Growing up, I was forbidden to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, though my family surname, McCabe, connects me to a clan present in Ireland since the 1300s. My first-generation Irish grandparents opposed all forms of “paddywhackery” – clownish behavior expressing a desperate bid for acceptance and assimilation. They taught us (myself and dozens of cousins) that our people had made “a deal with the devil” when we sought to be absorbed into the American construct of “whiteness”. They, and many other Irish, recognized that, in this country, they were being invited to ascend out of poverty and discrimination by joining Anglo Protestants in the oppression of African Americans, indigenous Americans, and workers from Latin America and China.
I marked the day once, in 2017, at an event called Irish Stand organized by a senator from the Republic of Ireland, Aodhan O Riordain, held at Riverside Church in New York City. The event was meant as a call to action to oppose the Trump administration’s demonization of immigrants and offer solidarity to those under threat, particularly migrants from Haiti and Latin America.
Today, there are about 42,000 descendants of the McCabes in the United States, and fewer than 7,000 in Ireland, typical of our diasporic culture. Like most Irish in the United States, my ancestors arrived on so-called “coffin ships” as indentured labor (they would work for seven years without pay in compensation for the cost of the ship passage out of Ireland; half of my ancestors went to the salt mines in upstate New York, and half went to build the Erie Canal).
My immigrant ancestors were teenagers, most of them boys, who had lost their families in the so-called “Potato Famine” which today Irish people call “The Great Hunger”. It was not a natural disaster; British occupiers exported Irish crops to England throughout the famine, even as one million people starved to death in a period of just four years. The British government declined relief, saying that the “lazy” and “rebellious” Irish must be taught a lesson. Three million more fled the country shortly thereafter.
When the Irish arrived in the United States, newspapers in New York and Boston ran cartoons depicting the new arrivals as apes. Often pictured holding a liquor bottle in one hand and a weapon, usually a club, in the other, the Irish were likened to beasts, violent, stupid, and threatening. The cartoon figures of leprechauns that appear on bar flyers and pub menus bear an uncomfortable resemblance to those cartoons.
Ireland is still under partial occupation, with five of the 32 counties that make up the island constituting Northern Ireland, which remains part of the United Kingdom. Most Irish believe that the entirety of Ireland will one day soon belong to the Irish again. Movements are underway to relearn Irish, an indigenous language driven out of daily use by the British over hundreds of years. Meanwhile, Irish people, and the Irish government itself, have been very vocal in support of postcolonial movements in Palestine, Kenya, South Africa and elsewhere, seeing in our postcolonial experience a parallel for recovery efforts in other places.
So, this March, instead of donning a cheap green top hat and buying 2-for-1 beer and calling it Irish, I’ll continue to ponder how we can resist xenophobia, provide relief for frightened immigrant families targeted by the current administration, and join in solidarity with others who dream of a future free of genocide and poverty.
