> SOUTHERN INDIANA — Where will the Celtic group go next?
An old Irish-language proverb goes Níl aon suáilce gan a duáilce féin, translated as, “There are no unmixed blessings in life.”
In January, we learned that the 2012 Celts on the River concert would not take place at New Albany’s Riverfront Amphitheater, as it had for the past three years, but on the waterfront in Jeffersonville.
The Kentuckiana Celtic Foundation, or KCF, apparently saw no compelling ethical reason to inform New Albany officials that a bidding war for the concert had started, because doing so might have allowed for a matching counter-offer.
I don’t contest Jeffersonville’s favorable offer to the committee, only that the committee is guilty of considerable tackiness and slap-in-the-face ingratitude by its failure to give our city a chance to reply, whatever the response might have been.
It must be remembered that three years ago, KCF came to New Albany as a fledgling splinter group with neither marketable experience nor organizational credibility. The England administration graciously gave KCF metaphorical refuge, a physical riverfront home and extensive logistical assistance in nurturing both KCF and its concert concept.
But worry not; New Albany’s loss probably will be Jeffersonville’s, too, once the Kentuckiana Celtic Carpetbaggers flee next to Otisco, New Amsterdam or Birdseye, given there seems to be no sentiment for them to be hosted anywhere in Louisville, which surely speaks volumes in itself.
I’ll close with another Irish proverb: Drochubh, drochéan, meaning “A bad egg, a bad bird.”
— Roger Baylor, New Albany
Reader misses former columnist
I miss Amy Gesenhues’s columns. Every column she wrote was heartfelt and often controversial. The paper is not the same without her.
— Mary Hissam, Greenville
