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Saturday, Mar 15, 2014 5:00 PM UTC
How did my fellow Irish-Americans get so disgusting?
Stupid tattoos and New Age music on one hand, snarling TV right-wingers on the other. It didn't have to be this way
Topics: Ireland, Irish-American, Irish-Americans, Irish famine, Joan Walsh, What's the Matter With White People?, Northern Ireland, Irish Republican Army, Irish troubles, IRA, Provisional IRA, St. Patrick\'s Day, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Peter King, R-N.Y., Editor's Picks, Life News, Entertainment News
When the Provisional Irish Republican Army agreed to end its paramilitary insurgency (and/or terrorist campaign) against British rule in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday accords of 1998, it was unambiguously a good thing for the people of Ireland and their British next-door neighbors. It’s not like everything suddenly became hunky-dory in the long and troubled historical relationship between those islands, but the peace has largely held – splinter groups and isolated sectarian violence aside – and an era of relative normalcy and increasing prosperity has followed. Given the global context of the 21st century, an intractable religious-cum-nationalist dispute between two tiny groups of white people in the northwest corner of Europe looks pretty close to irrelevant.
But the end of the IRA’s guerrilla war had a less salubrious effect on the Irish-American population, and I say that in full awareness that on the surface that’s an offensive statement. What I mean is that the last connection between Irish-American identity and genuine history was severed, and all we’re left with now is a fading and largely bogus afterlife. On one hand, Irishness is a nonspecific global brand of pseudo-old pubs, watered-down Guinness, “Celtic” tattoos and vague New Age spirituality, designed to make white people feel faintly cool without doing any of the hard work of actually learning anything. On the other, it’s Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King, Long Island’s longtime Republican congressman (and IRA supporter), consistently representing the most stereotypical grade of racist, xenophobic, small-minded, right-wing Irish-American intolerance. When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News.
It’s no secret that much of the IRA’s moral and financial support during the 30-year conflict came from the American descendants of Irish immigrants, many of whom were several generations removed from the ancestral homeland, understood the contemporary Irish context poorly, and were motivated by a sentimental and mythological version of nationalism. Supporting the ‘RA’s campaign of anti-British violence, either openly or (this was even more common) in private after a few drinks, was a uniting aspect of 20th-century Irish-American identity. It went along with Clancy Brothers records, covering up for abusive Catholic priests, a certain domestic style of monogrammed lace curtains and china knickknacks, and long St. Patrick’s Day pilgrimages to the kinds of decrepit, wood-paneled big-city bars that today exist largely as upscale simulacra of themselves. (I’m aware there are some real Irish bars left, but if you don’t know I’m not telling.)
That dim connection to a faraway romantic dream fueled by the doomed rebellions of 1798 and 1916, that kitschification of violence, was never entirely healthy. (Indeed, to the extent that American financial support helped lead to the deaths of both British and Irish civilians, it was shameful.) But galvanizing events like the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry in 1972, or the Long Kesh hunger strikes of 1981, also led more than a few Irish-Americans back to the true complications of their history, and helped them to see that there was an inextricable connection between the long-running Anglo-Irish conflict and other events, in America and around the world.
In its finer moments, the Irish republicanism of the ’70s and ’80s sparked a global consciousness among a population of privileged white Americans whose cultural distinctness was fading fast. You didn’t have to support Angela Davis, Che Guevara and the PLO to understand that there was a historical relationship between their issues and the Irish Troubles. Ireland was the original colonized nation, and was subjected to a near-genocidal conquest centuries before the Holocaust. It was where the policies of the British Empire were road-tested for use in India and Africa, and where a subject population stripped of property and political rights was then blamed for its own poverty. The island’s native people, despite their white skin, were viewed as savage and barbaric because they did not speak English, practiced an alien religion and hewed to unfamiliar cultural customs. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, which produced a huge wave of Irish emigration to America, the Irish poor were starved to death or driven off their own land by the millions. Yes, the potato — a plant imported from South America by the British — had been ruined by blight, but the famine itself was avoidable. Its true cause was not the black fungus that turned the prátaí to inedible mush, but a pseudo-Darwinian, proto-Milton Friedman free market ideology, insisted upon at a time when Ireland as a whole was a net exporter of food.
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