Off the N17
Tis the season to be Irish. Unless you’re Irish all the time. We are people with a history of punching above our weight, with a heritage that looks like a party and a quiet narrative that is complicated, dark and disturbing. We are, to quote our man Yeats, (with) an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustains us through temporary periods of joy.
Irish history is harsh. And recent. The Republic of Ireland has a population of 4.75 million, and Northern Ireland (or, ‘the six counties’ if you are in Ireland) adds another 1.85 million. There are more people of Irish descent in the U.S. than there are in Ireland (which makes sense, since Ireland is about the size of Wisconsin, area-wise). We love to celebrate Irishry, Irish roots, luck-o’-the-Irish, the music, food, and drink of the homeland. But being Irish is not just a party; like any cultural heritage, even a cursory dive into history reveals the love was not always rainbows and pots of gold.
Ireland is gorgeous. And harsh. It is a rocky island, with peaty bogs and coastal mountains. There are also valleys of emerald green fields, inland lakes, rivers, forests and estuaries. The terrain is often unforgiving, not a lot of agricultural options other than fishing and local dairy. Central to Irish history is the Great Hunger, or the Potato Famine. In 1845, blight ravaged the potato crop (not just in Ireland, but it was critical since importing food was not really a thing). The blight resulted in seven years of famine; mothers begged for food for dying children, starving people wandered the roads (you could be arrested for vagrancy if you were sitting or laying, even though you were dying) with mouths and skin stained green from trying to eat grass (humans cannot digest grass), bodies were buried in mass graves. Worse, the economic system at the time was heavily controlled by the British. Most land was owned by absentee British landlords. British law had deprived Irish citizens of the rights to worship, to speak in their native language, to vote, to own land or livestock. Under armed guards, British convoys exported wheat, barley and oats from Irish farms to England, as Irish citizens who worked the land starved.
The British framed the starving Irish as Celtic paupers, not worthy of salvation. By the time the potato blight ended in 1852, about one million Irish had died, and another 2 million had fled the country. Most of the starving refugees ended up in North America. Many had passage secured by British landlords; it was easier to book poor starving tenants onto a ship than it was to collect rent — problem solved. The ships themselves were often the same ships used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the refugees were transported, sick and starving, on these ‘coffin ships’, where nearly a quarter of the passengers who came on board died during the four week journey to their destination. Passengers had sleeping space 18 inches wide (half that for children), and laid head to foot in each others’ excrement and vomit and disease. Most arrived barely able to walk, penniless, weak, and (still) starving.
Port cities taking in the refugees were convinced Britain was sending the worst of Irish citizenry, not the hardworking Scotch Protestants who had come to America during the colonial era. These were poor, unskilled, sick, and mostly Catholic. Anti-Irish mobs erupted in violence in Philadelphia and New York. During the 1850’s, a large influx of German immigrants also arrived in the United States, in about as many numbers as the Irish, but they were healthy and hardworking, and largely Protestant. Immigration support was left mostly to states, and most states ended up with practices against hiring the Irish (No Irish Need Apply), and not allowing Catholics to hold certain jobs. As a result, most Irish refugees ended up in menial (dangerous) labor: digging canals, sewers, trenches, laying rails and slaving in textile mills, living in rickety tenements. Nativist laws were put in place, limiting rights of ‘foreign Catholics’.
The Irish had only just gained (limited) voting rights in Ireland before the potato blight hit. Recognizing that the vote was the best path to equality, they engaged in the political process in America, and voted in higher numbers than any other ethnic group. The first Irish-Catholics mayors were elected to New York City, and to Boston. As immigration to the U.S. from China and eastern Asia increased in the late 1800’s, by the end of the century, the Irish were no longer as reviled, and instead anti-immigration sentiment turned to the newer groups arriving.
Back in Ireland, Britain imposed laws about drunkeness, and parents could lose their children if they were drinking. The laws were disproportionately imposed on rural Irish families. At the same time, Scotland denounced the Irish, seeking to ‘preserve the Scottish race’. The division between the Protestants and the Catholics deepened. The tri-color Irish flag — designed to unite the Roman Catholics (green) and Protestants (orange) — was famously hoisted in 1916 after the Easter uprising, and has since become the national flag. The Irish in Northern Ireland, delineated in 1920, do not always identify as Irish, and are British citizens. An uneasy tension defined the next decades, culminating with The Troubles, beginning in earnest in the 1960’s, and ending in 1998. It is part of Irish history that we have frequently fought ourselves.
What the Irish brought to America was an enormous workforce, essential in creating the infrastructure that allowed the nation to grow and thrive and trade internationally. They brought the beginnings of unionization, fought for the end of child labor, were integral to creating safe working conditions in mines and factories and mills. They spread Catholicism, with every major city in America being home to a sizeable Catholic population, and paved the way for other Catholic immigrants to follow.
A current foray into my own geneaology revealed that the last person hanged for a crime in western New York was one John McCarthy (who killed a man in a bar fight, because we really cannot make this stuff up). I don’t know that he is of my own McCarthy heritage, but could be. I know that just seven generations ago, one John B. McCarthy came by ship out of Cork, through Nova Scotia and then to Belfast NY. McCarthys married and settled in western NY , then Cleveland and Michigan. I know my great-grandfather trained with boxer John L. Sullivan, who moved his training to rural New York (the fighting Irish trope is not so tropey after all). More than that, traveling to Ireland myself, and listening and asking questions, then walking across the burren and along the sea helped me understand the roots of my roots.
Irish history is complicated, and rife with characters who fight for and with each other, who persevere and rally and have a history of being underestimated and then overdelivering. Our music feeds the Americana and Appalachia traditions, a holiday around our culture has taken wing globally and everyone is Irish in the middle of March, our beer is delicious (and hits different on the home turf), our pubs are social, our singers and songwriters and playwrights and and poets are iconic, our doors are open, our streets are narrow and our hearts are wide. We’ve been through some stuff, and we still miss the N17, and believe in the long roads down to the sea, in the fields of Athenry, in wild mountain thyme, and that the bells will be ringing out on Christmas Day.
I am from grace under pressure, from rocky burrens and rocky shores. My people are rock solid, rock of ages, whiskey rocks and folk rock, standing the test of time, sharp and smooth, quiet and daunting. We skip across the water and our ripples tell our stories. And, as so brilliantly written in the credits rolling at the end of the movie “Belfast”, we dedicate our heritage to “…the ones who stayed …the ones who left. And all the ones who were lost.” Slainte.
