My Father Left Me Ireland: The complexity of Irish-American identity

My Father Left Me Ireland

Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty

ISBN-13: 978-0525538653

Publisher: Sentinel

Guideline Price: £20

Dear Michael,

Although I’m as old as or older than the father to whom your letters are addressed, I can’t write back the way he could. But since you and I share an Irish-American heritage, I thought I’d send along some reflections.

“It’s a complex fate being an American,” wrote Henry James. Compared to the tortured fate of countries scarred by poverty and dismemberment, our citizenship in the world’s most prosperous, powerful democracy seems more blessed than complex. The complexity comes from the dynamic, protean nature of our American identity.

Irish-Americans have played an important role in shaping that identity. A popular theory in academia is “how the Irish became white”. I can’t conceive a more wrongheaded assertion. The struggle of the Irish in America wasn’t to become white, which they already were, but to stay Irish.

Fleeing the chaos of Famine Ireland, confronted by unrelenting prejudice, our immigrant forbears built a vast social structure of schools, colleges, hospitals, unions and parishes. Instead of surrendering their Irishness, they gave America the hyphen. They made it a bridge on which they and their descendants crossed into America and allowed us to stay what we were as we became something new. Every immigrant group since has crossed – or is crossing – that bridge.

The Irish-American world of my youth was complex in a different way from your suburban one. I was raised in the Bronx and educated there in Catholic institutions from kindergarten through post-graduate study. The American part of our identity was taken for granted. The part, that defined our tribe and secured our place – and sometimes our safety – was the ethnic modifier: Italian, Jewish, Irish. I remember with affection that world’s decency, profanity, its hatred of pomposity and snobbery.

Another part recalls the fist-and-knuckle regime in our schools, the insularity and prejudices, the inability to treat sex as other than the near occasion of sin, the ridicule and violence inflicted on anyone even suspected of being gay and the vision of ourselves that made the arts the enemy of our eternal salvation. The changes that came weren’t solely from suburbanisation and an onslaught of consumerist culture. Much changed because people wanted it to change.

Your attachment to Irish history is deep and passionate. You indict “hardline revisionists” for trivialising it. Yet the debate they spurred was overdue. History that’s not being revised is history we’ve lost interest in. It’s not revisionism we’re against, I think, but the revision that goes against our version.

If their intent was to shut down a true accounting of Irish struggle, the revisionists failed. Books such as Robert Scally’s The End of Hidden Ireland, Irene Whelan’s The Bible Wars in Ireland or Terry Golway’s Machine Made have enriched our understanding of the resistance that shaped the Irish in Ireland and America. A rising generation of scholars is bringing new depth to the study of Irish history and the diaspora.

You write about “the false history of Ireland imposed by the English” that claims a “shared history,” when the real history was English aggression and Irish resistance. Yet you do revising of your own. From Daniel O’Connell in the 1840s through 1916, a majority of Irish sought Home Rule, not independence. A large segment of the English public agreed. Tory opportunism and pusillanimous grovelling by the government in Westminster allowed the unionist tail to wag the English bulldog (shades of Brexit) and wrecked the chances for Home Rule. The shared history of constitutional nationalism was lost, but it existed.

You and I revere the men and women in the GPO. But were those who sought a different path mere wonks blinded “by the grubby transactionalism of liberal societies”? Or were they patriots, too? Or does patriotism require “glorious madness” and the spilling of blood? Was Yeats wrong to question those who laud and romanticise the cruel, ugly truths of war, “As though to die by gunshot were/ The finest play under the sun.”?

I’m not sure what you mean when you write that “today’s Irish papers” denounced the Rising as “a senseless, theocratic plot”. Which Irish papers? Certainly not a majority, or anything close. You believe that “what bothers official Ireland most about the Rising is that its leaders were so thoroughly vindicated”. If by “official Ireland” you mean the Government, you’re wrong. From President Higgins on down, the government marked the Rising’s centenary with a massive, moving commemoration. The Irish Government here in New York hosted a full day of tributes and celebrations.

Like you, I’m a Catholic who left and returned. You rightly reject the distorted depiction of the Church as a relentless oppressor that turned Ireland into a “dark place”. But you cover the horrendous history of abuse in a single sentence. Those hundreds of abandoned infant corpses uncovered in Tuam – that’s a graveyard difficult to whistle past. Despite the good it did, and the many religious who lived exemplary lives, the Church became a self-protective instrument of social control and oppression that squandered the loyalty of large segments of Irish society. I know many fallen-away Catholics. I know just as many driven away.

Your self-analysis is done with frankness and pathos. But at points autobiography swells into cranky generalisations that posit, for example, “our men of letters cannot develop a political or moral thought without searching out a social science abstract from which to loot it”. Really? Which men of letters?

Your pages are ticked with “we”. “We think”. . . “We were so conditioned” . . . “We call the higher ideals a form of narrowness, and shrink from them.” What about those who’ve foregone lucrative possibilities in business and finance to become teachers, or put their responsibilities as parents and caregivers ahead of personal ambition? Sometimes it would be better – and humbler – to use I rather than we.

You complain that the culture with its “myth of liberation . . . made my generation into powerless narcissists”. Are you speaking for those who share your experience of a broken home and lack of paternal direction, and your politics? In measuring a culture and a generation by what was or wasn’t done to you, has a powerful narcissist replaced the powerless one?

You find the repository of “true Irishness” in the Gaeltacht. Over the past half-century, I’ve been many times. If I wasn’t old and linguistically inept, I might try to tackle Irish. I’m unsure, however, what defines “true Irishness”. Place? Language? Religion? Is there a test? A certificate? What are we do with false Irishness and the false Irish? Leopold Bloom had that argument with the Citizen. I think Bloom got the better of it.

I admire the poignant eloquence and emotional honesty with which you write about your American mother and the Irish father who left you. You welcome the nets James Joyce prided himself on flying past. I admire that, too. It takes cunning to evade nets and courage to fly deliberately into them.

I love and treasure Ireland. But it will never belong to me. I remain balanced on that hyphen our ancestors built. “Borne back ceaselessly into the past”, I’ve watched my children sail into their American future. I’ve neither the wisdom nor chutzpah to offer prescriptions for the Irish language or soul. Being Irish-American is complex enough.

Sincerely,
Peter

Peter Quinn’s books are Hour of the Cat, The Man Who Never Returned, Looking for Jimmy and The Banished Children of Eve. He has worked as a speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and as the Editorial Director for Time Warner