Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2013

Running from the 14th to the 24th of February, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival will be presenting over 140 films from the four corners of the globe. Over that last number of years this festival has gained major momentum. The majority of films shown at the Film Festival are Irish premieres, and for some of the films shown, the festival represents the only public screening that will take place in Ireland. Only a short time away and with a few of the shows already sold out its important to book your tickets as soon as you can. Visit Jameson Film Festival Tickets to buy your tickets and for more information on sold out events! The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival takes place in all of the Dublin City Centre Cinemas including Cineworld, The Savoy, Screen, Irish Film Institute and Light House Cinema in Smithfield.

For more information go to www.jdiff.com. If you are planning on staying in Dublin for a few nights over this festival, check out the Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin 4. The Hotel has some great offers on over these dates. Call 00353 1 646 1000 or go online to www.grandcanalhotel.ie

BAVARIA RACING

Racing enthusiasts are in for a real treat this summer as Bavaria City Racing arrives in the capital for the very fist time.

Over 100,000 people are expected to descend on Dublin City Centre on the 3rd of June 2012 to capture a glimpse of Superbikes, Super cars, Touring cars, Formula 2, WRC, Drifters, and the star attraction; demonstrations from internationally celebrated F1 cars and drivers.

Parts of Dublin City will be cordoned off to allow a demonstration of some of the world's most impressive racing machines. Started in Rotterdam in 2006, Bavaria City Racing has grown to a massive spectacle, attracting in the order of half a million people to see the event in the Dutch Port City.

Moscow has also played host to the event, but it is a real honour for Dublin to welcome the spectacle for 2012. Check out the event route here.

Tickets are selling fast for the event so book soon. Book your advance purchase rooms for the event on www.grandcanalhotel.com.

ST PATRICK'S DAY - STUFF YOU DID/DIDN'T KNOW

St Patrick’s Day is a uniquely Irish festival yet it is celebrated throughout the world. For those of you who are not totally tuned into what this special Irish day is about we’ve compiled some interesting facts.
1. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, although he was born in Britain, around 385AD. His parents Calpurnius and Conchessa were Roman citizens living in either Scotland or Wales, according to different versions of his story.
2. As a boy of 14 he was captured and taken to Ireland where he spent six years in slavery herding sheep. He returned to Ireland in his 30s as a missionary among the Celtic pagans.
3. Legend has it that he used the native shamrock as a symbol of the holy trinity when preaching and brought the Latin alphabet to Ireland.
4. Miracles attributed to him include the driving of serpents out of Ireland. However, evidence suggests post-glacial Ireland never had any snakes in the first place.
5. Wearing green, eating green food and even drinking green beer, is said to commemorate St Patrick's use of the shamrock - although blue was the original colour of his vestments.
6. St Patrick was said to have proclaimed that everyone should have a drop of the "hard stuff" on his feast day after chastising an innkeeper who served a short measure of whiskey. In the custom known as "drowning the shamrock", the shamrock that has been worn on a lapel or hat is put in the last drink of the evening.
7. Popular Irish toasts on St Patrick's Day, include: may the roof above us never fall in, and may we friends beneath it never fall out.
8. St. Patrick's Day was first celebrated in America in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1737. Around 34 million modern Americans claim Irish ancestry.
9. It is believed that St Patrick died on March 17 in 461AD. It is a national holiday in Ireland, and on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, which was founded by Irish refugees. It is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland and a provincial holiday in the Canadian province of Newfoundland.
10. Dublin has a parade that attracts hundreds of thousands of people, while in Chicago the river is dyed green for a few hours. The biggest parade is normally held in New York, while the largest celebration in the southern hemisphere is in Sydney, Australia.
11. St. Patrick's Day is not just a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is also a holiday in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, and in Montserrat in the West Indies.
12. St. Patrick's Day is the most widely celebrated saint's day in the world.
It is observed by the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion (especially the Church of Ireland)the Eastern Orthodox Church and Lutheran Church.
13. St Patrick’s Day color was originally blue.
Originally, the color associated with Saint Patrick was blue, but over the years the colour green and its association with Saint Patrick's day grew.
In the 1798 Irish rebellion, in order to make a political statement, Irish soldiers wore full green uniforms
14. Saint Patrick's feast day was already being celebrated by the Irish in Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries.
15. St Patrick’s Day made it onto the church calendar in the early 1600s thanks to Waterford Franciscan Luke Wadding.
16. In recent times, in 1940 and 2008, Saint Patrick's Day fell in Holy Week. It will not fall within Holy Week again until 2160. Hopefully they will still have Guinness, Jameson and parades then.
17. Birmingham, not the capital city, London, hosts the largest St.Patrick’s Day parade in Britain with a massive city centre parade over a two mile route through the city centre. The organisers describe it as the third biggest parade in the world after Dublin and New York.
18. The Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League used to be known as Toronto St. Patrick’s from 1919 to 1927 and wore green jerseys. In 1999, when they had a nationally televised game on St.Patrick’s night, they wore green again.
19. It is in Nome, Alaska, with a parade and a golf tournament. Everbody shoots over Brrrrr...!
20. Hot Springs Arkansas’s Bridge Street parade is the world's shortest because Bridge Street was named the shortest street in the world in the 1940s. The parade was declared "The Quirkiest St. Patrick's Day Parade on Earth" by Smithsonian Magazine in 2009.

Feel free to add anything that we've left out. Particular thanks to IrishCentral for helping with above info.

Ollie.

TUTANKHAMUN VISITS DUBLIN - SORT OF

The ad for "Tutankhamen - His Tomb and His Treasures" tells us that "The Pharaoh is Coming", but did he really, I asked myself leaving the RDS in Dublin on the opening day of the exhibition.
At a glance, Dublin 4 hasn't seen this much bling since the height of the Celtic Tiger. But before any serious criminals start planning a Brinks type heist, don't bother, all the merchandise are replica's of the originals.
Don't let that put you off visiting however, all of the 1,000 artefact's have been painstakingly reproduced to scale by expert Egyptian craftsmen.
I'm a bit of a history buff so I was looking forward to visiting the exhibition. Egyptian history is not a subject I can claim to know a huge deal about, but with a little help from the Mummy movie franchise and Karl Pilkinton's Idiot abroad I have at least beginners knowledge of history's longest enduring civilisations.
Tutankhamun is the most famous of all the Egyptian Pharaohs for a number of reasons - not least that his tomb was the first that was found almost fully intact - all others were emptied of their treasures by thieves.
He died at the relatively young age of 18 but like all Pharaoh's he didn't go empty handed. His tomb was littered with stunning pieces of art and enough gold to pay off the debts of modern Irish banks.
Children will definitely enjoy the spectacle. Backed up by a stunning audio and visual display, images of the mummified remains of Tutankhamen and two still born children will no doubt fascinate and revile in equal measure.
This is an impressive exhibition which has seen over 2 million people pay through the doors since its inception in 2008. There are now three touring exhibitions roving the World.
Based on original photos and diary entries from the period, the exhibition tells of Howard Carter's painstaking journey to find the lost Pharoh's remains. After many year's of searching and shedding tons of Lord Carnarvan's dosh, Carter was about to give up on his dream after exhausting the Valley of the Kings.
He was to find the tomb of Tutankhamun in literally the only remaining slither of land that he hadn't searched. The exhibition brilliantly walks you through the moment he found the tomb and following process of detailing, photographing and of course the curse.
The only problem I would have with the exhibition is that there is always the over-riding knowledge that none of what you are looking at is real. That said don't let that stop you going...it really is a stunning presentation of what is a riveting subject.
Tutankhamun his Tomb and Treasures opened on the 17th of February and runs till July. Packages are available at www.grandcanalhotel.com.

Ollie McGrath

IRISH AMERICANS OUTNUMBER US 9:1

A very interesting article on www.irishcentral.com sheds some light on the level of the Irish infiltration into the US. Interesting facts from the US Census include that 24% of people in Massachusetts claim Irish ancestry and even more impressively 36.9 million US citizens claim to of Irish decent.

Here are some highlights:

Number of Irish Americans: 36.9 million
This number was more than eight times the population of Ireland itself (4.5 million). Irish was the nation's second most frequently reported ancestry, trailing only German. If Scots Irish are included the number rises to over 40 million.
Sources: 2009 American Community Survey & Ireland Central Statistics Office

Number of Irish-born in U.S.: 122,000
Number of Irish-born U.S. residents in 2009. Those from Ireland are much older (a median of 60 years old) and have a higher median household income ($56,158) than U.S. residents as a whole (37 years and $50,221, respectively).
Source: 2009 American Community Survey

Largest population of Irish: Massachusetts, 24%
Percent of Massachusetts residents who were of Irish ancestry in 2009. This compares with a rate of 12% for the nation as a whole.
Source: 2009 American Community Survey

Irish American education levels: 32% college graduates
Percentage of people of Irish ancestry, 25 or older, who had a bachelor's degree or higher. In addition, 92% of Irish Americans in this age group had at least a high school diploma. For the nation as a whole, the corresponding rates were 28% and 85% respectively.
Source: 2009 American Community Survey

Annual income: $56,383
Median income for households headed by an Irish American, higher than the $50,221 for all households. In addition, 10% of people of Irish ancestry were in poverty, lower than the rate of 14% for all Americans.
Source: 2009 American Community Survey


Numbers of professional Irish: 40% in management
Percentage of employed civilian Irish Americans 16 or older who worked in management, professional and related occupations. Additionally, 27% worked in sales and office occupations; 16% in service occupations; 9% in production, transportation and material moving occupations; and 8% in construction, extraction, maintenance and repair occupations.
Source: 2009 American Community Survey

Numbers of Irish owning their own home: 70%
Percentage of householders of Irish ancestry who owned the home in which they live, with the remainder renting. For the nation as a whole, the home ownership rate was 66%.
Source: 2009 American Community Survey

Places called Shamrock : 4
Number of places in the United States named Shamrock, the floral emblem of Ireland. Mount Gay-Shamrock, West Virginia, and Shamrock, Texas, were the most populous, with 2,623 and 1,828 residents, respectively. Shamrock Lakes, Indiana, had 152 residents and Shamrock, Oklahoma, 122. (Statistic for Mount Gay-Shamrock is from the 2000 Census; the other statistics are 2009 estimates.)
Sources: American FactFinder and population estimates

Number of places called Dublin: 9
Number of places in the United States that share the name of Ireland's capital, Dublin. Since the 2000 Census, Dublin, California has surpassed Dublin, Ohio, as the most populous of these places (44,541 compared with 39,310, respectively, as of July 1, 2009).

So there you have it. Any chance our cousins in the States can come back and help us with our economy. You'll have a great time...we promise.

DUBLIN HOTEL PRICES STILL DROPPING

Well if ever you needed proof that Dublin is now one of the best cities in Europe in terms of hotel value than have a read of today's article in the Irish Times.

Anyone who's stayed in the Grand Canal Hotel or taken an interest in any of our offers will already tell you that we strive to offer the best rates. Our friends over in Hotels.com like to monitor these things and their latest survey makes good reading for anyone wanting to travel to Ireland's capital.

Dublin now ranks as the tenth cheapest city for hotel prices among major holiday destinations worldwide, according to a new survey.

The latest Hotels.com Hotel Price Index shows that the average price per room in the capital fell 7 per cent from €78 in the second quarter of 2009 to €73 for the same three-month period this year. This means that Dublin continues to be the cheapest city for hotels in western Europe.

Monte Carlo, the city which is the playground of the rich and famous, is the world's most expensive city for holidaymakers with prices having risen by 6 per cent over the past year to an average of €180 per night.

Geneva in Switzerland is the second most expensive city for hotel accommodation with prices up 7 per cent year-on-year to €174 per night. Hotel prices in Rio de Janerio rose 22 per cent during the same time period to €166. New York and Moscow, formerly two of the world's most expensive destinations, make up the top five with prices at €153 and €150 respectively.

The most significant rise in hotel costs recorded in the year to the end of June was in Cape Town where prices increased by 35 per cent to €108 per night, due to the World Cup.

Singapore and London also saw substantial rises in room rates with prices up 20 per cent and 14 per cent respectively.

The Latvian capital Riga is ranked as the cheapest city for hotel prices wiht costs having fallen by 8 per cent over the year from €63 to €58.

Christchurch, Tallinn, Bangkok and Beijing make up the top five in terms of cheapest hotel prices with all offering accommodation at €66 per night or below on average.

Abu Dhabi was the city which experienced the largest fall in prices in the year to the end of June with room rates down 29 per cent to €136.

The Icelandic capital Reykjavik saw its room rates fall by 22 per cent due to the ash cloud crisis earlier in the year while room rates in Bucharest dropped by 27 per cent on average making it one of the least expensive destinations in the world.

So there you have it. Dublin, value and particularly the Grand Canal Hotel are synonymous. Check out www.grandcanalhotel.com for more info.