Irish experience in US may be changing

Keith Duggan Sideline CutOn the eve of St Patrick's night last, the Derry boxer John Duddy made a significant step in what promises to be a cinematic fight career in a packed-out baby arena inside the vast emporium of Madison Square Garden. Although the contest was brief and spectacular, it was by all accounts a raucous evening in Manhattan, and a belting way to announce the orgy of leprechauns and come-all-yes that washes over the city like a green wave every March.

The thought also occurred that the Duddy fight would have been the perfect place for US Immigration to make a raid. They could have marched hundreds of illegal Irish back to the boat, had they made a random check of documentation that evening. For the Irish living away from home crave the native sports with a fierceness that is always surprising.

When Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern came on the radio on Thursday evening to announce that the Kennedy-McCain proposals had passed through the US Senate with surprising ease, it promised, just like that, the path would finally be clear for the estimated 50,000 Irish working without proper documentation in the traditional American cities to formalise their position. Though that hope seems to have been stalled by the House of Representatives, it was a heart-warming thought. Almost everybody in Ireland knows of at least one Irish family who has a son or a daughter bound to a lifestyle that they want to make permanent, and are therefore too fearful to come home.

For every 10 Irish teenagers who flitter away a broiling summer getting a taste of the American dream in the fun coasts of Long Island or Cape Cod and then reminisce about it for decades, there is always one who stays on. There have been periods in the last decades when the money in construction was simply too good to pass up and periods when there was nothing doing back home.

But with the repatriation over the last 10 years, only the diehards have clung on. A prominent Gaelic footballer told me recently that his brother was planning a visit home for the first time in over 10 years. I know a family friend who made a visit after a similar duration away, returning to a vastly different country but noting, with some relief, that although most of the pubs have been swanked up beyond recognition, "It was still the same f***ing faces sitting in the same f***ing places".

But it is stunning to think there are many, many others who have spent 10 years and longer in exile, caught in a netherworld where they must remain out of sight of official America and out of mind in Ireland.

Those of us who were schooled in the late 1980s sometimes reminisce about the prevailing message imparted then by harried schoolteachers. Jobs were like gold dust and school leavers and college graduates were pouring out of Ireland. It is shocking today to see the old news footage of the queues at the airports in the nostalgia shows like Reeling in the Years, not because the desperation is so plain but because the clothes are so terrible.

Grooming is the biggest visible difference between then and now. For those of us who were slightly younger, the message was simple: the country is f***ed. You were definitely finished unless you landed straight As (then worth a manageable seven points, unlike today when the Leaving Cert is awarded 15 million yen or something), and, even if you did, you were probably finished anyway. Most of us reasoned against landing any As at all.

As late as 1993, young Irish people who won a Morrison Visa or green card in the annual lottery were regarded as fortunate beyond belief. Legitimate or not, thousands left for the Irish strongholds of Brighton or Dorchester in Boston or McLean Avenue up in the Bronx. That was where sport came in.

Although the Irish-American GAA scene had a tearaway reputation back in Croke Park, it acted as a surrogate social welfare department for countless clueless Irish kids who landed in America with little more than a backpack, fading bleached highlights, a couple of hundred bucks and a Sony Walkman holding The Joshua Tree cassette. One winter February a couple of years ago, I had a long talk with Leslie McGettigan, a Donegal emigrant from the mid-1980s and a fine footballer who "made it" and opened a bar, Fagan's, in the Bronx.

Over the years, he never failed to marvel at the casual way Irish youngsters landed in New York. It was as if they had landed at the bottom of a slide in a funfair instead of the middle of one the toughest cities in the world. Lads that kicked some ball or hurled were snapped up. Many that didn't were looked after. There was a fully-formed and recognisable community present. After a few weeks, when they had found their wings, some kids would vanish into Manhattan or downtown Boston for adventure. Some stayed rooted firmly among the Irish, recreating what they missed as best they could.

But by the new millennium that huge summer arrival had thinned. America was, as the younger generation might say, "soooo, like, 20th century", and Australia and Asia had replaced it as the desirable place to explore. The pang of loneliness was felt all the more keenly by the long-term residents for whom these Irish students were the most authentic contact they had with home.

So there is something heroic and poignant about the 50,000 "undocumented", an absurdly small number in the grand scheme of transatlantic emigration down the centuries. They are much like the Japanese soldiers battling on in the heat and thickets long after the war has passed.

The internet and satellite television have made it easy for the Irish in America to keep track of the sports scene here, and many of my acquaintances do so with intense energy.

Bars like O'Neill's of Third Avenue or The Kells in Brighton have always been like churches on championship Sundays, with hundreds of people lining up in the dog day heat to pay $20 to see live broadcasts of the championship. Now, the Six Nations, the English Premiership and the European Cup are everyday events in the traditional Irish strongholds.

And news travels fast. One friend enjoys telling the story of how he walked into the dry-cleaners, only to be berated by the Korean owner about how Roy Keane had let his country down no more than an hour after that particular row occurred.

The legislative moves to liberate so many thousands of undocumented Irish is bound to have a strong impact on the nature of those Emerald suburbs. Already, the blue-collar Irish heartbeat of Dorchester has become gentrified and sought after. It seems natural that with visits home now almost a reality, the importance and tightness of the Irish communities will weaken, that the corner stores that sold Tayto and the Mayo News will not matter quite so much.

Until, of course, the wheel comes full circle and Gay Byrne's old curse about the whole county being banjaxed is again aired and the glittering skyscrapers of America once again look like the answer. When that day comes and thousands land wide-eyed, guys like Lesley McGettigan will be waiting there, without any expectation of thanks, to point them in the right way.