uk/html/index.php

All articles from the inception of this site, and also of the organization which helped to spawn Aisling - the Arlington House Irish Tenants Association - are still available here.

The entire archive [and the whole site] is searchable using our custom-Google search box.

The film kings had it's British premier at the Tricycle cinema appropriately situated on Kilburn High Rd on the 14th March the Friday before (also appropriately) Paddy's Day..

This is a test post for our new content management system - which will hopefully enable Aisling to keep the site up to date more easily.... It's really just as simple as typing in what you want to say - OR - cutting'n'pastin' from another document.

It should be easy-peasey. Allegedly... See www.drupal.com

- Jim

Drupal 6.1 installed relatively seamlessly.

Manual install - with default modules.

www.drupal.com