2022 Emerald Isle Irish Féile

Summary

The 2022 Emerald Isle Irish Féile was, per its own steering committee, “our 2nd festival” — the first Féile held since the inaugural 2019 event, after the 2020 and 2021 seasons were canceled for the COVID-19 pandemic. It ran in early September 2022 under Beaver Island Chamber of Commerce sponsorship and introduced the Beaver Island Irish American Hall of Fame.¹

Program

A December 2021 forum announcement set the festival for “September 8th-11th, 2022.”¹ A 2022 Baroque on Beaver program advertisement placed by irishfeile.com instead gives “September 9-11, 2022,” and describes the festival as showcasing “music from 10+ bands at multiple venues including Aoife Scott, great food, plus history oriented tours and activities.”² Neither source is reconciled here; the wider of the two reported spans (September 8-11) is used above for the article’s date fields.

The festival’s best-documented single event is the inaugural class of the Beaver Island Irish American Hall of Fame, induced in a ceremony at the Beaver Island Community Center on Saturday, September 10, 2022, at 11:30 a.m., during what the press release itself calls “the two-day Irish Festival (Féile).”³ The inducted class was Daniel Gillespie (Entertainment), Mary Kay McDonough Masini (Arts, posthumous), Father Patrick Cawley (Religion), Sister Mary Clare Malloy (Religion), and Mary Beth Greene Nelson (Cultural Heritage), with Helen Collar separately honored for her genealogical research on the island’s first Irish settlers. The ceremony was hosted by “Beaver Island poet and historian Robert Cole,” and inductees received a medal and plaque, with their biographies and photographs to be housed at the Beaver Island Historical Society’s Print Shop Museum.³

Evidence limits

No held periodical covers 2022: the held Beaver Beacon run ends in 2011 and the held Northern Islander run begins in January 2024. This article rests on two Beaver Island Forum community posts (archived for research, not as an institutional record) and one web-only advertisement read and quoted on 3 August 2026. The Chamber of Commerce is not named as sponsor in either 2022-dated source itself; its role as 2019-2023 sponsor is attested instead by later retrospectives (the January 2024 Northern Islander promotion and the Féile’s own site), which the series hub article records — this article follows that attribution rather than a contemporaneous 2022 source naming the Chamber directly. Beyond the Hall of Fame induction, no held source names a specific 2022 musical act, venue (other than the Community Center for the induction), or attendance figure.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes