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I don’t have any Irish ancestors.

My wife tells me that is a shame.

She, of course, has Irish ancestors.

My Son therefore has some Irish blood in him.

That said, my experience with Americans of Irish descent is that they automatically assume that people will be mean to them because they are of Irish descent. That means they will always try to get in the first punch even if you are coming over to shake their hand.

We are all Americans.

I think the historical legacy of this event is complicated, and mixed. Both “sides” have legit grievances. I’m not sure dogmatism for either side is really warranted, because there’s always, “well, what about....??”.

civil war is rarely a good thing, and this event was a form of civil war (in the context of WW1, incidentally), and was followed by something which is really indisputably a civil war....which was followed decades later in the North by something which was really indisputably terrorism....with legit grievances on both “sides”.

Devalera was not George Washington, nor was he Che Guevera; Churchill in this context was not King George III, nor was he Alfred the Great.

It’s all very complicated, often tragic, perhaps sometimes avoidable....but not entirely.

In retrospect, I think the greatest actor in all of the complications between Ireland and the UK in the 20th century was actually Margaret Thatcher. I think if you look closely at what she proposed and what the final peace documents attained, they are actually pretty close. She was 15 or 20 years ahead of the game. Which is unsurprising.

I have an odd connection of sorts to the Easter Rebellion. As a girl of ten, my late Irish grandmother lived through it and watched the General Post Office burning from the street in front of her family's home in Dublin. Some eight decades later, in her final years in a nursing home in Orlando, she had a vivid nightmare after watching the movie Michael Collins and began warning all and sundry to take care because "the gunmen" were out roaming the streets. Responding to the nursing home staff's call, my mother and I went and calmed my grandmother down, letting her talk of the Easter Rebellion before reminding her of the events of her long life and that she was now living in America. We then wheeled her around the building so that she could see that all was safe.

As a member of the same family as Michael Collins whose real name was Michael O’Coileain I have researched the Irish revolutions of 1916 and 1920. I conclude that as is the case in many revolutions only a small portion of the population wanted the revolution because they had resigned themselves to second class citizenship. When Collins and the other heroes showed them there was chance for freedom in 1916 enough people got on board to make it happen. Inevitably as Orwell pointed out in 1984 freedom is slavery for some people and some were not at all happy to be free.
The sad part of this story is the brain drain Ireland suffered from the mid-19th century onward. Believe it or not before the Great famine there were 12 million people in Ireland and it has about 6 million today. As a cab driver in Dublin told me, “We’re happy for you and your family. You went out and made something of yourselves in America, but we wish you would have stayed.”