THAT STUDENT summer in London, I remember it well. How those generally pleasant people would freeze as soon as I opened my mouth, in that polite English way.
I did not blame them, what with all those bombings and shootings by our people killing their people, and their people killing our people.
The following student summer I was working in New York. On my first day as “vacation relief” in the Tudor City apartment complex across from the UN building there was an old lady sitting alone in the lobby all day long, watching me. I was the temporary doorman.
Her name was Mrs Treece, as I would discover later, and she was 83. As evening drew in, her curiosity overcame her and she shuffled over to me. She was small, thin as a needle and with the skin hanging from her frail arms flapping like wings.
“I say sonny, what time is it?” she asked. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t a watch. I said “I think it’s about half-five.” She stood back, thunderstruck.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. Other residents were returning from work. She called to them in great excitement and announced, “Everybody . . . everybody . . . He’s Irish”, pointing at me.
I wanted to die. Never, ever in my 20 years had I felt such crimson-laden embarrassment.
Soon there was a growing group of people forming a circle in front of me. Mrs Treece tottered back and ordered: “Okay . . . talk!”
I was flummoxed. I mumbled through my blushes: “What can I say? What do you want me to say? I don’t know what to say . . .”
She didn’t hear a word. She turned to her audience and pronounced with deepest feeling, “My God – isn’t that just beautiful?” They murmured agreement. All they heard was my accent. They adored me in that building for the rest of my stint there.
That was the summer I fell in love with New York. I discovered life there as well as the meaning of real freedom and true tolerance. Since then I have never lost my deep affection for that great city or the country to which it belongs.
But it would be hard to do so. America is not a foreign country to my people. It is family.
My grandmother Beatrice Reagan spent her youth in New York, working as a domestic before returning home to Roscommon where she met and married my grandfather Patsy McGarry. His siblings all went to America in the early part of the last century, two sisters and one brother. We don’t know what became of any of them.
My maternal grand uncle, Jim Rogers, fled to New York in 1923. On the losing side in the Civil War, there was no place in this new state for a draper’s assistant who took up arms against it. He lived into his 90s but in all of his long life he returned to Ireland just once. That was in the 1930s when he introduced his new wife to the family
In the 1950s, my mother’s twin brother, Pat Rogers, emigrated to New York where he is to this day with “the cousins”, his four children close by with their many children.
In the 1980s, two of my brothers emigrated to Philadelphia where they still are with their combined eight children and 10.8 grandchildren (another on the way very soon). Those latter numbers tend to confirm a warning by a Ballaghaderreen father all those years ago. His daughter was going out with one of those brothers and he advised her “Watch that fella. All them McGarrys are good for is breedin’!”
That may be the case but what it does mean is there are now more McGarrys of our next generation in the US than there are in Ireland. And that is unlikely to change. Last year, two of my nephews emigrated to Australia.
Our experience as a family is replicated all over the west of Ireland in particular. So it was no surprise to read that Taoiseach Enda Kenny met cousins on a trip to Boston last month. He will probably meet many more when he arrives in Chicago later this week, destiny of choice for so many Mayo emigrants to the US.
These are the people who make up Irish America, our flesh and blood. To them we owe St Patrick’s Day as we now know it and as it is celebrated all over the world. To them we owe peace in Northern Ireland, tens of thousands of jobs in Ireland today and billions in exports from US companies based in this state which make us look good even in the midst of the worst recession of modern times.
On Saturday, as you raise your glass to Ireland, remember too our very own kith and kin in the good old USA. They don’t forget us.