In his wonderful book, The Aran Islands, first published in 1907, John Millington Synge reports an old island woman coming to him with a letter from her son in New York. It is written in English, a language she does not know, so she needs Synge to read it for her. This in itself is poignant – a gulf of language has opened up between mother and son. Even more heartbreaking is the effect on her of his descriptions of life in the United States.
“All the evening afterwards the old woman sat on her stool at the corner of the fire with her shawl over her head, keening piteously to herself. America appeared far away, yet she seems to have felt that, after all, it was only the other edge of the Atlantic, and now when she hears them talking of railroads and inland cities where there is no sea, things she cannot understand, it comes home to her that her son is gone for ever.”
The son’s letter, that was supposed to bring him closer to his mother, has in fact brought home to her the reality of a great sundering. He and she are now separated, not just geographically but psychologically and the breach between them is irreparable. Even if her son returned, he would not be the same man and the island would not be the same island. When Synge is back in Dublin, a friend writes to him from Inishmór: “My sister has come back from America, but I’m thinking it won’t be long till she goes away again, for it is lonesome and poor she finds the island now.”
For hundreds of years, the human experience of being Irish was typically one of doubleness. To be born in Ireland was also to be born into the prospect of leaving it. Alongside the four provinces, there was a fifth: Elsewhere. And its main earthly location was North America. This divided consciousness could not but be uneasy. For those who left to make new lives on the far side of the ocean, Ireland was a place of memory and nostalgia, but also a place too lonesome and poor to go back to. For those who stayed, America was both a wonder and a torment, a place whose promises of freedom and prosperity pulled one’s loved ones away, a continent of railroads and inland cities where your children became different people.
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Can this mental gap be closed now? After all, the great sundering is now over. The flood of Irish emigration to America is reduced to a trickle. As Seán Ó Riain and Nessa Ní Chasaide point out in their contribution to the vast new Routledge History of Irish America, legal migration from Ireland to the US averaged just 1,547 people a year between 2001 and 2021. The proportion of the current Irish population who have previously lived in the US is 1.5 per cent – making this experience very much a minority one. And perhaps more profoundly, Ireland itself has been so Americanised that the vision of an existential chasm that overwhelmed Synge’s Aran Island woman has long since vanished.
For hundreds of years, the human experience of being Irish was typically one of doubleness. To be born in Ireland was also to be born into the prospect of leaving it
And yet, at least when we think about what “Irish history” might be, there is little evidence that we have integrated the experience of emigrants with those of the country they left. It is not, in fairness, easy to get our heads around the scale of this whole story. The numbers are staggering. From the 1600s onwards, ten million people emigrated from Ireland and six million of them made their new lives in what is now the USA. About 30 million Americans still identify their genetic and cultural heritage as Irish.
Paradoxically, the sheer size of this exodus and influx has made it hard to hold it in mind with any clarity. It is easier to reduce the perplexing variety of experiences to a simple narrative of tragedy and triumph – Irish Catholics, oppressed and impoverished, heroically establishing themselves as proud and successful Americans. This dominant story is not untrue, but it is very far from being the whole truth of a seismic demographic shift that involved Protestants and Catholics, women and men, colonised and colonisers, radicals and reactionaries, heroes and criminals, successes and failures.
It is a compliment to the superb job that Cian McMahon and Kathleen Costello-Sullivan have done in assembling the Routledge History of Irish America to say that the book manages to undermine its own title. It is not quite a “history”, more a mosaic of 41 historical essays, arranged roughly, but not entirely, in chronological order. And it implicitly questions what “Irish America” is, positing it, as the editors have it in their introduction, as a shifting and sometimes contradictory “social construct”. It does this so successfully that it surely can never again be reduced to that old singular identity.
The complications begin straight away with Audrey Horning’s excellent chapter on the earliest Irish settlers in North America. Contrary to received wisdom, she argues persuasively that “there was no effective model [of colonisation] pioneered in Ireland that was applied in North America” and shows that the Irish themselves were in fact important participants in the English project of transatlantic settlement. The Roanoke colony established by Walter Raleigh in what became North Carolina in 1584 included five Irishmen.
One of them, Edward Nugent, murdered Pemisipan, chieftain of the indigenous Roanoke people, apparently just for the sake of it. A fellow colonist recorded how Nugent “following [Pemisipan] into the woods, overtook him ... We met him returning out of the woods with Pemisipan’s head in his hand”. This was presumably the first of what would be countless such killings – we are forced to remember that Irish people were big participants in the genocide on which the US would be founded.
And also to remember that Irish immigrants were, for a long time, more likely to be Presbyterian than Catholic. Peter Gilmore gives a thoughtful and lucid overview of the five waves of transatlantic relocation from the North of Ireland in the 18th century, noting (rather startlingly for me) that, “between 1730 and 1775 as many as half of all Ulster migrants may have been individuals who travelled as bound labour”. Economic hardship and oppression did not respect sectarian boundaries.
Land hunger in turn made many of these Presbyterian migrants settle on the frontiers where they continued the violence against native peoples that Nugent had inaugurated: “Border warfare – raids, cruelties, merciless retaliation – embedded racialised injustice in Ulster psyches and normalised a hard-edged viciousness.”
Racialised injustice was for a long time the structural context in which Irish people made their American lives. Indeed, one of the unfolding strengths of the volume is its alertness to the fluidity of Irish relationships to the whole imperial project in America – very much including its other original sin, slavery. Angela Murphy provides a searching overview of the reasons why, in spite of appeals from Daniel O’Connell, Irish Americans, particularly Irish Catholics, did not as a whole take up the cause of its abolition, which they tended to see as a “Protestant social reform movement” whose proponents had little sympathy for their own plight.
Yet the complexity of the racial question is drawn out in studies of the north-eastern cities by Danielle Phillips-Cunningham and of California by Malcolm Campbell, and later taken up in a fine exploration by Cara McClintock-Walsh of the relationship between Sean O’Casey and the pioneering African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Antagonism and affinity are both part of the story of relationships between Irish and African Americans.
Such microcosmic studies ground the volume in social and cultural specifics. It covers, of course, the large themes. The immense impact of the Great Famine on American history and culture is comprehensively examined, often from fresh angles of vision in essays by Anelise Hansen Shrout, Hidetaka Hirota, Marguérite Corporaal, Mary Kelly and others. The evolution of the Irish Catholic church in the US is traced from early struggles to overcome prejudice and build an institutional identity (clearly mapped by Oliver Rafferty) to this century’s devastating child abuse scandals (summarised by Sally Barr Ebest). The building of Irish political machines in the big cities is, oddly, given relatively little space – for example, the Daley dynasty that ruled Chicago for nearly half a century does not merit a mention.
One of the unfolding strengths of the volume is its alertness to the fluidity of Irish relationships to the whole imperial project in America
But this perhaps reflects an editorial decision to give space to the less familiar topics that give the book its vibrancy. Colm Tóibín has a dazzling case study of the histories of two Protestant Irish families in America, the Emmets (descendants of Robert Emmet’s brother Thomas) and the Jameses, including of course Toibín’s literary hero Henry. There are provocative essays on the representation of disability in Irish America (by the redoubtable Joe Valente), on Irish-Americanness in Hollywood films and family sagas (by Matthew Fee and Sinéad Moynihan respectively), on music and poetry (by Méabh Ní Fhurtháin and Kathryn Kilpatrick) and, as a haunting conclusion, on the environmental imagination in contemporary Irish-American writing (by Christine Cusick).
Perhaps the best tribute one can give this consistently vigorous and critically minded history is that it does not feel like the story of a phenomenon that is now in the past. It is itself evidence that the whole question of what Irish America means is very much alive – and, from the evidence of the work of so many young scholars collected here, in good hands.
Fintan O’Toole’s books include We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958
Further reading
Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick (2023). This is a compulsively readable exercise in the recuperation of otherwise lost lives. It examines the fates of Irish-born women who went to America in search of brighter futures only to end up being sucked into the criminal justice system as sex workers, thieves and even as killers. Particularly in the late 19th century, Irish girls and women were disproportionately represented in American “correctional” instructions. Farrell and McCormick manage to release them posthumously from stereotypes and bring their personalities and struggles back to life.
Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York by Tyler Anbinder (2024). If Farrell and McCormick take us into the dark side of Irish America, Anbinder’s brilliant book presents a much more optimistic narrative of the Famine Irish in New York. Drawing on new archival sources, Anbinder gives voice to a generation’s struggle to escape from destitution and despair and its remarkable success in achieving dignity and stability. This is not a happy-clappy account, but the fact that it is just as persuasive as Bad Bridget reminds us that there is no one definitive version of the fate of the Irish migrants after the Famine.
Boss: Richard J Daley of Chicago by Mike Royko (1971). If you think Irish-American politics is all Kennedys and Camelot, Royko’s great account of Boss Daley’s rise and reign as the uncrowned king of Chicago is the antidote to your romanticism. It is one of the classics of American political journalism, first published in 1971, and worth reading for its sardonic prose alone. But it is also an engrossing example of how politics became an arena in which the son of poor Irish immigrants could become one of the most powerful men in America and of the good and bad sides of the Catholic ethnic identity that Daley embodied.
