`I think Irish people will be dumbfounded by the breadth and depth of the Irish-American experience when they see this series," says Niall McCarthy, executive producer of Long Journey Home, a seven-part documentary series telling the story of the Irish in America in the 19th and 20th centuries. It starts next week on RTE 1. McCarthy and fellow-producer Tom McGurk started doing initial research about four years ago, planning to seek financial backing from prominent members of the Irish-American community, but a chance meeting with Roy Disney, nephew of Walt, brought the powerful Disney Corporation on board as sole financiers.
"Roy's people were Huguenots who emigrated from Ireland in the 18th century, and his wife is a Daly," says McCarthy. "He feels strongly Irish-American, and the Disney Corporation at that time were becoming interested in involving themselves in heritage and history. The idea I sold to them was of doing `the tribes of America', with the Irish as the first subject."
Broadcast as a four-parter in the States, Long Way Home has been broken up into seven programmes here. The first two, dealing with the origins and consequences of the Famine, will be most familiar to an Irish audience. It's the subsequent programmes, looking at the impact of the Irish on the cities of America, their involvement in the Civil War, the rise of the powerful political machines, and the final triumphant assimilation into the American mainstream, as represented by the Kennedys, which may surprise and enlighten Irish viewers. "The two most successful immigrant populations of the last 100 years have been the Jews and the Catholic Irish," asserts McCarthy, who points to the explosion of interest over the past couple of decades in the history of the Irish as an ethnic group in America. "In 1969 there were only two chairs of Irish-American studies at US universities. Now there are 27."
The shape of Long Way Home is largely determined by the contributions of these senior academics, under the auspices of an editorial board. "Irish-Americans used to be seen as a non-progressive element in US history, but that has changed. They're now seen as a key part of the democratisation of the original Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. At the same time, conservatives see the closely-knit neighbourhoods and strong family values of the Irish community as a positive model. At this stage, the `what happened' is more or less agreed, but the `why' is very interesting. And there's a lot of fascinating sociological analysis going on." Long Journey Home is designed primarily for an American audience, especially those who claim Irish origins. But what does it mean to be Irish-American at the end of the 20th century? "The only identifiably Irish neighbourhood left is in South Boston. The others are all gone. The last episode poses the question of what happens when you win the war," says McCarthy. "In the 1970s, it was assumed that Irish ethnic identity would fade away completely, but there's now a rediscovery of Irishness going on among the next generation. Whether or not it does prove to be A Long Day's Journey Into Night or something else will be for someone else to say in another 100 years' time."
Long Journey Home begins next Friday at 10.10 p.m. on RTE 1.