Posted on 01/25/2021 2:05:05 PM PST by Ennis85
We like to claim Ernesto “Che” Guevara as one of our own. Guevara was an Argentina-born guerrilla fighter who helped Fidel Castro overthrow the American-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. He had an Irish ancestor, Patrick Lynch, who was born in Galway in 1715. So thrilled are we by this connection that, in 2012, a Che statue was proposed by Galway city council, and a stamp was issued here in his honour five years later.
The uncomfortable reality that Guevara killed lots of people does not count against him in Ireland. Revolutionary violence has always had a certain romantic allure for those of a socialist persuasion, and helps explain why that famous image of him by the artist Jim Fitzpatrick has adorned the walls of so many student flats down the years.
One of Guevara’s jobs was to maintain discipline during the anti-Batista struggle, so he was in charge of killing deserters and defectors. When Castro was installed, Guevara presided over the execution of the defeated enemies of the new regime. The fact that he executed or murdered people seems only to add to his appeal for some, however. But that should not be surprising in a country that is sending Sinn Fein to new heights in the polls even though the party, far from repudiating the IRA, continues to honour the terrorist organisation.
Like the IRA, Guevara was so committed to his ideals that he was willing to kill and be killed for them. He was shot dead by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, leaving him on the “right side” of history.
We are much slower to claim a son or daughter of the auld sod when we don’t approve of their politics. Richard Nixon had Irish ancestry — his mother’s side came from Quaker stock in Timahoe, Co Kildare. It’s not something locals tend to boast about. Nixon visited Timahoe in October 1970, and a little plaque in the nearby Quaker cemetery marks the occasion. At that time, Nixon was halfway through his first term of office. The Watergate scandal was still a few years away. He would go on to win a landslide victory in the US presidential election of 1972, beating his challenger, George McGovern, by over 20 points.
But we didn’t take Richard Milhous Nixon to our hearts, not like we did John F Kennedy just seven years earlier. The crowds that greeted Nixon were far smaller and less rapturous. He didn’t have an Irish-sounding name, of course, and he wasn’t Catholic. But, maybe more significantly, he was a Republican, who had run our hero Kennedy close in the 1960 presidential election.
The next American president to have a strong Irish connection was Ronald Reagan, whose great-grandfather was born in Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary. Reagan’s father was Catholic, but the future president adopted the religion of his Protestant mother.
Despite his Irish sounding-name, we didn’t take Reagan to our hearts either. Like Nixon, he was a Republican. There were protests against him when he visited Ireland in 1984. They were led by the likes of Michael D Higgins and the bishop Eamonn Casey. They hated Reagan’s policies in Latin America where, dreading the emergence of another communist regime like Cuba’s, he backed right-wing military dictatorships as a countermeasure.
Higgins has always liked Cuba and, as president, paid an infamously fawning tribute to Castro when the dictator died in 2016. I would be surprised if he didn’t also have a soft spot for Castro’s buddy Che. In Ireland, we tend to like communist dictatorships more than democratically elected US Republicans.
A short time after his visit to Ballyporeen, Reagan won a second term as US president, winning a landslide victory the equal of Nixon’s. Unlike Nixon, he remains popular in America, but that cuts no ice with us.
Barack Obama has a very remote Irish connection, one he wasn’t aware of until 2007. He was, and is, much more interested in his Kenyan heritage through his father. But we claimed him anyway. There was even a corny song by the Corrigan Brothers entitled There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama.
Joe Biden loves to proclaim his Irish heritage and visited us most recently in 2016, as US vice-president. A great-great grandfather on his mother’s side was born in Ballina, Co Mayo, and emigrated to America in 1850. He has other Irish connections in his family tree, especially in Louth, but Biden is actually of English and French as well as Irish stock. Almost all Americans can claim multiple heritages like his.
What draws Biden to the Irish side? Maybe it’s because he was raised a Catholic, and is still devout — he attended mass on the day of his inauguration. He is probably considered more Irish than Nixon or Reagan simply because neither of those men embraced their Irish roots to anything like the same extent. The fact that both were of Protestant faith perhaps weakened their sense of connection to the auld sod.
Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s vice-president, has a stronger and more recent connection with Ireland than Biden. Whereas the new US president has to go back as far as 1850 to find an ancestor who lived here, Pence has to go back to only the 1920s. His maternal grandmother was from Doonbeg, Co Clare, and his maternal grandfather from Tubbercurry, Co Sligo.
Pence made several visits to Ireland before he became vice-president. Clearly he likes the country, and is proud of his Irish roots. But Pence is an evangelical Christian, a social conservative and a Republican. He also worked for Trump, only splitting with the former US president at the death. On its own, the Trump connection would not be a deal-breaker for us. Any one of the first three would be enough for that.
In short, our willingness to claim someone as Irish is extremely conditional. It doesn’t matter how strong your connection is, how often you visit the country and how proud you are of your Irish roots — your politics overrides everything. If you’re American, you have to be a Democrat as well. That is the only kind of Irish-American we’re really willing to embrace. We’re faster to acknowledge a killer like Guevara as an Irishman than an American Republican.
It doesn’t matter that millions of Irish-Americans now vote Republican, or that lots have served as ministers or officials under Republican presidents. Those Irish-Americans are the black sheep of the diaspora family, an embarrassment to us all. No céad míle fáilte for them.
There is something in many Irish psyches where their entire daily existence is absolutely dependent on delusion, like they would fall apart without it. Maybe it was a defense mechanism tied to multi-generational despondency. It's a perpetual adolescence where they deny reality right in front of them, often putting a convenient focus on their "Cafeteria Catholic" version of religion as a surrogate to actually living.
It's a vision disconnect; they can look in the mirror like few others, refusing to see what's looking back at them.
Look up Barak Obama plaza in Moneygall, Ireland. Had to stop there for gas and my daughter was asleep. She woke up as I was pulling in and saw the huge sign and said, “I thought we were in hell.” lol
I agree. One can certainly put on a show of devotion for any religion or even to a claim to Christianity in general. Biden’s support of abortion is a stark reminder of that.
Thisiis from the Sunday Times and it is sarcasm. Don’t you have that where you live?
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