At a supermarket where the workers are overly friendly – a few months after I moved from Dublin to New York – the cashier told me that the Irish are his favourite people.
The cashier at the till next to us interrupted her transaction to chime in, telling me how much she loves the Irish, and that the Cork accent is the best in the world.
As I struggled not to give a cynical answer, it dawned on me that I had experienced a variation of this conversation several times a week since moving to the States, and I couldn’t help but wonder how the Irish got so much luckier than other immigrants.
Americans’ love of the Irish, while both welcoming and flattering, seems perplexingly unequal to how fun or hospitable an entire nation of people can possibly be.
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The love that Ireland receives abroad seems to far outweigh any amount of craic an Irish person could have, or how lovely their lilt could sound to an American ear.
Is there another reason that Americans insist on loving the Irish to this disproportionate extent?
One possibility I’ve discussed with American friends of mine – each with Irish ancestry somewhere in their bloodline – is that the Irish represent the ideal underdog story, a tale Americans can’t help but love.
The Irish, to an American mind, are scrappy upstarts who spent 800 years resisting British colonisation, survived a devastating famine and persevered to create an economically prosperous country.
The Irish faced oppression abroad as well as at home, but powered through the stereotypes to dominate both US law enforcement and the mafia.
This idea of Irish oppression abroad has been sentimentalised in the US mind, in my view. Our whiteness meant we could assimilate more easily than other immigrant groups – and assimilate we did. John F Kennedy, the first Catholic US president, remains the blueprint for Irish American men, and Joe Biden leans heavily on his Irish roots. Claiming Irish heritage allows one to covertly say: “I came from nothing, I worked my way up.”
What is the alternative to proudly boasting your Irish roots? The fear of not being able to point to an underdog, immigrant heritage, is a fear of being in America since the beginning – and who knows what your ancestors may have gotten up to during the Atlantic slave trade or the genocide of Native Americans.
I have never heard someone call themselves English-American; the line goes too far back, you may as well admit you were once the oppressor.
The demographic I’ve heard the pro-underdog rhetoric from the most tend to be what I would characterise as the All American Businessman. This man appears at every Irish networking event in the city, with a big Kennedy head and a navy blue suit with a stars and stripes tie.
For this man, with children in Ivy League colleges and an apartment on the Upper East Side, telling me he’s Irish is the same as telling me he worked his way up – or, his father did. Or his grandfather? Maybe it was his great-grandfather.
They came over in the famine. What year was that in, again? This character may own a business started with their trust fund, but in their eyes, being even distantly Irish absolves them of any privilege they may wield.
They worked their way up from nothing, the Irish.
One may argue that Americans simply want to feel connected to their roots, shirking a nation that seems constantly on the brink of a second civil war in favour of claiming home in different nations across the globe. But this acceptance of Irish people over other immigrant groups is nothing new.
The Johnson-Reed Act, which was brought into place in 1924, outlined the number of immigrants allowed into the US based on nationality. Countries such as Italy, Poland, China and Russia faced severe restrictions on how many immigrants could come to the US, leaving families separated and dashing the dreams of countless would-be Americans.
However, immigration from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany remained largely unchanged, despite these nations already having large populations living in the US. The Irish were not just accepted, they were encouraged.
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Although I have no doubt that the American love for the Irish is genuine, and I’m flattered by the immediately positive response I get from strangers when they realise my nationality, I can’t help but feel that it is unearned on my part.
Behind the love of our music and humour and accents, there lies an enjoyment of our story that is based on falsehoods.
The perfect underdog who faced untellable injustice and still managed to become president is a fantasy of the American mind, and I can’t help but squirm at the thought that I’m claiming it.
- Sarah Moran is from Mayo, and studied in Dublin. She left Dublin in the summer of 2023 to move to New York on a year-long J-1 graduate visa, following a year working as a journalist. In New York, she has continued writing on a freelance basis, and works as a communications associate.
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