Trasna na dTonnta: Irish Americans as Our Nation's Greatest Apostles of Independence
The following first appeared on the Substack ‘Creeve Rua’ and is syndicated with the permission of the author.
Those most faithful exiles
With the coming of this year’s Lá Fhéile Phádraig and an Taoiseach’s hotly discussed visit to the United States, the topic of Irish-Americans has once again come to the fore. While our wider diaspora, as well as the religious significance of the day in question, have perhaps been unfairly sidelined—it is indisputable that the Irish nation in America has a central significance to understanding Irish identity. As the great Fenian arms supplier and fundraiser for 1916, John Devoy, once said: ‘The majority of the Irish race is in the United States and has in its hands the ultimate settlement of the Irish question’.1
While the strong ethnic bonds of Irish-Americans have weakened over time, there are still masses of our people whose hearts yearn for a return to their native soil. For this we must reject the constant attempts to suppress their tírghrá by appeal to ‘cringe’ by blank slate internationalists—as well as the legitimately hideous emergence of neoconservative, anglicised and American-style ‘éiRe patriotism’ of the Trump-McGregor-X world which is so easily parodied for the unionist slop that it is. Irish-Americans deserve better than this.
Our exiled Irish have always been our best. Oftentimes, one can only fully appreciate that which is most precious to our lives once it is deprived from us. When one looks at the dedication, love and loyalty that so many Irish families who were ripped from this country have had over the years to their native land, the point is made. From risings, rebellions, parades and conferences, the Irish diaspora in America has often articulated a de-Anglicised dream of an Irish-Ireland better than those still living on our island. This essay is a heavily due recognition of their intellectual contribution to Irish radicalism.
Celebrating óglaigh across the pond
While the rebellions and revolutions (from both nations) in the 1700s had notable overlaps, it is really the Fenian era where the unbreakable bond of the Gael and his American brethren was truly established. Not only did Daniel O'Connell rally support for Repeal by touring among abolitionists and radicals in the states, but the tragic heroes of Young Ireland, John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, heavily relied on Irish-America when all other hope was lost.
As An Gorta Mór saw a rapid increase in the numbers of lost Gaels, these rhetorical support networks became explicitly physical and financial. With the 1867 Rebellion as well as the Fenian invasion of Canada, the Irish Republican Brotherhood came to see the tremendous influence and support in arms and finances by way of their cousins in the Fenian Brotherhood:
‘Starting in the 1850s the Fenian brotherhood and later the Clan na Gael provided both financial and physical support for the Irish Republican Brotherhood's revolutionary efforts to establish a democratic Irish republic. In addition to encouraging and financing nationalism in Ireland, Irish Americans attempted to move United States foreign policy in anti-British directions.’2
The Land War led by Charles Stewart Parnell and others in the 1880s further established a reliance on this overseas support. Through this backing, Irish-Americans fundamentally altered the course of history within their native island for the better, flipping the tragedy of their emigration and exile on its head, as Cronin reports ‘their money and moral support enabled the Land League to bring about a social revolution in Ireland’. What had been established is what many referred to as ‘the Irish nation in America’—and unwavering loyalty to their ethnos and people's freedom.3
Through this loyalty and support, this community demonstrated itself to be ‘more Irish’ than those left on the island, in articulating and acting on a wholly de-anglicised form of the fighting Irish:
‘In many ways, the American Irish hated Britain more passionately than those in Ireland. Their bitter anger stemmed from historical experiences in Ireland, sometimes real, other times exaggerated or imagined, passed down from immigrants to descendents and from confrontations with Anglo-American nativism. Without Irish American fury and money, Irish nationalist movements would have found it difficult to survive, much less succeed.’4
In one sense, the Irish in America were Gaels more explicitly aware of their own identity—more ethnically conscious. Irish in Ireland could conceivably slip into the conservatism of being Irish within the broader British identity. Exiled Americans had no such liberty, living in bustling towns and enclaves in New York, Boston and Chicago, clearly marked with harps and tricolours on every corner. To assimilate meant the death of one's ancestral line. While some of course did fall victim to this process, this would have required social ostracization from their wider community, rather than the gradual erosion of identity experienced by West Brits at home.
The great patriot Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, whose name is forever enshrined in the memories of Irish patriots through Pearse's famous funeral oration, powerfully expressed the importance of emphasising Irish-American loyalty to what he deemed ‘the Irish race’:
‘"What is Ireland to me now?" "Sure I’m an American citizen!" All right for him who wants to forget all belonging to him in the past, and who wants to be the Adam and Eve of his name and race, but it is otherwise for men who are no way ashamed of those who have gone before them, and who do not want to bury in the grave of American citizenship, all the duties they owe to their motherland, while it remains a land enslaved.’5
Prophets of saoirse and social justice
As the twentieth century developed, Irish-Americans began to emerge as a coherent national body, fighting not only for independence in their native island but also for social justice in their new-found home.
Through publications such as The Irish World, as well as the rise of the Kennedy family and Tammany Hall, they were able to be the moral voice of the Progressive movement, articulating a middle ground between the state socialism that dominated that era's urban politics and the other extreme of unfettered free markets.
They were able to demonstrate a separate world of Irish ideas about economics and politics, less constrained by the conservatism which dominated much of the discussion in the home country. As the great progressive Irish-American leader and editor of The Irish World, Patrick Ford put it: ‘This country is Ireland’s base of operations...here in this land to whose shores English oppression exiled our race — we are free to express the sentiments and to declare the hopes of Ireland.’6
Nor was this a simple centrism, Irish-Americans were still radicals stemming from their years of support for the oppressed and independence against injustice. Roosevelt's New Deal compromise was heavily influenced by the Catholic social thought of Irish leaders like John A. Ryan. They articulated a living wage, state protections and regulations to support the poor and organised labour, within the context of a patriotic nation state. The Catholic Social Thought of many prominent Irish-Americans was at the heart of this ideology:
‘Various other clergymen in Boston also defended collective bargaining and industrial democracy, partly because the attainment of the latter goals, it was hoped, would discourage workers from turning to socialism. Monsignor John A. Ryan’s influence was palpable in these ideas.’7
The essence of this worldview was that of the union of hand and heart, or sacred and the profane, through a synthesis of spiritual uplifting with material betterment. Workers would be given fair wages and robust supports, while the nation writ large would be protected from moral decay.
As Michael Kazin, a critic of populism within American history describes, they managed to synthesise regulations and a strong moral order with Labour protections and social-oriented policies:
‘In their wake, American Catholics-particularly the Irish among them-stepped forward to address the nation's woes in the name of all ordinary citizens with spiritual convictions…They demanded respect for manual workers and curbs on speculative wealth; they warned that increasing the powers of a centralized state could lead to communism but urged politicians to aid wage earners in their conflicts with employers. They clubbed the dead horse of prohibition yet thundered against any lifting of the legal curbs on divorce, birth control, and sexy films. Like the Populists in the 1890s, Catholic activists wanted both to pull down the rich and to raise the spiritual state of the nation.’8
No doubt the history of being an oppressed, dispossessed national group, often condemned to indentured servitude, was a major influence in this non-socialist form of economic protection. Another aspect was likely the contrast of the cold and individualistic Anglo elite, which at that point was embracing Social-Darwinism and Anglo-Saxonism:
‘many of whom, adopting the racial discourse of the era, identified themselves as “Anglo-Saxons.” The popularity of the latter term among America’s Protestant elite reflected the growing diplomatic rapprochement between the United States and Britain since the late nineteenth century. In Boston, however, Anglo-Saxonism was also informed by Catholic-Protestant rivalry. During the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston’s Irish Catholic identity had been largely forged in response to Yankee prejudice.9
For many Irish-Americans, this Anglo-Saxon elite reflected the type of laissez-faire neglect which their ancestors had felt under the British empire. Certainly, the inegalitarian language of Boston retaining what was literally referred to as the ‘Brahmin caste’ was enough for many to determine the anti-meritocratic flavour of American liberalism, demonstrating the need for radical populism.
The world the Kennedy family for instance grew up in was swimming in prejudice from the WASP elite. Despite being right outside the Irish Catholic stronghold of Boston, the prestigious college of Harvard was ran with a strong WASP ethos, with president Charles Eliot deliberately teaching in order to rid America of ‘Catholic heresy’:
‘plenty of anti-Catholicism festered behind the ivy walls at Cambridge, a rarified world of Anglo-Saxon Protestant intellectual life far removed from the hand-to-mouth existence of Boston’s Irish Catholics. In many ways, Harvard’s attitudes were merely an extension of the British view of the Irish, part of a stubborn bias engrained in American intellectual life for many years to come.’10
Contexts like this no doubt influenced Irish-American thinkers in developing a de-anglicised approach to economics and social policy, devoid of utilitarian individualism, putting social justice back to the heart of the body politic. While American life claimed to be meritocratic, there was no basis for retaining a privileged ‘caste elite’ who believed in the superiority of their ethnicity. For figures such as Edward McSweeney of the Knights of Columbanus and others, America had to rid itself of the entrenched nepotistic conspiracy of Anglicisation, if it was to be a truly independent nation.
Often referred to as ‘Anglophobia’, conflation of the entrenched Anglo-Saxonist elite with a corrupted liberalism also blended into an attack on war-mongering. To many Irish-Americans, the same Anglo financial interests that were content to see America and Ireland poor were the same powers that wanted to plague Europe with wars of annihilation:
‘The impact of the Great Depression had made radical economic reform attractive to many Irish Americans, particularly when it seemed to target economic elites who were associated with pro-British interests…An obsession with the belief that British influence was rampant at the highest level of American society, hostility to U.S. involvement abroad, and a feeling that the Irish were deliberately marginalized helped lead to a break with Roosevelt and his policies. Furthermore, the conspiratorial worldview encouraged by publications such as the Irish World made the Irish susceptible to demagoguery’11
Expelling the nathracha nimhe of anglicisation
In a sense, Irish opposition to the moneyed interests of Anglo-liberalism began to take a wider form, recognising the threat to the nation-state by subversives and snakes of all stripes. The infamous conservative campaigns of Irish-Catholic senator Joe McCarthy are but one example of this.
While this did mean an unfortunate turn toward conservatism in some of the Irish-American electorate, it also bled into a type of illiberal Catholic radicalism seen in the journal Triumph. Here was a illiberal worldview totally independent of the Neoconservative, Capitalist and individualist strands of the Buckleyite Right. These American Catholic papers were heavily sympathetic and often directly tied to the Irish-American community. Opposed to the murder machines of free-market capitalism as well as progressive internationalism, radical Irish Catholic Americans once again demonstrated their ability to uniquely contribute to the world of Irish ideas.
Irish-Americans identified the globalist, progressive ethic of the late British empire far better than most Irish at home did. They saw in Liberal internationalism simply a revamped emanation of Whig imperialism. The cause for the erosion of the nation-state, as well as the expansion of abortion and nuclear weapons, was all part of the same mechanical order of atheistic totalitarianism.
As the 20th Century progressed, the North of Ireland, after South Vietnam, became the newest Catholic victim of this dystopian world-destroying ethic. As the radical Catholic journal, Triumph, reported about the post-apocalyptic conditions of the North during this period:
‘It took only a few hours for my views to change...radically. A casual drive through the streets and the countryside suggested a reality of a modern Reign of Terror. Interviews with a number of those who bear the vicious scars of British violence confirmed the enormity of a genocidal effort that the world to its shame ignores. These people desperately need the help of Americans, particularly Irish and Catholic Americans. The rest of the article is a predictable description of "the savage terror of the British police state which is North Ireland," where Fisher saw "hordes of combat troops in full battle dress roaming the city on foot and in heavily armored vehicles, with their fingers at the triggers of high-powered rifles." The wives and children of men then interned in Long Kesh, which he called "the largest of the British Army's several concentration camps," were pictured and described, as were numerous accounts of "unprovoked attacks by British troops on civilians in Catholic areas." The suspicion that the British were behind Protestant sectarian murders of Catholics, of which there were many at the time’12
Owing from theorists of psychological genocide, commentators did not mince words:
‘British policy toward the Catholics of Northern Ireland is, in sum, an awesome, systematic, brutal and inhuman physical and psychological assault on a race of people by a so-called civilized government.’13
Accounts such as this centralised in the eyes of so many gallant Irish-Americans the necessity of supporting the Republican struggle for freedom in the North. Most famously through NORAID, the Irish Northern Aid Committee, financial and armed support from the United States became an essential feature of the cause. One wonders, like so many periods in recent Irish history, what would be left of the Irish in British occupied Ulster if they had not received that vital backing from their cousins abroad.
Nor could this struggle solely be reduced to a political or ethnic conflict, as many viewed the end goal of the British state in Ireland to be that of the eradication of the Irish nation and soul itself. It was battle for those faithful Catholics and followers of St Patrick, against the totalitarian order of mechanised British liberalism, which held its claws over the Irish Free State as well, argued powerfully by the American Catholics in Triumph once again:
‘An editorial in the July, 1972 edition of Triumph interpreted developments since the reimposition of direct rule in March as 'the growth of a concerted effort to obtain England's long-term goal of secularizing not only the North, but even the South of Ireland, thereby at last destroying the soul of the Irish nation - its Catholic faith.' Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Jack Lynch of the Irish Republic was condemned for 'his desire to co-operate with the English by pushing Irish membership in the Common Market, interning many IRA Provisionals living in the Republic, attempting, with the support of many of Eire's clergy, to cut the Catholic heart out of the national constitution’.14
From this, it became clear that one could not simply fall back on ‘sympathy’ for Northern Catholics, or the feckless Free State. Instead, there was a recognition of the righteousness, at least in part, of the cosmic struggle which Republicans were fighting, on the side of God and Faith.
The essence of Republicanism during this period was identified as that of conservative socialism, or Catholic radicalism, which mirrored developments in Irish-American political thinking:
‘Even more startling than these flights of fancy was a review of a Northern Aid pamphlet, Freedom Struggle. The reviewer saw a similarity in the IRA or Sinn Fein social program - with its distrust of capitalism and communism, as well as the centralization of power, with the social encyclical of Paul VI, Populorum Progressio. He claimed that: The native political tradition of Ireland, Republicanism, is reviving the natural religious spirit of Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic. It has found, in its war and its program, a way of achieving in part what the Vatican Council, Pope Paul and Jean Cardinal Danielou have been insisting is the work of Catholics in the political and social order.’15
While this interpretation was partially a novelty, and of course there were more modernised progressive forms of Republicanism by the time of Gerry Adams leadership, there was a strongly Catholic nature to Éire Nua-era Sinn Féin. Nor was it confined to obscure journals like Triumph, as more thought-out thinkers and philosophers in Irish-America detailed it. One such work was ‘Divided Ireland’ which characterised the Republican struggle as one against the modernising totalitarianism of partition as well:
‘Charles Rice was also concerned that the continuing unsettled troubles in the six Ulster counties "will be likely to exert irresistible pressure for the secularization of the Republic as the price of unity and peace." A unification of Ireland that would be "a secular humanist copy of England itself" would be "a de facto repeal of the Irish war of liberation of 1916-21 and a de facto British annexation of the 26 counties."’ 16
These liberalised social values were simply one more weapon of British imperialism:
‘Triumph's opposition to such secularizing legislation in the Irish Republic as the ultimately successful campaign to legalize the sale of contraceptives dovetailed with its support of the IRA. It noted that T.P. Mahony, the Irish correspondent for the Jesuit journal, America, had written in approval of legalizing the advertising and sale of contraceptives in America's January 12, 1974 issue. In contrast, Triumph's Irish correspondent advanced...the position held by the Catholic populace of Ireland and by the rank and file of the IRA.’17
These criticisms of our Free State's neoliberal agenda become particularly pertinent when one looks at the direction of the country today. In particular, if we are to see a United Ireland in this generation, what form exactly would that unity take? Would it in any way reflect the dream of Éire Nua, and all our patriot dead at home and abroad? Perhaps it is time to listen to the warnings of our long-lost cousins.
Fáilte ar ais: to reuniting our nation once again
While we are all happy to commemorate and look fondly on the historical bonds of Irish at home and abroad, I do not believe one is really honouring our nation's lost stock if we are not to listen to what they have to say.
The truth is, for all the schmaltz and decline which has occurred, the Irish diaspora over the past couple centuries has expressed, articulated and lived an Irishness more intense and authentic than we at home. For that they must be commended, listened to and cherished.
Perhaps an appeal to their coming home is in order - we must reignite within them the ancient dream of an Ireland free and Gaelic. A dream of liberation for the Irish, at home and abroad, as well as all the world's peoples under the yoke of emigration, famine and foreign totalitarianism.
Bibliography
Cronin, Sean. 1997. Washington’s Irish Policy.
McCaffrey, Lawrence. 2004. “Ireland and Irish America” in Summer, Catholic University of America Press.
McCarthy, John. 1987. IRISH-AMERICAN CATHOLIC CONSERVATIVES AND NORTHERN IRELAND.. American Catholic Historical Society.
Footnotes
1
Devoy, John. 1903. Prospectus of the Gaelic American.
2
McCaffrey, p. 10.
3
Cronin, p. 11.
4
McCaffrey, p. 10.
5
O’Donovan Rossa, p. 81.
6
September, 1874, Irish World.
7
Murray, Damien. 2018. Irish Nationalists in Boston, p. 130.
8
Kazin, Michael. 1995. The Populist Persuasion, p. 111.
9
Murray, Damien. 2018. Irish Nationalists in Boston, p. 227.
10
Maier, Thomas. 2003. The Kennedys.
11
Hanley, Brian. 2003. ‘The Irish World’, p. 18.
12
McCarthy, p. 75.
13
Ibid, p, 76.
14
Ibid, p. 70.
15
Ibid, p. 77.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid, p. 72.