President Joe Biden arrives in Ireland on Tuesday as the number of Americans who claim Irish descent at 31.5 million has declined by a quarter in 40 years. Ireland is now a country of immigration not emigration. North and South, Biden will be welcomed by heads of government who are wholly or in part of Indian heritage. Rishi Sunak is prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But he symbolises, as does Leo Varadkar, the end of the inherited imagery of the 20th century. This is as out of date in Britain as in Ireland.
Ireland today bears little relationship to the one imagined by Irish America. It was always thus but until the early 1990s continuity still outweighed change. When Ronald Reagan visited Ballyporeen in 1984, Ireland was a country of emigration and outwardly traditional attitudes. It was not just Ireland which seemed set in its inherited place, so too did America. Reagan with speaker Tip O’Neill and Senate majority leader Howard Baker epitomised personal civility even in pitched political battle. The polarisation of the United States was still ahead.
It was also the moment when the architecture of Irish-American power we take for granted crystallised. John Hume forged personal links with Senator Ted Kennedy in the 1970s. Kennedy allied with Tip O’Neill, governor Hugh Carey and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Together they were known as the Four Horsemen and progressed what was broadly Hume’s analysis of Irish affairs. They co-opted Reagan and he put pressure on Margaret Thatcher in the run-up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement she signed in 1985.
Those avenues of influence – which were an enormous diplomatic achievement – remain intact and are still delivering. Biden was a first-term senator in the 1970s. With the retirement of Senator Patrick Leahy in January, he is the last man standing of a generation of Irish-American politicians who amplified our influence. Demographics and cultural change mean there will be fewer successors to the already-thinning ranks of Irish Americans on Capitol Hill and in state houses across the United States. Machine politics and the Democratic Party were a means of advancement for a peasantry who arrived in America to become an urban poor.
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Another pillar of Irish America was the Catholic Church. All Hallows seminary in Drumcondra which trained priests for the diaspora had a reach that matched in extent the Ivy League or Oxbridge. They survived but All Hallows is gone, and so is the society that surrounded it. Catholic America, specifically white Catholic America, supported Donald Trump in large numbers in 2016 and 2020. Depending on what exit poll you prefer he won between 47 per cent and 49 per cent of the Catholic vote in 2020.
The heyday of Irish emigration to the US was over before the Irish State was founded. What played out since is a remarkable story of transition and invented tradition. Joe Biden identifies as Irish in America, but he visits as an American, a foreigner, albeit one with close ties of affection for Ireland. When Irish America celebrates St Patrick’s Day, it foremost marks its own considerable achievement. That 10 per cent of Americans still identify as Irish, second only to German, is still a considerable strength. That identity is primarily about them in the context of their own melting pot there, not us here.
What in foolish snobbery we look down upon as stage Irishry is not a celebration of what Irish America is. It is a measure of how far they have come and from what. The joke is on us, our own recent arrival and insecurity. This is a country simultaneously re-remembering and disremembering at speed, to overlay old morals with new pretensions. Irish America similarly is in flux.
In a sense, the visit of every American president to Ireland is a fulfilment of John F Kennedy’s poignant promise to come back in the springtime. It is 60 years since he left never to return. Biden will be his seventh successor to visit in office. His visit to Ballina, like Princess Grace of Monanco’s to Newport, Co Mayo; Kennedy’s to Dunganstown near New Ross; and Reagan’s to Ballyporeen is a rite of passage. It is about showing how far he has come, not about going back.
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For people who have only recently moved into bungalows, the mythologising of the thatched homestead they had just abandoned is understandably embarrassing. But what we see as American sentimentality is a hardnosed measure of their own progress. There is something of the end of an era about the Biden visit. He is the last of the generation of Irish-American politicians who can remember the springtime Kennedy spoke of and who subsequently gave generously of their friendship.
Because of that friendship and developing bonds of investment and trade, Ireland reaches into the heart of the American political system. With the European Union, the United States is our most important political alliance. Our challenge, and it will be harder work, is to connect with an Irish America in the 21st century that is less politically prominent and more diverse. It is a matter of self-interest not sentimentality that we should.