Posted on Sun, Mar. 17, 2002


Editorial | The Irish in America

It's St. Patrick's Day. This is the day to wear green and break Lent with a not-that-guilty pint of Guinness.

Today is also the groundbreaking for the Irish Memorial, a sculpture and park dedicated to those who perished during An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger) in the 1840s, as well as the millions who fled to Philadelphia, the United States, and freedom.

Money for the installation at Front and Chestnut Streets was raised by the Irish Memorial Inc. Funds are still being solicited for the 1.7 acres of gardens, fieldstone walls, poetry, and interpretive stations, all designed by Pauline Hurley-Kurtz. Unveiling is scheduled for October. Models of the memorial itself, sculpted by Glenna Goodacre, show a marvelous piece of narrative sculpture. On one side, the hungry and bedraggled board the boat. On the other side, they set foot in the uncertain new world.

It's a fitting memorial to a people who, as soon as they arrived, helped build the country, literally (as coal miners, road workers, railroad laborers) and spiritually. It's fitting it be built here, in the Delaware Valley, home to an estimated 900,000 people of Irish descent, out of more than 44 million countrywide. (The rest, as the old joke goes, wish they were.)

On this day, the point is not so much what makes the Irish different as what makes them themselves. The Irish story is in fact much like the story for Italians or Russian Jews or many peoples from Africa, Asia and South America. Outcasts in their own land, they were thrust across oceans and continents into a rough, heartlessly open country to make their way. The story begins in degradation (the 1840s famines), unfolds through death, violence and servitude, and flowers in a present harvest of achievement.

The Irish prospered first in the working classes, notably in public-service jobs such as fire fighting, teaching and police work. That dedication to public service - one of the great achievements of any immigrant group - is why you may read, among the names of the heroic dead of Sept. 11: O'Brien, O'Callaghan, O'Connor, O'Dougherty . . .

Like other groups, the Irish starved to get their children educated. Hard-earned pennies from working-class hands helped build cathedrals and universities across the country. At length, sons and daughters went into the professions, until there is not a walk of life in which people of Irish descent - from Henry Ford to Babe Ruth to John Wayne to John F. Kennedy to Neil Armstrong - have not distinguished themselves.

But that is how the Irish are like others. What is it to be Irish and no other thing?

Is it the poetic touch, the Shaw and Yeats and Joyce in us all (America answers with O'Connor, O'Neill and O'Hara . . . as Ireland sees and raises us with O'Brien, Heaney, McCourt)? Is it a particular love affair with language, a courtship with nonsense, jokery, flimflam? Blarney, is it?

Or is it nostalgia and sentimentality? Adults sobbing over Yankee Doodle Dandy, Going My Way, or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? Gallons of boo-hoo over songs about mother, Irish eyes, and when you were sweet 16? Staunch Notre Dame fans who are strangers to Indiana? Folks pining for an Ireland they've never seen? Families sloppy with love for one another? Or is it the kitschy gift-shop of cliché, shelves well stocked with leprechauns, shamrocks, shillelaghs, harps, CDs of the Clancy Brothers or James Galway playing "Danny Boy," Claddagh rings, spurious coats of arms?

Is it the grin of determined cheerfulness; the dogged stubbornness, sometimes beyond the grave; the devotion to the clan (country, God, political party, and most fiercely, family); the suicidal generosity; the tendency to celebrate, even when no celebration be scheduled?

Now could it be a certain addiction to song and dance? (Whatever it is in music that grips the Irish heart, the world needs more of it rather than less.)

Behind many of these predilections - best not to wonder, at least today, how much is true and how much bunk - lies belief. As the Irish Memorial shows, the Irish story in America started with people boarding a ship that might well prove their coffin. Why board unless you believed in a further shore? Well might lives of hardship, looking back to a golden age and forward to a better future, cry out for nearness to the divine.

Whatever Ireland and the Irish have been, they are not now as they once were. In the United States, the working-class tradition prospers, to be sure, but so do wealth and power. And as Ireland grows richer - a multicultural, globalizing gem, a diminutive powerhouse in software manufacture and cyber-smarts - it is becoming as secular as the rest of Europe. But the Irish have always been mindful of history. If there is a way to preserve what's good from the past - and that includes belief - while saying fáilte to the future, may the Irish find it.

This St. Patrick's Day, it's worth reflecting that Ireland has just now - just now - emerged from the leaden shadows of servitude, bigotry, colonialism and division, heading, perhaps, toward a green horizon in which the Irish - no matter where they live - can decide the future for themselves.

That's why today all Americans are Irish: To be Irish is to win freedom out of despair, straight roads out of a maze of suffering. And all along, to believe, sing, dance and work like the bejeezus, don't you know. The hope is that Irish people everywhere can guide the way to a future, not of sameness and plunder, but of heart and hope. Many things stand for the Irish, but the Irish themselves - it is hope they stand for.