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Mom of six who turned her Irish pub into a hub of pandemic service gets $1 million surprise

Humans of New York/Facebook

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit many people hard, but it's been a particularly rough road for restaurant owners. Businesses that rely on people gathering can't sustain being closed for long, and when your small business is your livelihood, your financial security can plummet far and fast.

That's the situation Mary O'Halloran found herself in when her Irish pub in New York City's east side was shut down just before St. Patrick's Day. In a post shared by Humans of New York, O'Halloran explained that her longshoreman husband got stuck in the Aleutian Islands for nine months when the pandemic hit, as no flights were going out. That meant she was stuck with a suddenly shutdown pub, six kids who needed schooling from home, and no idea how to make it all work.

She explained what she did to homeschool her kids, as well as try to make ends meet:

"I pulled all the furniture out of the bar, and made a section for each of them [the kids]: pillow, blankets, everything they needed. Then I had to figure out how to survive. Other bar owners were just throwing up their hands, but I had to try something. I began catering dinners for emergency workers at a nearby hotel. It wasn't much money, but it was something to do. Each night I'd cook dinner for thirty people. The kids would help when they could: peeling potatoes, washing dishes.

But I'd be so exhausted every day. Everyone had so much faith in me to survive. Maybe because I keep the tough side out—everyone assumed I was OK. Nobody knew I was full of worries. But it was so freakin' hard. To keep the kids happy. Month after month I'm falling further behind on the rent. It felt like the walls were closing in."

However, her regular customers kept showing up:

"They ran errands for me. Sometimes they'd take the kids on walks to give me a break. There was a group of Irish musicians who would play here every Thursday night. They helped me set up an online store, so that I could sell scones to the music people. Soda bread scones with homemade blackberry jam. My mother's recipe from back in Ireland. Really, it's the simplest thing-- but all six of us kids used to line up for them."

Those scones became a lifeline for O'Halloran when a reporter did a story on the bar and tasted one of her scones live on TV. For a few months, the orders rolled in:

"It wasn't a ton of money. I was only making $1800 for 100 boxes of scones. It wasn't paying rent or anything. But it was something to do, you know? I finally found something that was working. People were writing notes, saying: 'I gave these to my grandmother, and she loved them.' It was the little bit of light that I needed. It pulled me forward. I didn't feel alone anymore. It was like: 'Oh My God, there's something out there.'

O'Halloran's story on Humans of New York resonated with people who acknowledged her work ethic and heart for service—and comments from those who know her and her pub came flooding in as well.

"I used to sing in Mary's pub," wrote one commenter. "My jazz band loved her food, my Irish parents loved her hospitality, and I loved her genuine, heartwarming, generous, positive, can-do, independent spirit. This woman is a Celtic Goddess. She's the rainbow in an Irish sky. She adds a secret ingredient to the extraordinary mix of this melting pot city. As Nat King Cole spelled it.... L-O-V-E."

"Mary is SO WONDERFUL," wrote another. "No one in the world deserves happiness and success more than Mary. I had the pleasure of teaching her daughter Erinn, and Mary was the most incredible class parent, always sending in treats for the class and asking what more she could do when she was already stretched so thin. She even hosted our entire grade of 75 students for a cooking class at the pub! She often donates catered meals to our school's teachers and office staff. We love you, Mary!!"

And yet another: "Mary even would come in on a Sunday am & teach local Boy Scouts how to cook & let them serve their families in her dining room! My son still knows how to crack an egg one-handed thanks to her. She's a gem and so is Mary O's!"

And still another: "I live around the corner. Mary let my neighbor get married in her restaurant. There was no money in it for her. Just needed a space for 30 minutes. There were only a few of us there in person; a lot of people on zoom. But Mary couldn't help herself: She whipped together a shepherd's pie and sautéed mushrooms and we had a wedding feast all afternoon."

Brandon Stanton, the man behind Humans of New York created a special web page for people to purchase O' Halloran's scones for $30 instead of her price of $18 to help her out. "Mary started crying when I suggested raising prices, because she says other people are hurting more than her," he wrote. "So if you are also in a tough spot, but want to try the scones, do not worry. The $18 non-magical scones are still available through her website."

Within a day of posting Mary's story and the link for ordering scones, more than $1 million worth of orders came in, Stanton shared on Instagram.


"We found a quiet table at the end of the night, and I gave her a full accounting," Stanton wrote. "There were 25,000 orders, which meant 150,000 scones. She allowed herself a brief, joyful cry. Then she asked: 'I can do this, right?' I told her: 'Of course.' Because every one of those orders came from people who want the best for her. And I felt confident that we'd all be patient while she figured out a new process for making scones. Mary has a great team around her. She refers to them as 'The Regulars' as if they're a squad of superheroes, but they're actually longtime customers who transform into volunteers at a moment's notice."

Stanton said those volunteers have made it clear that after a decade of serving others, O'Halloran is simply reaping what she's sown: "'This woman deserves every bit of this,' they said. 'She gives and gives and never asks for a thing.'

It will take teamwork and planning and time to fulfill the scone orders, but it will be done. A GoFundMe also provides an alternative for people who want to help Mary O's out directly.

What a beautiful show of support for a woman who has provided so much support for others.

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Meet the inspirational Irish model who's smashing the gender binary.

Meet Ivan Fahy, an androgynous, gender-expressive model from Ireland.

Ivan uses male pronouns, but he doesn't confine himself to simply being "male."

"My gender and its expression is more than what the male gender binary permits," he said.

And because of that, Ivan is breaking barriers right and left when it comes to modeling. "My photos show that boys do wear makeup, boys do wear high heels,"Ivan said in an interview with the creative agency Thinkhouse. "I'm a boy, I am wearing them, and we do exist."

"Having this platform means a lot to me because I know it will send out positive messages about self-acceptance and the acceptance of others." All images from Thinkhouse/YouTube.

That language is integral to Ivan's identity. And so is the fact that, well, he knows how to werk.

As a generally expressive and artistic person, Ivan was always drawn to modeling — to creating impactful moments with just his body as a canvas. But once he actually began modeling professionally after secondary school, he says something felt … off.

Ivan realized that it wasn't modeling itself that was bothering him — it was the boring, uninspiring act of modeling as a male. "I deserve to be embraced as a model that is feminine," he told Upworthy. "My gender allows me to be more imaginative and bold because I don't care about labels or boxes and this excites many people."

"I would love to work with the world's biggest designers and be the face of a few brands, not just because that would be amazing for obvious reasons, but because it would show that people are becoming more brave and inclusive."

Even as he made a name for himself with his fierceness on camera, Ivan didn't wear heels in public until his college graduation.

It sounds like a small victory for someone who had already begun to embrace his gender-expressive self. But he says wearing heels to his graduation from NUI Galway was a major step in helping him come into his own.

"Being a model gave me the confidence and tenacity to do it," he said. "I didn't like the idea that I am this fabulous and confident expressive model online that people look up to and admire, but in real life I hide away and conform."

Of course, the art of modeling can't take all the credit. Some of that belongs to his mother, too. He says that on the day before graduation, she told him that people might think or say mean things, but she raised him to be strong and brave. So in the end, he put on those heels and marched proudly across the stage.

"I am lucky to have family and friends that accept me. The stares and opinions of others can upset me sometimes, but everyone close to me is amazing."

Ivan certainly isn't the first or even biggest name in genderqueer modeling. But that doesn't mean he's not worth celebrating.

U.S. readers might be familiar with names like Ruby Rose, Rain Dove, and Ryley Pogensky. And in Ivan's native Ireland, RTÉ news anchor Jonathan-Rachel Cynch came out as gender fluid in 2015.

But Ivan's visibility as an LGBTQ role model is really important, especially in a country so strongly associated with its own Catholic history. Although Ireland is coming around to genderfluidity, Ivan says there's a lot of work still to be done. "There are still high levels of homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools, self-harm, suicide, etc., in Ireland and these need to be addressed immediately," he said.

That's why, in addition to his stunning and inspirational modeling work, Ivan also offers workshops and talks about gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ inclusiveness, including a recent one at TEDx Galway.

"If a guy says 'Ivan's cool, I love his high heels,' [other people ask him] 'Are you gay?' But why do you care? Instead of it just being, 'I'm appreciating the picture. It's art.'"

While his modeling skills have largely been embraced, Ivan has still encountered some resistance to his gender expression.

"Many brands and designers are afraid to be pioneering," he said. "Some of these barriers are too great to simply overcome because we are talking about people's beliefs and their willingness to take risks."

Not all of Ivan's professional struggles have to do with his gender, though. He also encounters the same false promises and untrustworthy people that anyone in the fashion world has to deal with. It's still not ideal, but if he's going to have to put up with any frustrations, it's better to be faced with industry-wide problems than continue to be held back because of who he is.

"If someone works with me, all of a sudden they are doing it for 'attention' or 'publicity' and it's not true. They might just be working for me because they like me as a model."

Ivan's work is an inspiring example of just how far our society has come in celebrating beauty in every gender.

Gender has never been as strict or simple as we try to make it out to be. There's still a ways to go, of course — as evidenced by the barriers that Ivan himself has had to face.

But as his stunning vogue has shown us, sometimes a little bit of self-confidence is all it takes to break through and inspire others to follow in your footsteps. Whether they walk in heels should be entirely up to them.

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See the incredible story of an Afro-Irish island in 9 stunning images.

There's a place they call the Emerald Isle, where the lush green landscapes are home to families with names like O'Gara, Darcy, and Ryan. They live in towns called Cork Hill, Kinsale, and Sweeney's Well, and they stamp a green shamrock on your passport anytime you visit, whether it's for their famed St. Patrick's celebration or to experience the island's warm, tropical climate...

I'm obviously talking about Montserrat, a small Caribbean island with a centuries-old connection to Ireland. Here's the strange, dark, and ultimately beautiful history of this fascinating place:

1. Back in 1678, more than half of the island's population was Irish.


Photo by Graham Clifford. Used with permission.

Oliver Cromwell exiled thousands of Irish laborers to the Caribbean during the 17th century. Many of them were criminals serving time; others volunteered or were forced into indentured servitude, trading years of sunburn and abuse for the promise of a small piece of land.

Many of them eventually flocked to Montserrat, which was under French dominion at the time and had gained a reputation as a safe haven for Irish Catholics.

2. While the Irish at first were treated like any other slave or forced laborer in the Caribbean, they soon started gaining status in their new home on Montserrat.


Image via David William Seitz/YouTube.

"The Irish probably thought, 'I've been an indentured laborer, I've been treated as a slave myself, I want to be prosperous.' And they looked at the wealthy at the time and saw owning slaves as a status symbol," Graham Clifford, an Irish journalist who spent some time in Montserrat, explained in an interview with Upworthy.

3. Over the next century, the Montserratian people got, well, pretty fed up with it.


Image via Leah Tribe/YouTube.

Which is understandable — as frustrating as it is when some foreign empire shows up and forces you into slavery and claims your land and resources as its own, it's even more insulting when the other "lesser humans" that they brought with them start pushing you around as well.

4. So the Montserratians staged a revolt against the Irish majority on March 17, 1768.


Image via mnispirit/YouTube.

As Sir Howard Fergus, a historian and politician as well as the first Montserratian to be knighted by the British Empire, explained in an email to Upworthy, "The day was strategically chosen for planter lords would have been celebrating at the Governor’s residence in tipsy glory, it being St. Patrick’s Day."

5. But someone leaked the uprising plan, and the slaves were swiftly punished, leaving nine dead and 30 more banished from Montserrat.

A Montserratian girl recites a poem about the St. Patrick's uprising. Image via David William Seitz/YouTube.

OK, maybe it's not the most flattering legacy.

Of course, the Irish weren't the first oppressed group to take it out on the next oppressed group on the oppression ladder. And they definitely weren't the last. Still, that legacy remains a major part of Montserrat — in the national colors, in the harp on the country's crest, and in the names and places all across the island.

6. It wasn't until 1971 that the rest of the world began to take notice of this particular bit of colonial history.


Image from mnispirit/YouTube.

Sir Howard Fergus had published an article on the St. Patrick's Day uprising, inspiring the island's lone secondary school to celebrate the unnamed martyrs of the day with a history project — one that ended up attracting national attention.

Over the next few years, this trend of cultural education continued. But eventually, the idea came up to exploit this little bit of Irishness for the purposes of tourism (and maybe for some LOLs).

7. "It was a short step to carnivalising St. Patrick’s Day and making it to a week-long festival rivalling Christmas," Sir Fergus said.

Photo by Graham Clifford, used with permission.

"Montserratians are not so much celebrating Ireland. It is a festival of fun with a tincture of Irishness thrown in."

Still, Sir Fergus clarifies: "Some are however kicking and screaming because they think the original purpose of the holiday was to celebrate the heroes of St. Patrick’s Day."

8. But recently, some efforts have been made to reconnect the Irish and the Montserratians, to share their cultures and their histories.

Skyping across the Atlantic with Montserratian children. Photo by Graham Clifford, used with permission.

Clifford learned about Montserrat in the mid-'90s, and years later arranged a trip to the island with the help of Father George Aggers, an Irish priest who worked with a local parish on the island. They set up a Skype call between the Montserratian children at St. Augustine's School and his own children's classroom at Gaelscoil de híde in Fermoy, County Cork, allowing the children to learn about each other's languages and cultures and connect over their shared heritage and history with March 17.

"I wanted to use the links I have as a way of bringing together people from these distant but strangely familiar communities," Clifford told the Irish Independent.

9. "They do obviously play up the Irish connection for tourism," Clifford said. "But it's still there. It's a mad, random connection."

A Irish-Montserratian music and dance celebration. Photo by Graham Clifford, used with permission.

History is full of ugly details. But we can remember the past while building toward the future. We just have to reach out and connect.

Every culture has its shameful secrets — and in the case of Montserrat and Ireland, those stories are layered in colonial complications. What matters most is that we learn from those mistakes and celebrate the cultures and heroes that came from them.

Here's the first installment of a documentary about the Irish connection to Montserrat:

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10 surprising Irish words you didn't know you were using almost every day.

2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, giving us even more reason to celebrate Irish culture.

March 17 is a wonderful day. No, not because of Evacuation Day — I'm talking about St. Patrick's Day!

As an Irish-American, the feast day of Ireland's patron saint is particularly important to me. Though it has its origins in solemn Christian reverence, it's come to be more accepted as a celebration of all things Irish — a chance for the rich culture of the island and its diaspora to truly shine.

There's just one small problem:

"Éire go Brách," which basically translates to "Ireland Forever." Photo by Ben Stansall/Stringer/Getty Images.

People keep calling it "St. Patty's Day." Which is totally, utterly wrong.

A "patty" is a hamburger. Or a veggie burger, if that's your thing. A "Patty" is Patricia, who might well be a wonderful woman. And "St. Patty" was an Italian woman whose feast day is in August.

"Paddy" is the proper way to shorten the Irish name of Pádraig, which has since been Anglicized (literally, "made into English") as "Patrick." The name means "noble born" and comes from the Latin roots for "patriarch" — you know, like Father, 'cause St. Pádraig was a priest 'n' stuff.

Hamburger jokes aside, the Irish people suffered centuries upon centuries of colonial oppression from Britain, which included the erasure of their language.

So basically, saying "St. Patty" is like pouring salt in a gaping cultural wound.

In fact, there's been way more Anglicizing of the Irish language than most people realize. Here are a few words (or a "cúpla focal") that we owe to the Land of a Hundred Thousand Welcomes.

"Céad Míle Fáilte" means "a hundred thousand welcomes" and is commonly found in pubs. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

1. Slogan

From "slua," meaning "crowd" (or "sluag," for "army"), and "gairm," meaning "call." "Slua" is pronounced "slew," which may be why we say "a whole slew of things" too.

2. Galore

From "go leor," which basically means "until many." Makes sense, right?

3. Hooligan

This one is less of a translation and more of a pejorative origin derived from stereotypical depictions of the Irish as rowdy drunken brawlers. See also: "paddy wagon," which is so named either because the Irish were stereotypically cops or because they were stereotypically getting arrested for being drunk and violent.

Sigh.

Clearly the two most important Irish-to-English translations that anyone would ever need. Photo by Patrick Nielsen Hayden/Flickr.

4. Smithereens

This literally means "little pieces," a combination of "smiodar" for "debris" and "ín," a common Irish suffix for "small" that has been Anglicized to "een." See also: "Colleen," which means "little cailín," or simply "a girl."

5. Clan

From, uhh, well, "clann," which means "family."

Easy enough!

6. Swanky

This comes from "sócmhainní," which means "assets," or "somhaoineach" for "profitable." (And yes, the spelling looks strange, but it actually makes a lot of sense once you figure out all the different combinations of open vowel sounds.)

7. Whiskey

A personal favorite of mine, both in drinking and translation. This comes from "uisce beatha," which means "water of life." Yup.

Carál Ní Chuilín, the Minister of Arts and Culture for Northern Ireland, advertising for a campaign in better Irish language fluency. Photo by Líofa Fluent/Flickr.

8. Kibosh

Even I was under the impression that this was a Yiddish word. But it turns out it was likely derived from "caipin," or "cap," and "bháis," or death — literally "death cap," and the Irish name for a candle-snuffer. Judges also wore an chaip bháis when announcing their sentences.

So basically, when you "put the kibosh" on something, you're actually killing it. Yay?

9. Phony

This one's kind of complicated, but also really cool. It probably comes from "fáinne," an Irish word for a ring, and refers to a confidence scheme called a "Fawney Rig," which involves "accidentally" dropping a fake ring of value in front of a victim and then selling it to them for way more than it's actually worth.

10. Keening

"Keening" is to cry or wail, usually for the dead, and it's just a differently spelled (but similarly pronounced) version of the Irish word "caoineadh," which means the same.


Advertising Britain's Irish language network, Coláiste na nGael. Photo by Christy Evans/Wikimedia Commons.

Like the Irish hero-poet-politician Pádraig Pearse once said: "Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam — a country without a language is a country without a soul."

The Irish language might be struggling to survive, but it's not dead yet. In fact, it's one of the oldest living languages in the world, as well as the first national language of the Republic of Ireland, which means that all government documents are written in Irish and English and that children study the language in school.

That being said, less than 2% of the population actually speaks the native tongue on a daily basis, and only 41% claim to speak it at all, even after years of schooling.

Thanks, colonialism!

But this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising and the beginning of Ireland's struggle for independence, making it an extra-special year for celebration.

So go forth with your newfound Irish knowledge and have the craic (that means "fun")!

Which means a lot more than just drinking alcohol, by the way. But if you are gonna drink, please be safe — and for the last time, stop ordering Irish car bombs.

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