In his autobiographies ("Angela's Ashes" & "Tis") Frank McCourt tells his moving story about his mother who was born into a Catholic family in the slums of Limerick. When Angela Sheehan married a Toome, Co. Antrim man and they struggled to raise their large family in Limerick, her husband Malachy was looked up with great suspicion and contempt by her family and neighbors and in his attempts to find work. Because he was from the North and had a different accent McCourt was dismissed as a "sneaky little Presbyterian with an odd look and an odd way of talking." Depressed and irresponsible, he squandered the little money he earned on drink and several of Frank's sibings actually died of malnutrition. Some years later (1959) Angela visited her son, Frank, a school teacher and author in NYC: "Mam had moved into a small apartment... on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.." Frank recalls, "I remembered something she had told me months ago while we sat waiting for Thanksgiving dinner. 'Isn't it remarkable,' she said, the ways thing turn out in people's lives." I asked her what she meant. She replied, "Well I was sitting in my apartment and I was feeling lonesome so I went up and sat on one of those benches they have in the grassy island in the middle of Broadway and this woman came along, a shopping bag woman, one of the homeless ones, all tattered and greasy, rootin' around in the garbage can till she found a newspaper and sat beside me reading it till she asked me if she could borrow my glasses because she could only read the headlines with the sight she had and when she talked I noticed she had an Irish accent, so I asked her where she came from and she told me Donegal a long time ago and wasn't it lovely to be sitting on a bench in the middle of Broadway with people noticing things and asking where you came from. She asked if I could spare a few pennies for soup and I said instead she could come with me to the Associated supermarket and we'd get some groceries and have a proper meal. Oh, she couldn't do that, she said, but I told her that's what I was ! going to do anyway. She wouldn't come inside the store. She said they wouldn't want the likes of her." Angela continued, "I got bread and butter and rashers and eggs and when we got home I told her she could go in and have a nice shower and she was delighted with herself though there wasn't much I could do about her clothes or the bags she carried. We had our dinner and watched television till she started falling asleep on me and I told her to lie down there on the bed but she wouldn't, God knows the bed is big enough for four, but she laid down on the floor with a shopping bag under the head and when I woke up in the morning she was gone and I missed her." Sadly, discrimination, homelessness, poverty, hardship and hunger still exist, but it IS in our power to do something about it.