Wednesday, November 5, 2008

My fellow Strabanians...

I got a call yesterday from a young woman, a journalist, who said she was calling from Strabane... but she pronounced it "stra-ben." I was confused. Then, she added, "... in Northern Ireland."

Her name is Aine (pronounced On-ya) McCarron, and she writes for The Strabane Weekly News. She was interested in knowing how the presidential voting was going in her town's American namesake. I explained to her that there was a village of Strabane, located in the township of North Strabane, and that we also had a township called South Strabane, all named after her own town by the Scots-Irish who settled here in the late 18th century.I told her I didn't know how the Strabanians would vote, but I'd let her know today.

(Unofficial vote totals for North and South Strabane townships combined were 6,262 for McCain and 4,634 for Obama.)

Aine wrote this article for her newspaper's Web site, illustrated by a photo from our Web site of voters standing in line at a polling station in North Strabane.

I told Aine yesterday that most people were sick of the campaign at that point, and she replied that even though the election was not even in her country, people there had heard so much of it that they were sick of it as well. Asked who Strabanians of Ireland favored, she said Obama was the better choice, for them and the rest of the world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The only information that people around the world have is the propaganda they get from MSM who are in the tank for Obama. Obama is a well spoken product of a skillful marketing campaign. The real Obama, good or bad will be revealed.