In the old days, imagination, nourished by letters, illuminated the great landscape of America for those who did not emigrate. Details of intolerable heat and cold, of the Depression, dates of examinations for the New York police force, the best Catholic schools, and the activities of county associations arrived monthly to small towns in Ireland.
The traffic was all one way then. Thirty years after our own Civil War, a new local landscape began to emerge. Those who did not emigrate tried to shape a nation. They were often scholarship boys who grew up with Caesar's Gal- lic Wars and Homer's Iliad.
Idealism
Shakespeare, Milton and Lamb stretched their vocabulary with Newman and Sheehan's Apologetics giving them moral formation. Hall and Stephens provided their maths books and an tAthar Peadar and Irish poetry their link with the Irish past.
Theirs was a mind-set of idealism and a gentle patriotism manifesting itself in service. Emigration and its visibility was a lived experience. It was not until much later that the social consequences of the diaspora taking root in new soil was examined.
These 1950s scholarship boys went to teacher training colleges and to university. A good suit and a leaving certificate secured a position or training course in the civil service, the ESB, banking, insurance, and the newly emerging ACC.
Many went as priests to the foreign missions. At home they created and developed conditions for cultural and fiscal growth. They made sacrifices and the best of them, especially teachers with true vocations, left a creative mark on generations.
From such a milieu came Michael, a man who travelled to America last August. His story was not exactly a Fairy Tale of New York but it shone a light on the far-reaching phenomenon of diaspora.
New York was familiar to him. He knew its voices and avenues. He had heard and seen them in his childhood at the local cinema in St Mary's Hall, Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon - James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne and Karl Malden in films of heroic lives and deaths surrounded by loyal buddies.
He imitated the great Joe di Maggio when with a group of boys he played ball on a small town street in Connacht. He knew the American vocabulary of panhandlers, bobby-soxers, baseball and movies. By last year he had reared his own family and paid his dues. His visit to New York would revitalise half-imagined images.
Old battlefields
He would luxuriate for a few weeks. He would visit Virginia to view its old battlefields and the Civil War Museum, places of colour and history seen previously only on film. Then New York and his sister's welcoming home, concerts in Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dean and De Luca and the million techni-coloured sights of its exciting boroughs.
His travels touched Queens, Manhattan, New Rochelle, and Saratoga. Saratoga! - that lovely word which might be a dance, a cocktail, or a racecourse. With a younger brother and friends he savoured the crisp beauty of upstate New York, its racecourse and military history museum.
Later, at New Rochelle, a name transported from an older Europe, he enjoyed warm hospitality, music and stories which linked the old world with the new great cauldron of humanity. Travelling back to Queens he took the subway north to Grand Central station near 42nd Street. He changed to subway number 6.
It was the hottest summer day in years. There was not a breath of air. And on that train near 51st Street, a stone's throw from where post-Famine emigrants gave birth to his mother, Michael collapsed. There, among the moulded plastic seats, the advertisements, the poems by Spanish and Chinese writers, the AIDS warnings, his life ebbed.
A group surrounded him - not like Synge's dark-shawled wailers or O'Casey's stoic tenement dwellers, but New Yorkers bringing something as biblical and sacred to the subway scene.
These descendants of the "huddled masses" who had passed through the clearing house at Ellis Island fused into an extraordinary, loving, concerned chorus with resonances of hombres and buddies - of Cagney and Wayne.
"You hang on in there, you can make it, buddy," these descendants of Poles, Irish, African, Asian, and South Americans chorused encouragement. "You hold on there, you can make it, buddy." He didn't make it.
Kindness of strangers
He was my brother. He died in the subway carriage surrounded by the kindness of strangers and all that is best in America. They said Kaddish and Requiescat for him on subway 6.
A few days later, on the Westchester to Wall Street bus, Pa Joe Neville from Cork, in America for 50 years, said to his contemporary Eamonn McGarry, from Douglas Hyde's country in Co Roscommon: "Did you hear of the man who died on subway 6? He lived in my part of the country [Cork] but he originally came from Roscommon." And Eamonn knew him. That's diaspora.
There is a phrase, much tarnished with glitz and sham, that I'd like to repeat in its original simplicity; a phrase that once evoked gratitude, rescue, safety: "God Bless America." Let me extend it to all who travelled on subway 6 on August 16th, 1999 - to all those strangers who succoured my dying brother far away from Connacht and from his loving family in Cork, and his students and colleagues on the Mahon peninsula.