Posted on 03/16/2006 4:40:06 PM PST by SJackson
For as long as I can remember, all I've ever heard about the Irish in general or the Irish in America or the meaning behind St. Patrick's Day was ... drink, drank, drunk. That's it. And I'm not alone.
Back in 2001, social activist Tom Hayden published a stunning book entitled "Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America"; it's a memoir-social history-travelogue combined.
In a chapter called "Drinking, Sexuality, and Assimilation," Hayden writes: "Drinking was the only Irish legacy passed along to me. You drink because you're Irish, I learned, which soon became you're Irish because you drink. Writ large, it was a coping mechanism for the Irish as a whole."
Much of Hayden's book sharply examines how the catastrophe of the Great Potato Famine of the 1800s led to the exodus of millions from Ireland. After more than 150 years, the episode of the Great Hunger is emerging from the shadows of history. It's a long-overdue subject for study.
Hayden sums up this epoch: "It was the Great Hunger that created Irish America, or at least Catholic Irish America, as 2 million people began a forced exodus in the 1840s that did not abate for decades. According to one famine expert, 'in no other famine in the world was the proportion of people killed as large as in the Irish famines of the 1840s.'"
The disastrous effects and aftereffects of the Great Hunger were never merely a matter of any so-called natural disaster. In every social, economic and political way, the starvation, humiliation and shaming of the Irish in the era of the potato blight derived from the cruel and unusual policies of the brutal English colonial powers who had grotesquely exploited the Irish for many centuries.
And in every revolting manner possible, those same English colonial masters found ways to profit from the suffering and misery that impelled millions of ill-kempt, starved and poverty-stricken Irish to board the verminous Famine ships (aptly dubbed "coffin ships"), thus inducing an Irish Diaspora.
And yet, as a rule, those of us who grew up in Irish-American families learned little (if anything) about our history of oppression and persecution. Hayden is eloquent on this subject as well:
"Experiencing amnesia as a coping mechanism is not unique to the Irish. To my surprise, in the immediate years after World War II many Jewish Americans experienced a similar reluctance to face the trauma of the Holocaust. And, according to the historian Charles Johnson, 'in the black communities for many years after the emancipation there was great shame and embarrassment about the memory of enslavement.'"
So to paraphrase novelist Mario "The Godfather" Puzo, I'd like to make you a drink that you can't refuse. Alcohol-free, that is. It's high time we celebrated the true essence of the Irish.
What's that, you ask? Well, this St. Patrick's Day we could start by celebrating the exquisite use of Nobel-winning Irish poet W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree" as a motif in Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby." And three cheers to Clint for making "Mo Cuishle" (Gaelic for "pulse of my heart" or "my darling; my blood") an internationally revered expression.
This year, in fact, I suggest that we inaugurate a new annual pattern: On St. Patrick's Day let's shine a light on a sample of Irish or Irish-American literary achievement. That's where you'll find the "deep heart's core" of the Irish persona. And if Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is too heavy for you, then you can opt for the Celtic wordplay and pugnacious ridicule on display in Pulitzer winner Maureen Dowd's twice-weekly New York Times columns.
If reading isn't your thing, then indulge in some music by the Chieftains or Mary Black. If you require visual splendor, you're in luck. There's a handful of "Riverdance" videos and DVDs, and about this mythopoeic dance phenomenon, Tom Hayden is also historically instructive: "The fabled Irish step dance was a legacy of post-Famine church sexual morality that insisted on limiting the body's movement to below the knees. 'Riverdance' unveiled and unbottled the sexual energy locked within the dance step, and freed an uninhibited dimension of the Irish soul."
Instead of yielding to the Leprechaun-soaked-in-ale stereotype, I'll binge on a slew of Irishman Jim Sheridan's best films ("My Left Foot," "In the Name of the Father," "The Boxer," "In America").
St. Patrick's Day should be about overcoming amnesia, not perpetuating it by getting drunk.
I'll drink to that! - Tom
Not all Irish are Catholic potato famine victims.
Earliest large Irish migration was 1718 with five shi[s from Londonderry to Boston. These were Protestants, most we now label scots-irish.
Many others came in the decades BEFORE 1840s, playing a huge role in the Revolution and settlements moving west.
Mountain men, Texas, etc.
I call it the potato starvation since Ireland was a net exporter of food, grain and meat, the whole time. They just weren't allowed to eat any of the (mostly absentee) landlord's produce. They could only eat what they could grow on their ever less fertile soil. I did not even know this fact until I was about 50, though my father was a student of Irish history. He gave me a book to read, Paddy's Lament, written seemingly without bias, that I recommend to anyone who would like to learn more about this era.
The potato blight, and the famine-disaster, was not caused by the English, but rather was a natural consequence of Catholic religious practices, high birth rates, and dependence on a single crop in high densities to support the high population increase. The Brits did more to aleviate the famine than they had ever done before, importing and distributing free maize (indian corn) in an effort to help.
It was beyond their powers to do more. The Irish, once again, left their island in large numbers to the great benefit of the world.
The Irish had left before, to transmit ancient culture through the Irish Monastaries. The Irish emigrants had given us President Jackson before the Famine, and Presidents Kennedy and Reagan afterwards.
Were/are they not the true rednecks, after the collar they wore?
How about Van Morrison and James Joyce?
Heh, the whole title of that book is "Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred". I'm sure there's no bias in that...
True, came some of my ancestors came to Texas in the 1850's, Name of McLennon. Claimed to be Scots-Irish and Baptist by faith.
barbraann
This Tom Hayden is the same one who ran Students for a Democratic Society. Not exactly an authority.
Social activist Tom Hayden?? I think "radical socialist" would be a more accurate description.
That being said, I will still have a drink or two to celebrate the Celtic soul that flourishes under my skin.
I will listen to the Bothy Band shred the wind with Rip the Calico and The Holy Land. I'll have another bit of Bushmills and relish the contrapuntal melodies of Planxty playing The Good Ship Kangaroo and The Blacksmith's Daughter.
If, by that time, I have yet to shed a single tear of melancholy remembrance, I'll sip a little more of the morning dew and listen to Paul Brady sing The Lakes of Pontchartrain.
I will not be drunk but I will have opened a door to see more clearly the joy and the struggle of those who lost all hope in their native land and came to America to renew their spirit and regain love's hold on their heart and soul.
My Grandmother arrived in America from Londonderry during the early 1920's and for that I am greatful! She was a seamstress and came here alone to meet relatives in Philadelphia. Bella was quite a woman! She met my grandfather, a Scotsman from Johnston and they married here in NYC. I consider myself an Irish Lass!
read later
Beautiful, beautiful thoughts, like your beautiful, beautiful home page.
It was a monoculture crop blight that left an overpopulated island vulnerable to mass starvation, combined with a rise in food prices on the Continent due to crop failures elsewhere, intense political hostility (politics is involved in nearly all famines), poor communications, and the fact that no government had, up to that point, paid any attention to such 20th-century niceties such as disaster relief.
There are popular stories of crops being exported while Irish starved, and so they were, primarily to purchase food relief. The efforts to construct relief programs out of nothing are heartbreaking to read, with all the classic mistakes made by amateurs where even professionals would have failed.
One source for information on this that is somewhat less politically tainted than the ones Hayden recommends is The Great Hunger, Cecil Woodham-Smith's chronicle of the disaster. It isn't sometimes immediately apparent that these events took place in one of the most revolutionary periods in European history, which certainly helps to account for the political confusion - add that to centuries of animosity between English and Irish and the magnitude of the thing begins to make a little more sense.
Complete bullsh*t, you anti-catholic bigot.
Ireland ping.
HEHE, I think he must work for UNFPA!!
HEH
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