For updated information please visit our new website at www.mjqirishcentre.com

Welcome to the official website of the Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural and Sports Centre. The Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural and Sports Centre (MJQICSC)is a 501 (c) not-for-profit corporation with the objective to preserve and promote Irish/ Irish American culture and artistic heritage. The Quill Centre hosts and sponsors several festivals and events in the Town of Durham, Greene County that promote this heritage.

East Durham is known as the Emerald Isle of the Catskills. It received this name due to the thousands of Irish families that would vacation there every year. They choose East Durham because before the era of modern jet planes it was too expensive to travel to Ireland and East Durham was the closest thing that resembled Ireland.

The MJQICSC has land along Route 145. Within this patch of land there are Festival Grounds, Gaelic Pitches, The Irish Park, The John E. Law memorial, September 11th memorial and much more.

Michael J. Quill (1905–1966) was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expanded to represent employees in other forms of transit, and the President of the TWU for most of the first thirty years of its existence.

Quill had varying relations with the mayors of New York City. He was a personal friend of Robert Wagner but could find no common ground with Wagner's successor, John Lindsay, or as Quill called him "Linsley", and led a twelve-day transit strike in 1966 against him that landed him in jail. However, he won significant wage increases for his members. He died of a heart attack three days after the end of the strike.

We invite you to have a look around our website and see all that there is to do at the grounds. We also have many concerts and events that we hold annually with picture pages and event calendars; we look forward to seeing you at one of these events soon.