Irish Diaspora

It’s St. Patrick’s day as I write this and I’m not wearing anything green. If I ever have in previous years, it’s been accidental. I’m American, a proud citizen of the USA and I’m very conscious of that whenever I’m traveling in another country, including Ireland where I’ll be visiting for the fourth time in a couple of weeks. Though all my ancestors came from there and 97% of my DNA matches that of people who live in northwest Ireland, West-central Ireland, and southwest Ireland, I’m still very much an American.

That my ancestors came from the west of Ireland means they lived “beyond the pale” — that is, they lived outside an area controlled by the British (around Dublin) called  “the pale” in the 14th and 15th centuries. My people resisted submission to foreign rule so they were banished westward, again and again, to areas with poorer and poorer soil. In the 1600s when Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland, they were pushed back still further and sent “to hell or Connaught.”

Yours truly in The Burren, 2009

Thousands were sold into slavery in the West Indies during that time and Connaught (especially an area called The Burren) was an area about which it was said at the time “to have not wood enough to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to bury him.” All were evidently very poor, which is why so many left Ireland for America. Life was very difficult long before the potato famines of the 19th century which only made it worse.

In spite of all that, the little leprechaun with his fists up on the logo of “Fighting Irish” sports teams at the University of Notre Dame does not offend me. Neither does the one of another leprechaun spinning a basketball on the index finger of his right hand while balancing on a shillelagh with his left which the Boston Celtics use. No Irishman or Irish-American, as far as I know, has objected to the stereotype that Irish people are prone to fighting. They are. As for the other well-known stereotype that the Irish are prone to drinking, that shoe fits too. It certainly has for my ancestors going back four generations at least. Paddy wagons were so named because they were usually filled with Irish immigrants named Patrick, or “Paddy” who were arrested for drinking and fighting.

Are those attributes part of Irish DNA or have they been socialized into us for generations under Viking and then British oppression? Both? No one knows for sure but at least we’re not overly sensitive about them, unlike so many other kinds of people who lead campaigns demanding certain logos and mascots be changed. Yeah, the Irish have suffered, but any student of history knows that no ancestral groups, anywhere, have been spared suffering from starvation, war, slavery, and all the other nasty things we humans do to each other.

Is it true what Matt Damon’s character in "The Departed" said about the Irish — that: “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever”? How about what Thomas Cahill said about the Irish in his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: “They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting…drinking, art — poetry for intense emotion…” Was he correct? Perhaps, but no Irish poet I’ve ever read stimulated intense emotion in me. They don’t reach me the way Robert Frost does.

My DNA map blowup for County Cork

In America, my ancestors became coal miners, policemen, domestic servants, laborers, and streetcar drivers. Their offspring — my uncles, aunts, cousins, and so forth — have joined all the professions and many are doing quite well. We’ve assimilated fully and that’s good for America. I’m struggling to find information on my great-grandfather, Eugene Sullivan, after whom my father was named. Born in County Cork, Ireland, he came over in 1900 and became a cop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the boat, he met his first wife, Mary Mahoney, also from Cork as the family story goes, who bore fourteen of his children in thirteen years before dying in 1917 at only thirty-nine. My grandmother, Mary Sullivan, was the oldest. She married and bore my father at nineteen in 1922 and five more children as well.

Great-grandfather Eugene Sullivan

Mary Mahoney’s mother, Kate Mahoney, also bore fourteen children back in Ireland and she lived to be sixty — beyond average life expectancy for a woman in that time and place. My own mother had eight, and she is still with us at ninety-four with grandchildren and great-grandchildren too numerous to count. Three more are gestating, but that is not the norm in America today. If it weren’t for immigration, the US population would be in serious decline. Few native-born Americans want children anymore. They have dogs instead.

America is changing and so is Ireland. I want to experience as much of it as I can before it changes into something that would be unrecognizable to my ancestors.

We'll Do The Rest

After spitting in a tube my adult children sent me for Fathers’ Day last year, then mailing it out and waiting six weeks, ancestry.com sent me DNA results. My sputum — or 98% of it at least — matches that of people living today in three regions of Ireland: the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal; County Mayo in west/central Ireland; and the southwestern counties of Cork and Kerry.

None of this surprised me. Those DNA findings confirm forty years of research into family origins and three trips to various parts of Ireland, but one thing did puzzle me at first. The McLaughlins I met while traveling in Inishowen told me the Gaelic version of our name — MacLochlainn” translates to “Of the Vikings” so I expected to find DNA traces from Scandinavia. Viking raiders started raping and pillaging the Irish coast during the 9th century, then established settlements in many places over the next 400 years. They founded Dublin itself, so many Irish should have Scandinavian DNA after all that.

Further research into ancestry.com's site explained it. My DNA profile matches people living in those regions of Ireland now — many of whom would likely have Scandinavian ancestors, whereas people living in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden would not tend to have Celtic ancestors from Ireland. The Irish didn’t raid or settle in those colder regions, so my DNA would not match many people now living in those countries.

Most historians agree that Celtic people first settled in Ireland only 2500 years ago — around 500 BC. There were already people living there when the Celts arrived, but historians disagree about who they were or where they might have come from. Some claim they arrived from northern Iberia and I’ve read claims of migration from North Africa, the Fertile Crescent, and what is now Russia going back 5000-8000 years. Recent DNA research at Dublin’s Trinity College offers corroborating evidence for these claims.

After Vikings were assimilated, the British took over large parts of Ireland by the 14th century. Some Irish accepted British conquerors but most continued to resist and were banished westward to rocky hills and bogs “beyond the pale.” The “pale” was line of wooden stakes driven into the ground as a boundary. That now-familiar English phrase has come to mean “outside the bounds of acceptable behavior” and both meanings were applied to my ancestors by British conquerors.

When Oliver Cromwell began his depredations in Ireland around the 1640s, he further banished rebellious Irish “To hell or Connaught.” The latter is in western Ireland “beyond the pale” where most of my forebears lived before emigrating to America beginning in the early 1800s. Some, including the Haggertys and McDonalds, then settled around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and worked in the coal mines. They moved north to Boston in the early 20th century, intermarried with the Fitzgeralds and McLaughlins, and begat me.

While all that interests me and I’m still researching ancestors named Sullivan, McQuire, Harrington, Mahoney, Cassidy, and others, I think of myself as 100% American. That’s not an ethnicity; it’s an attitude. It’s an idea for organizing humans to the extent they wish to be organized. To be American is to believe the Constitution is the most brilliant governing document ever written, even if Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg disagrees.

As an Irishman who calls himself “Bono” said:

“America is an idea, isn’t it… That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in history… The idea is that you and me are created equal… the idea that life is not meant to be endured but enjoyed, the idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us; we’ll do the rest. This country [he was speaking at Georgetown University] was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it…”

He was referring, of course, to the Declaration of Independence, but the ideas expressed there were soon after codified into our plan for government: the US Constitution. To the extent that we preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, as so many of have sworn to do, we preserve the idea of America. The Constitution curtails government and confers “liberty and justice for all” — then leaves it to us to do the rest as we see fit.

It’s the idea of America that makes us great. It makes us the kind of country to which so many others want to come. We have many races and ethnicities in America. They’re all welcome so long as they endorse the idea. If not, they shouldn't be allowed in.