Half of the population born in Ireland since 1820 have emigrated, some to win great fame and success around the globe. Their descendants— Irish Americans, Irish Australians, Irish in Britain, Irish in Patagonia or wherever – form part of the 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish ancestry.
Imagine the 70 million as a shamrock chain, starting in Ireland, linked to New York, San Francisco, across the Pacific to Australia, New Zealand, and back again through Europe where tens of thousands of the descendants of the “Wild Geese” continue to settle, and back home via London to Ireland.
From these roots have sprung several key members of the currently wildly successful Irish soccer team. (You can qualify to play through ancestry.) The current Prime Ministers of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and to some extent the current President of the United States, whose ancestors, on his mother’s side, the Cassidys, left County Fermanagh many years ago.
How far do the Irish roots spread? As I write this piece a call from a friend in Japan alerts me to Irish activities there on St. Patrick’s Day. There will be an Emerald Ball at the Capitol Tokyo Hotel. A group called Tir Na nOg will perform, they consist of three Japanese musicians skilled in fiddle, tin whistle and bodhran.
On my desk is an invitation to the 1993 St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the Palm Terrace Hotel in Kolonia, Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia, halfway between Honolulu and Manila. Kevin Shea from the Office of the Attorney General has kindly sent me the invite.
The latest generation of Irish to have moved out from the hearth are now making their way in many of those same countries. Though times have changed, their needs have not, looking for a secure job, a chance to raise families, a possibility to dream. With 300,000 now out of work in Ireland, it is only a matter of time before we sec another lava flow away from the country.
Despite the modern trappings, the talk of the European Community, Ireland remains unique in Western society, as generation after generation the people must leave in droves in order for them, and those left behind, to prosper.
Those who know these immigrants can recognize the same decency and attitudes that was in their own foreparents. These are the children of a thousand poems, of sad songs of emigration, of deep personal losses foretold in their songs and stories by generations before. They will as Seamus Heaney has stated feel “vaguely in exile from somewhere inside or outside themselves” for the rest of their lives.
Most of those leaving carry with them the same dream baggage, of going back some day, gold sovereigns in hand, to take up and improve the life they left behind. For many it will not happen.
The Irish attitude to their emigrants is a complex one. There is much pride in an individual family in the achievements of an emigrant son or daughter, yet there is an ambivalence towards those who have left, the feeling that somehow those at home retain the birth-right, while those who went abroad have forfeited it.
These perceptions spill over to the second generation and beyond. Those readers from Ireland will be very familiar with the ambivalent attitude towards American tourists, though at the official level there is clear recognition that an injection of dollars is among the best cures for the ailing economy.
Part of the problem is that there is still little in Irish schooling that teaches the stories of the emigrants. It’s as if the millions who left since 1820 fell off the face of the world. Their arrival back, through children or grandchildren, is still a source of bemusement to many.
From the American Irish side, Ireland remains a touchstone; deep in the loamy soil their roots began there, and most see it, for all its problems, in a relatively uncomplicated way as a child might see a distant but fond relative.
Air travel, a relatively recent phenomenon, has brought the distant relations closer together now than ever. There has never been a time they needed each other as much. A recent book, Global Tribes, makes this point. As international borders disappear, as they have already in economic terms in Europe and in North America, we will begin to hold dear to us those cherished traits that make our cultures different and distinct. Being Irish will then become much more a state of mind than being from a particular state. Speed the day.
Happy St. Patrick’s!
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