Editorials

Ireland’s great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) took place in the middle of the 19th century, caused by a blight on the potato crop in the Emerald Isle. Beginning with the harvest of 1846, and lasting for five years, the fungus caused the potato crop to fail, and millions lost their sole source of food.
In that first year, 1847, some 400,000 people starved to death, and as many as 1.5 million Irish died from starvation over just five years.  Read more

The news this week that Rep. Marie St. Fleur has decided not to seek reelection this fall is not good news for the community. In her ten years in office, she has been a stellar advocate for the people of her district, for the broader Dorchester and Mattapan community, and more broadly for the citizens of the state. A native of Haiti, she moved here to Uphams Corner with her family as a young girl, and was educated in local schools. She took her college degree at UMass-Amherst, and also has a law degree.  Read more

The weather prognosticators were agog this week with their predictions of the modest snowstorm that arrived here Wednesday afternoon.

All week long, these highly trained meteorologists and their anchor-people partners in the media have been steadily raising anxiety levels of their listeners with their forecasts of the mid-week snowfall they were certain would come.  Read more

Late last fall, word spread through the neighborhood that one of our own, Jerry “Judgie” Leary, had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. The longtime union official and veteran community activist and his wife wife Gayle are the parents of six – Patrick, Kaitlyn, James, Gerald P. III, Devin, and Ryan. Those who knew his capacity for empathy and propensity to help others decided to organize a fundraiser – we Dot people call it “a time” – to rally around their friend and his family. They set tomorrow – Fri., Jan.  Read more

The news coming out of Haiti is horrible. The images are heart-breaking. The damages are catastrophic. The suffering seems limitless.  Read more

There was some good news this week on Savin Hill. After long months of negotiations, it was announced yesterday that an innovative, co-educational, college preparatory high school now located in Cambridge will relocate into the Savin Hill Avenue building that once was the home of St. William’s School.  Read more

UMass-Boston Chancellor J. Keith Motley hosted a community dinner for about 20 civic and political Dorchester leaders last week, and he used the occasion to brief his neighbors on the status of the university community.

At the meeting in the Chancellor’s on-campus meeting room in the Quinn Building, Dr. Motley painted a picture of a growing and involved public university on the shores of Dorchester Bay. Among the statistics:  Read more