CenterPieceNY

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...

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 aroun...

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 Sovi...

Corina Galvin calls County Mayo in Ireland her home.   She's also been a New Yorker for almost three decades.  And she has accumulated a lot of frequent flyer miles along the way.  That's because her job in event planning and management puts her constantly up in the air, traveling all over the globe, meeting some significant influencers in the process. 

This job, the only career of her working life, also allows her to divide her down time nicely between Ireland and New York, keeping her connections to her siblings, all in the west of Ireland, and her moth...

Jane McCooey thrives when she’s bringing people together to solve a problem, to the benefit of all.

When Jane, from County Armagh in Ireland,  is confronted with obstacles, she’s not afraid to reach out for help, and her first port of call is often to tap into the familiar power of sisterhood. 

Before you know it, she’s fallen in with a band of sisters.   She’s done this repeatedly–sports being a prime example–and more recently in the world of work.

Why there, you ask?

Because, you could say, men...

Niall O'Leary is best known as a performer of Irish dance in the New York area, and further afield.  A lesser known fact about Niall is that he also has his own Manhattan-based architecture practice.

The amazing thing about Niall is how he has managed to satisfy his innate need to create and design in these two very disparate disciplines.  To him there is barely a difference between them. Maybe every young person should be trained to think like Niall, so when they are asked what they want to be when they grow up, they'll transcend the us...

'Tis the festive season, and as yet another year ends,  a time for self-reflection.

So we thought we'd take a moment this Christmas to have a closer look at this podcast, delivered in the words of creator, producer and host Paul Finnegan, to explain why he does it, and to give you a walk-through on how he goes about doing it.   We hope you'll find it a relaxing and perhaps thought-provoking, and hopefully entertaining listen, worthy of your precious time.

It's a Christmas Carol, but by no means up to Dickensian snuff, not ev...

Ray O'Hanlon is a long-standing journalist, author and editor of the weekly Irish Echo news service, which has been a pillar of the Irish American identity since 1928.  That's a stretch coming up on 95 years, and Ray has been with the Echo for more than one third of that time!

Ray sees his work as stringing together elements, pearls he calls them, of larger stories, creating a broader context that transcends any particular incident or era.  It can be said he has been the string itself,  defining and chronicling  enormous changes among the Irish in American, and their prof...

In this episode, Helen McNamara O'Shea tells us of the brave leap she made from a career as an accomplished doctor to that of a singer/songwriter.  Given that Helen describes herself as 'ancient', which she is not by any means, it seemed, on the face of things,  a switch that didn't make a whole lot of sense.

But that's on the face of things, because both careers, to Helen, have something fundamental in common. Healing.

And that's what Helen is at heart, a healer.  She just does it now through the power of...

County Cork, on Ireland's southern shore, is its biggest county, bigger than all the rest, all thirty one of them.   Corkonians, as the people of Cork are known, are intensely proud of their heritage.  They often claim, in all sincerity, that Cork City, not Dublin, is the true capital of Ireland.   And they might be right.  One need only ask the British about their experiences dealing with 'the rebel county'.

By the time the centerpiece of this episode, musician and singer Donie Carroll, left his native Cork for New York, he'd already experienced many twists and turns on t...