I have met and talked to IRA members at length and they are even more impenetrable in their hermetically sealed cult like view of the world as are supporters of a certain presidential candidate in the United States. It goes without saying that these left-wingers regard America to be in desperate need of "transformation" as the principal villain on the world stage. Regrettably, this view has been seeping into Germany of late and there is a small but cultlike minority echoing the same opposition to America here.
Meanwhile, I have the memory extending back to the 1960s of Irishmen perched on barstools crying in their beer in America over the auld sod and throwing a few dollars into the hat to buy guns for the IRA or bombs to blow up Belfast.
But, of course, there is far more to the Irish contribution to civilization than the intoxicated mutterings of barflies or the hallucinations of IRA Bolsheviks. Let the Irish come to America as my ancestors did and they are likely to produce a president inside of two or three generations and a speaker of the house or a Senator before you can say kiss the Blarney Stone. Their contribution in the ranks in American wars has been noteworthy, very much so in the Civil War, in the first world war with the fighting sixty-ninth and extending to today in the Marine Corps. There would be no modern English literature without them.
"Erin go bragh" hangs today on the exterior of my door here in Germany for Easter.
