Hibernia

A Celtic Calendar

The Celtic year runs from November 1, to October 31 and the American branch of the Celtic League produces a wonderful historical and mythological calendar which pinpoints Celtic holidays such as the Celtic New Year (Samhain – November 1) and significant dates in history. The following is a sampling of some of the important dates in Mean Fhomhair (September).

9.8.1798: The Battle off Ballinamuck, the last battle of “The Year of the French.”

9.9.1845: The first report of the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland. 

9.11.1649: The Massacre at Drogheda by Cromwell.

9.14.1607: The Flight of the Earls from Ireland.

9.15.1945: John McCormack, Irish tenor died.

9.16.1845: Thomas Davis, leader of Young Ireland movement, died.

9.20.1803: Robert Emmett, Irish patriot, executed.

9.24.1880: Beginning of famous “boycott” against Irish landlord Captain Boycott.

9.25.1917: Thomas Ashe, Irish patriot, dies on hunger strike.

9.27.1891. Last public speech of Parnell, Irish statesman, at Creggs, County Galway.

This year’s calendar has incredible illustrations by Patrick Wynne of legendary Celtic figures, and is peppered with philosophical sayings such as Nil cnaimh in do theanga ach brisfidh si cnaimh, which translates as “There are no bones in your tongue but it will break bones.” 

Calendars can be ordered for the very reasonable price of $7, which includes shipping, from The Celtic League, 2973 Valentine Avenue, Bronx, New York 10458.

Most Common Irish Names in America

The following are the most frequently occurring Irish surnames in the United States, with their root derivations.

(Italics are Irish language.)

• Murphy, O Murchadha, (murchadh “sea warrior”).
• Kelly, O Ceallaigh, (ceallach, “strife”).
• Sullivan, O Suileabhain, (suil, “eye;” Levan, a Celtic deity).
• Brennan, O Braonain, (braon, “sorrow”).
• Walsh, a person of Welsh origin.
• Ryan, O Mavilriain (derivation of name uncertain).
• Lynch, from the Norman-French surname de Lench.
• Dunne, O Duinn, (donn,” brown,” hence” brown-haired”).
• Byrne, O Broill, (bran, “raven”).
• Flynn, O Floinn, (flann, “ruddy”).
• O’Brien, O Briain, (Brian Boru).
• Quinn, O Cuinn, descendant of Conn.
• Reilly, O Raghailligh, descendant of Raghallach.
• O’Connor, O Conchobhair, descendant of Conchobhair.
• Daly, O Dalaigh, (dalach, “assemblyman”).
• Kennedy, O Cinneide, (ceann, “head”; eidigh, “ugly”).
• O’Donnell, O Domhnaill, descendant of Domhnaill.
• McCarthy, MacCarthaigh, (carthach, “loving’).
• Fitzgerald, son of Gerald (Norman-French derivation).
• O’Neill O Neill, (“Neill of the Nine Hostages”).
• Regan, O Riagain, descendant of Riagain.
• Burke, from the Norman-French surname de Burgh or de Bourg.
• Donohue, O Donnchadha (donn, “brown-haired”)
• Barry from the Norman-French surname de Barri.
• Casey, O Cathasaigh, (cathasach, “watchful”).

From The Book of Irish Americans by William D. Griffin, published by Random House.

Irish Place Names in America

Ireland has only 32 counties. Irish America has nearly 100.

The following list includes counties in the United States named after Americans of Irish descent (some nationally prominent, others of purely local significance) and places in Ireland.

Michigan takes the prize for nostalgia, with four of its counties named after counties in Ireland.

• ALABAMA: Butler, Calhoun, Cleburne, Cullinan, Houston, Jackson.
• ARKANSAS: Boone, Calhoun, Carroll, Cleburne, Conway, Fulton, Jackson.
• COLORADO: Crowley, Jackson.
• FLORIDA: Calhoun, Jackson.
• GEORGIA: Burke, Calhoun, Carroll, Dooly, Dougherty,
• Fulton, Glynn, Grady, Hart, Houston, Jackson, McDuffie, Talbot.
• IDAH: Power.
• ILLINOIS: Calhoun, Carroll, Clinton, Fulton, Jackson, McDonough, McHenry.
• INDIANA: Boone, Carroll, Fulton, Jackson.
• IOWA: Sullivan, Boone, Butler, Calhoun, Carroll, Emmet, O’Brien.
• KANSAS: Butler, Coffey, Doniphan, Ford, Geary, Jackson,
• Kearny, Riley, Sheridan.
• KENTUCKY: Boone, Boyle, Bracken, Butler, Carroll, Casey,
• Clinton, Fulton, Harlan, Hart, Jackson, Lyon, McCracken, McCreary, Rowan.
• LOUISIANA: East Carroll, West Carroll, Jackson.
• MARYLAND: Carroll, Garrett, Talbot, Baltimore (city and county).
• MICHIGAN: Antrim, Barry, Calhoun, Clare, Clinton, Emmet, Jackson, Roscommon, Wexford.
• MINNESOTA: Houston, Jackson.
• MISSISSIPPI: Calhoun, Carroll, Jackson, Sharkey.
• MISSOURI: Barry, Boone, Butler, Carroll, Clinton, Jackson.
• MONTANA: Fallon, Fergus, McCone, Meagher, Sheridan, Toole.
• NEBRASKA: Boone, Butler, Harlan, Keamey, Sheridan.
• NEW HAMPSHIRE: Carroll, Sullivan.
• NEW YORK: Clinton, Fulton, Montgomery, Sullivan.
• NORTH CAROLINA: Jackson, McDowell, Rowan.
• NORTH DAKOTA: Burke, Dunn, McHenry, Sheridan, Walsh.
• OHIO: Butler, Carroll, Clinton, Fulton.
• OKLAHOMA: Gavin, Grady, Jackson, McClain, McCurtain.
• OREGON: Jackson.
• PENNSYLVANIA: Butler, Clinton, Fulton, Sullivan.
• SOUTH CAROLINA: Calhoun, Dillon, McCormick.
• SOUTH DAKOTA: Jackson, Shannon.
• TENNESSEE: Carroll, Crockett, Houston, Jackson, McNairy, Sullivan.
• TEXAS: Calhoun, Callahan, Crockett, Crosby, Devitt, Donley, Houston, Jackson, Kennedy, Kinney, McMullen, Moore, Nolan, Reagan.
• VIRGINIA: Carroll.
• WEST VIRGINIA: Boone, Calhoun, Jackson, McDowell.
• WISCONSIN: Dunn.
• WYOMING: Sheridan.

In addition, several states have a Green (or Greene) County.

Others, including California, have an Orange County. New York has both.

Anniversary of Commodore Barry

The father of the American navy arrived in Philadelphia from his native Wexford in 1761. He was fifteen. By age 29, he commanded one of the finest ships in the transatlantic trade.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, he was given command of the Lexington, and was the first captain in the Continental navy to capture a British vessel – Edward – on April 7, 1776. After the war, Barry was appointed first head of the Navy, with the title of Commodore.

He died on September 13, 1803.

Irish Studies and Peggy O’Brien

When Peggy O’Brien left the United States, the nation was in upheaval. The late 60’s had seen the country nearly tear itself apart in the rewriting of its history and racial legacies. In 1967, as a newly-minted college graduate, she headed to a far quieter place: Trinity College, Dublin, where she took a masters and a Ph.D. in English. Dublin could not have been farther removed from the psychedelia of America: it seemed to rest in a 1940’s twilight. But soon O’Brien, now a professor at Trinity, saw the Irish begin-ning, as Americans had done a decade earlier, to look at their past with a vivid new eye.

In the 70’s, things really began to open up. “There was a whole new wave of self-scrutiny about Irish culture,” says O’Brien. “There was just a ferment of artistic and intellectual work that made Ireland a very exciting place to be.” O’Brien stayed in Ireland for almost 20 years, teaching American literature at Trinity.

And then, in 1985, she returned.

(With a flair for the dramatic departure, she left on the day the divorce referendum was being counted.) “I decided to see what I made of America again, because I had been an expatriate for so long, ” she says. After teaching at Harvard and other Northeastern universities, she was asked to begin an Irish Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It has become one of the most popular and progressive in the country.

An Irish Studies program at an American university is often the love child of a single faculty member who is devoted to Joyce and Yeats or their own Irish ancestry. But at UMass, it was a gathering conviction among faculty members from different departments that Ireland had outpaced American ideas of it. “We all felt that there was something of a gap between the Irish American perception of Ireland and the Irish perception of Ireland,” O’Brien says. The new thinking in Ireland was declaring an end to fairytale histories and O’Brien hoped to bring it to America.

What O’Brien saw in Ireland was a demythologizing of the nation’s history, perhaps the most romanticized of any Western European country at that time. “The new work was stressing realism and accuracy,” O’Brien has said. “And encouraging a suspicion of the famous Irish lyricismạ If the risk of this new approach is a loss of innocence about Ireland and the danger of politicizing the great voices of its literature, the reward is a more open and fuller investigation of what the nation was and is.

In this atmosphere, Yeats could be approached not only as the great native romancer of Ireland, but as a Protestant from the upperclass. And O’Casey’s great Civil War play, The Plough and the Stars, could be produced not only for O’Casey’s “charming Irish rogue… and the Irish martyr mum” but for his breakthrough ideas. “He’s also a profound critic of war, and the futility of war,” O’Brien said recently.

“He’s a feminist. He has these very powerful women who talk about the way in which war is simply fueled by male fear of cowardice, fear of intimacy, fear of love.”

The whole effort is towards a “complex and hybrid” view of the Irish past, without coddling.

It is a new thinking that in O’Brien’s view, was born in the violence of the Irish 60’s. “I think that the thing that produced this morc than any single factor was the troubles in the North,” she says. 

“The idea that evolved became that somehow pluralism had to be achieved.” A good example of this view-from-new-angles is O’Brien’s course, “Literature of the Two Irelands,” which she describes as “a very frank look at Catholics and Protestants writing about Ireland.”

At Trinity, O’Brien herself underwent an education about the Irish. One wrenching surprise was the question she was asked when people first met her: They would say not ‘What do you do?’ but ‘What do ya have to say for yourself?” O’Brien throws her head back and laughs. “It was daunting at first. But then I grew to love that challenge and it served me in good stead.”

Now at UMass, O’Brien and her colleagues have aggressively sought to bring Irish writers and their students to meet and debate with the real article.

In the last two years they have even imported productions of new Irish plays, including one from a women’s theater group in Belfast. “It was important for the students to see Ireland not as pigs in the parlor and colleens, but to see these radical feminists from Belfast producing great theater.”

For O’Brien, the future of Irish Studies lies in its relevance to other cultures and other colonial experiences. “I believe Ireland becomes more interesting when it’s not being touted but studied as an ancient culture that was colonized. But that’s my personal opinion.” What UMass seeks generally is a “new direction” for Irish Studies, and they are among those charting its course.

– Stephen Talty

Muhammad Ali in Ireland

Muhammad Ali’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side was Abe Grady, who emigrated to the United States from County Clare, Ireland, soon after the Civil War and married a “free colored woman” whose name is unknown. This we learn from the recently published Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser published by Simon & Schuster. Also in the following passages contained in the book, fight promoter Harold Conrad comments on the Ali versus Al “Blue” Lewis fight in Dublin, Ireland in 1972.

Harold Conrad: “It was always my dream to do a big heavyweight fight in Ireland. I’m not Irish, it’s nothing like that, but Ireland is where fights started. You ever been there? They fight; they argue all the time. If you don’t argue with them, they get mad at you in Ireland. And this guy, his name was Butty Sugrue, owned a pub in Dublin. He wanted to promote a fight, so I told him, ‘Okay, for two hundred thousand dollars, you can have Ali.’ And when Ali stepped off the plane onto Irish soil at the airport, the people went wild. He told them his great-grandfather was named Grady and had come from Ireland, and they loved it. Then, the next day, he called me up and asked, ‘Where are all the n—s in this town?’ That’s Ali talking, not me. I told him, ‘Ali, there aren’t any, and he said, ‘Oh.’ The night before the fight, I was in a pub talking with some guy who said he was going to the fight. I asked, ‘Did you get tickets already?’ And he said, ‘Tickets? It’s an insult for an Irishman to pay to see a fight.’ I should have made a note of that, because the next day seven thousand people crashed the main gate, tore it down. Seven thousand got in for free. But it was a good fight. Ali had a little cold, and Lewis was there to win. He bloodied Ali’s nose, but Ali chopped him down toward the end and stopped him in the eleventh round.”

 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦