Terry Prone: Irish identity was riven with irony as the shame was too real to bear

Overseas, on St Patrick’s Day, particularly in America, wearing a bockety, buckled green top hat and marching in a city parade, you’re probably even more proud of your Irishness. If you’ve never been to Ireland, that adds to the patriotic satisfaction. The further away from you in history is your nearest Irish ancestor, the better. 

You’re an exile these many generations and would congratulate yourself on that, too. Maybe you don’t vote in a predictable Tammany Hall way any more, but, according to the US president, you voted for him in phenomenal numbers in the most recent presidential election. Irish identity created a perhaps transient community effective enough to generate gratitude on The Donald’s part.

While the US is a country built by millions of immigrants, most of those immigrants, be they German, Russian, Chinese, French, or Italian, had one thing in common. They wanted to make a lot of money and go home. Most of them never made it, partly because so much of their money went to support their family back in the old country, whatever the old country was. But, especially for Italians, Germans, and French, going back home was the dream.

Interestingly, this was a dream to which Irish emigrants paid obeisance but rarely set out to actually achieve, according to the great historian of Irish emigration, Kerby A Miller. Prof Miller suggests the Irish emigrant was the least likely to make the return journey — the least likely of all those who headed stateside throughout the 19th century. The Irish emigrant might cry in pubs singing come-all-ye melodies about beautiful Kerry or Galway, but their melodic affection was long-distance and they were happy to keep it that way.

Even when they made money, while they might contribute to Republican causes, they rarely used their earnings to set themselves up back home. Their Irish identity served a different function, one that’s been pointed to by JD Vance, the US vice president.

Irish identity was a cherished artifact that could — especially among the poor — pull them into an unadmired community of unachievers. But — as Vance testifies — that, in itself, can provide a source of pride and belonging.

“I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree,” he says.

To these folks, poverty is the family tradition… Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbours, friends, and family.

Back here on the home front, the Irish identity is rarely as defiantly assertive as Vance’s claims. If it was, the Wolfe Tones would have retired and been forgotten years ago.

But then, to be proud of anything, in this country, is to invite criticism that you’re naïve or — worse — cynical. Even without third-party trolling, most of what older people used to value as essential to Irishness has gone walkabout.

The Church is just one example. Inside a quarter of a century, the Catholic Church has gone from virtually unchallenged power to disordered retreat. Twenty five years ago, the view was that the nuns, love them or hate them because of school experience, had created the educational and healthcare systems in Ireland. 

It was not possible to overlook the foundational importance of Jews in our healthcare system, but mostly, we gave a level of credit to the Church difficult to imagine today. Our parents and grandparents lived in what O’Casey called “a wasteland lit by holy candles”, characterised by a poverty ennobled by a retrospectively ridiculous sense of virtue.

One of the saddest threads running through the rottenness of economic stagnation and abject poverty characterising Ireland 80 years ago was the paradoxical self-esteem drawn from concealing it. The legends attached are many and various.

You had the mother eating her dinner from a plate sitting on the open kitchen table drawer, to allow her to pretend not to have been eating rather than experience the shame of failure to share food with someone knocking on the front door. You had the sibling suffering from TB hidden away in a cocoon of lies nobody believed but everybody accepted. 

You had the funny story of the family not thinking the soup powder sent home from America was that tasty, only to find out, long after swallowing the last spoonful, that the package had in fact contained the ashes remaining after a first cousin in Nebraska was cremated. 

Oh, how we laughed. 

How we laughed and concealed and cherished the gratuitous gratification at keeping the good side out, even when there wasn’t a good side.

We laughed at the belief that Pádraig Pearse had only one eye and was therefore always photographed in profile, while at the same time taking enormous pride in him dying for Ireland. Our identity as Irish was somehow underpinned by the willingness of figures in our history to die to repel the invader. Never mind that we had the unique distinction of effectively inviting in the invader a few centuries earlier.

But then, enlightenment happened. The next generation — those in their 60s and older today — came along. Donogh O’Malley educated the hell out of that generation and the IDA put that great poster up in the corridor of the airport showing the next generation of Irish achievers celebrating their degrees.

It wasn’t until much later that it was revealed that almost every one of those pictured apparently, later on, was forced to emigrate for work. 

Even when we found out, it didn’t cause much of a stir, because it would have been too real, too literal. 

Being too literal has never served us. We’re permanently on the irony spectrum — witness the fact that the representation of Ireland on our currency within living memory was an American married to John Lavery, the official artist to the British government. Nobody ever leaned on an Irish harp with more melancholic beauty than did Lady Lavery.

One of the unexamined truths of identity revealed by the meeting between the Taoiseach and Mr Trump is this.

Ask any American about their identity and they first claim to be American, rather than mentioning the state they come from. Ask an Irish person about their identity, and they do the opposite. They first claim to be Irish, never European.

Europe has never quite established itself in the minds of its citizens as a united federation of states as has the US. The EU has been lucky, up to now, that America has always been an ally led by presidents, none of whom saw that as a gap to be widened. All has changed, changed utterly.