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hardpacker · 1 year

Text

on Irish America

i began this post following the death of the queen, but it's since expanded. i do harp (ha ha) on the same points throughout and comment on some texts.

as always, analysis is ongoing. here's a list of what I'm currently reading.

It's the most privileged classes who weep and mourn the loss of one of their own regardless of nationality. The capitalist classes are borderless. They can and will construct borders by which they themselves aren't limited. They want the same things through the same means. They will pay lip service for the sake of civility even when (like Sinn Fein) their party claims to be one of staunch republicanism founded in a history of revolutionary socialism, trade unionism, class consciousness… specifically Marxism in the case of James Connolly. Attempting to honour his so-called martyrdom by severing that grotesque punishment from his political aims would only be a sham of aesthetics only. Severing him from his birth in Scotland, his unsteady employment and frequent unemployment, his time living in America, his criticisms of the Irish landlord and his solidarity with Irish Americans, is to use him as a quotable portrait-- not a living, labouring human being.

time for a bit of scrutiny:

originally, i was first piqued by someone "observing" in this way: "irish people & people of irish heritage pretending to be a type of irish person that hasn't existed for 30 years."

i think it's very weird to sum this up as a type of "clout-chasing," or whatever, that Irish people/people of Irish descent celebrate the death of a monarch and symbol and (right up until her death) a lobbyist of ruthless imperialism. if anyone's "pretending" about mocking the queen's death… well it honestly doesn't matter at fucking all, because the “pretending” in question here begins and ends with posts.

For every supposed opportunistic celebration, the harsh reality is that’s not just the Irish Of American Experience. There's people in mainland Ireland who yes— may opportunistically celebrate for a laugh and then carry on not giving a fuck, and that, as in America, is to the detriment of the rest. There are conservatives in Ireland who suck as much shit as your most annoying Irish American neighbour, but trying to justify your complaint by couching it in a respect for "authenticity"— and an authenticity or a “tradition” being considered long-dead— is to flirt with nationalism as with fascism. You don't know. You don't have the full picture. I'm not comfortable calling any peoples/group "dead," lost to history and not an extant spirit or movement. It's not true, and that crafting this particular truth would be so precious to someone is to me untrustworthy.

Today, the United States accounts (officially) for over 43 million Irish Americans, with numerous US citizens claiming an ancestral link with Ireland. The 1980 and 1990 censuses showed that over 43 million US citizens (19% of the total population) defined themselves as being Irish-American. However, these statistics obscure a great shallowness of interest for the vast majority and, as Dumbrell notes, “there is no cohesive ‘shamrock vote’ in the US.” This headline figure also ignores the fact that not all of these 43 million people come from an Irish Catholic background and that the large numbers of Scots-Irish with a Protestant ancestry complicates the political profile of this group to a significant extent.

This is true and it isn't, right? There aren't very conclusive or standardised reports on this, but overall Irish Americans vote "liberal." (I have to assume that's far to the right of me, personally.) Recent diaspora are noted as being more progressive and more othered in Irish communities in America, and what should this suggest to me? That Ireland is more progressive? Whether or not Ireland is more or less conservative, its conservative policies over decades have lead to further diaspora. I would also say younger Irish Americans are more progressive, too. That tends to be the case until we die prematurely.

In 2004, Ireland held a referendum, with a majority successfully voting to limit the right of Irish citizenship "to individuals born on the island of Ireland to the children of Irish citizens. It was approved by referendum on 11 June 2004 and signed into law on 24 June of the same year." (more)

This was of course a post-9/11, post-Celtic Tiger, post-Good Friday, racist and xenophobic fearmongering by the centre-right and conservative-liberal parties, inflating the incorrect notion that the country's workforce was being flooded by undocumented immigrants seeking to game the system by giving birth in Irish hospitals to secure their stay. Not only is this hypocritical and the numbers themselves incorrect, it is, more importantly, fundamentally racist and horrifically cruel. It's cruel to the Irish people, to the Irish diaspora, and to all people seeking a home. The country of Ireland relies heavily on its immigrant population while its own population has been cut in half.

Despite (or more appropriately, because of) centuries and centuries of ongoing subjugation, (white) Irish people are considered automatic citizens of the UK. They have at least the legal, though not social, ability to move freely, vote, and stand for public office. Irish names are still discriminated against. Irish is a discrete ethnicity on the UK census.

If the Irish people are capable of organising around socialist ideals and mobilising in a block, why is there a monarchy at all? Why are the 6 counties still held hostage? Why is brutal racism by citizens and Gardaí still permitted? Why is Shannon a pit stop for the American military as it moves weapons and POWs? Why does Ireland not only permit but also forgive abuse on its soil by foreign monopolies? Or could it be that there is no monolith in Ireland either, and that the movements encouraging social and political change are at all times up against powerful suppression, and drowned out under more sensationalised events in the 24hr news cycle? By now you must know Gil Scott-Heron's poem-song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Many in Ireland fix their disdain, and rightfully so, to the Irish Americans who assimilated into the police force. What seems missing from this is that the Gardaí is comprised of Irish police. Policing was brought into Ireland by a colonising force, sure, the same happened in America. And Irish citizens were involved with the slave trade before any Irish-American. Police are a blight everywhere. But the existence of policing and the social structure that engenders enlistment stems from colonisation and enforced division and obscuring and parceling out history favourable to the "victors".

I hate saying this, because it really sounds like a race to the bottom and I don't mean that. I don't want to cause division or point fingers or flatten our negative traits into a firm image of the Irish people as a whole. What I mean is the opposite and I insist on moving past divisions to find the commonality that does, achingly, call to our spirit.

Like all history, it's numerous and many-faced, it's something to build from, to usefully contextualise and learn from for the future. And if our problems do span our geographic position, then we ALL must continue learning and find our solidarity in that process instead. Never will I downplay the incredible importance of Irish socialist organisations like the Connolly Youth Movement or People Before Profit, and more. They're extremely important and the fact they exist at all gives me hope for a future not so distant. I mean to insist that similar mobilising has occurred, is occurring, and will occur again in America with Irish Americans in front or in the ranks.

Jersey residents join Irish protest

FEBRUARY 21, 1985 WASHINGTON (AP)

Hundreds of New Jersey residents joined other Irish-Americans yesterday in a peaceful but noisy demonstration near the Capitol to protest the visit of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The crowd, estimated by one police officer at about 2,000 people, listened to remarks by several members of Congress and chanted lustily against Mrs. Thatcher, who was delivering a speech to senators and representatives in the Capitol about 200 yards away.

"We want to have her know we're here and are against her policies in Northern Ireland," said John Tracey, 68, a retired trucking company employee from Demarest, N.J., who climbed off one of three chartered buses that arrived from. North Jersey. The protesters spent part of the afternoon visiting members of Congress who have supported their positions on various issues. They were most vocal in their praise of Rep. James Florio, D-N.J., who earlier this month circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter to other lawmakers, urging the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold hearings on the conflict in Northern Ireland.

"Quite frankly, there hasn't been an American position on this," Florio said later. "The State Department has hidden from taking a position on this very important question." Before breaking up to visit the lawmakers, the demonstrators who gathered down a driveway from the east side of the Capitol were eyed by groups of police officers and a circling police helicopter that buzzed noisily overhead, forcing some of the speakers to shout. Some of the demonstrators carried placards, such as one reading, "Strip Search Maggie - She's the Terrorist."

One of the leaders of the New Jersey contingent is James V. Burke, a guidance counselor in the East Brunswick, N.J., public school system. Burke is president of the Central Jersey chapter of the Irish-American Unity Conference, a 2-year-old national group that has been trying to unite Irish social and political organizations on the question of Northern Ireland. "We're making great strides in New Jersey," said the 44-year-old Sayreville, N.J., resident.

"We've got about 3,000 members in New Jersey, but we're growing." Burke said Irish-American unity on the issue of Northern Ireland had been hurt in the last election by the support the Catholic Church gave President Reagan because of the abortion issue. "Ronald Reagan is the most pro-British, anti-Irish president we've ever had," Burke said. "The people were torn between the Catholic Church telling them to vote for Ronald Reagan on that issue and their support for the Democratic Party, which is our greatest friend."

I put this here to show that there is power in the mobilising of Irish Americans, but also that there is a basis for them to learn from and apply to other struggles. The foundation is there. It is easy to explain. It is hard to break the cognitive dissonance of being Irish in America. The desperation and poison of capitalism is hard to break even when its promises are flimsy. I do have a lot of disgust and a feeling of alienation from older, conservative Irish Americans, and I watched that heel-turn occur with whiplash in my own family, so I know a bit of how it's done. It's mournful. I won't stay there in that place though. I know myself.

James Connolly

To Irish Wage Workers in America

(1908)

We Irish Workers are then not under the necessity of considering ourselves as bound by tradition to the Democratic Party; political parties are not formed by traditions, but by interests. Where then do our interests lie? Certainly not in the Republican Party – that is the party of our employers, and as our employers we know do not allow their actions to be governed by our interests we are certainly not under any moral obligation to shape our political activity to suit the interests of our employers.

Where then? To answer that question properly we must ask ourselves why are we Irish here at all in this country, instead of in Ireland. Certainly we have no complaint to make against our native land, and we for the most part did not come here for pleasure. We came here because we found that Ireland was private property, that a small class had taken possession of its resources – its land, its lakes, its rivers, its mountains, its bogs, its towns and its cities, its railways, its factories, and its fisheries. In short, that a small class owned Ireland and that the remainder of the population were the bond slaves of these proprietors.

We came here because we found that the government of the country was in the hands of those proprietors and their friends, and that army and navy and police were the agents of the government in executing the will of those proprietors, and for driving us back to our chains whenever we rose in revolt against oppression. And as we learned that since that government was backed and maintained by the might of a nation other than our own, and more numerous than us, we could not hope to overthrow that government and free our means of living from the grasp of those proprietors, we fled from that land of ours and came to the United States.

You can search and uncover copious writing about the names and histories of Irish American socialists and their organisations. When you do, the heavy hand of the Catholic church emerges, working tirelessly to counter and suppress and dissolve these organisations by provoking shame and division in the same way the Vatican joined forces with the CIA to disarm the working people of all their education and achievements in communist Poland.

Religion and spirituality aren't antithetical to socialism at all. but. hierarchical institutions will do whatever they can to preserve their interests. capitalism wins by depriving a person of their basic needs unless they perform the correct tasks, produce the correct product, creating meritocracy completely inorganic and contrary to what i do believe are our most basic, more community-minded impulses. it is done over and over and over so religious institutions, just like in Ireland, become a stand-in for culture. religion can be reshaped by social forces, but the role of religion can also be shaped by capital, and there are armies to defend capital.

James Connolly, July the 12th (1913)

But they are told

“all this persecution was ended when William of Orange, and our immortal forefathers overthrew the Pope and Popery at the Boyne. Then began the era of civil and religious liberty.”

So runs the legend implicitly believed in Ulster. Yet it is far, very far, from the truth. In 1686 certain continental powers joined together in a league, known in history as the league of Augsburg, for the purpose of curbing the arrogant power of France. These powers were impartially Protestant and Catholic, including the Emperor of Germany, the King of Spain, William, Prince of Orange, and the Pope. The latter had but a small army, but possessed a good treasury and great influence. A few years before a French army had marched upon Rome to avenge a slight insult offered to France, and His Holiness was more than anxious to curb the Catholic power that had dared to violate the centre of Catholicity. Hence his alliance with William, Prince of Orange. King James II, of England, being insecure upon his throne, sought alliance with the French monarch. When, therefore, the war took place in Ireland, King William fought, aided by the arms, men, and treasures of his allies in the League of Augsburg, and part of his expenses at the Battle of the Boyne was paid for by His Holiness, the Pope. Moreover, when news of King William’s victory reached Rome, a Te Deum was sung in celebration of his victory over the Irish adherents of King James and King Louis. Therefore, on Saturday the Orangemen of Ulster, led by King Carson, will be celebrating the same victory as the Pope celebrated 223 years ago.

(more) (on) (this)

In a 1907 speech, New York City mayor and Democrat George B. McClellan Jr reportedly declared that ‘There are Russian socialists and Jewish socialists and German socialists! But, thank God! There are no Irish socialists!’ Connolly answered McClellan’s challenge on the pages of The Harp, the ISF monthly published between 1908 and 1910. He urged Irish-Americans to shun their historical ties to the Democratic Party and its ‘invertebrate Irish middle class politicians’ who brandished their ancestry only on election day.

Emigration failed to free Irishmen from imperialist exploitation, Connolly argued—Irish longshoremen on the docks in New York still worked for British shipping magnates with offices on nearby Wall Street. He implored his readers to reject their ‘aggressive insularity’ and organise with ‘that Polack, whose advent in the workshop you are taught to view with such disfavor’.

Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910, but his blend of socialism and Irish separatism reverberated with [Elizabeth Gurley] Flynn as she recruited for the Wobblies.

from The girl orator of the Bowery: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ireland and the Industrial Workers of the World

Let me repeat: in regard to "pretending to be a type of Irish person who hasn't existed in 30 years," i don't have any confidence in accepting the supposed extinction of A Type Of Person.

To me, culture, just as faith and just as work or hobbies, is a practise. It’s a dialogue that doesn't end. It's study and implementation. It frames actions, it grounds experiences, I am in conversation with it, it is itself a language when language fails.

For people who view their Irish heritage as something other than the "obvious" "very American" "mixture" (I do think it's their right to describe it in this way, if they don't find it relevant to their experiences) I do think there is a very confusing sense of shame for much of the Irish diaspora— white, and nonwhite, depending— that mainland Irish can quite literally capitalise on, both in a form of social currency and while structuring laws around a) who does and doesn’t count for citizenship, and b) making sure enough companies cater to the diaspora’s desire for return. Genealogy is an entire industry now, with the LDS' properties taking up space in Dublin while libraries that offer these same services remain under-funded and under-staffed and must literally compete with them in the Dál.

When citizenship is based upon a linear and quantifiable provenance, you leave out a vast amount of people who have been forcibly, violently severed from that. And your disdain for an older, more conservative, more "traditional" population who may have more access to documents and "traditional" trappings, in turn BECOMES the image of the Irish American you fixate upon. You are engaging in a cooperative act.

Writing in the Dublin Inquirer, Emma Dabiri, an Afro-Irish scholar, responds to the following question:

I’m not from Ireland but I live in Dublin and I’ve lived here for several years now. I’ve been wondering whether I should start to assimilate by using Dublin slang and letting myself grow an accent or not? I feel like I should be trying to fit in, and I really like it, and it feels natural to start to talk like everybody around me. But if I started doing that wouldn’t people think I was joking? Especially people I know who are used to my original accent. Any advice?

Such an interesting question. Our voices and accents are a fundamental part of our identities. They are crucial markers of belonging, of how we are perceived, and of whether we are included or not.

The self-awareness that emerges when you understand how different your accent is from those around you can be likened to a form of double consciousness, leading you to overthink and over-analyse every word in a way that thwarts ordinary communication. Or is that just me?

So … what to do? I think the concept of code-switching might be helpful.

Code-switching is simply a matter of modulating your accent or vocabulary to meet the needs of the situation. People from minority or marginalized groups do it all the time. An Economist article on the phenomenon, explains that “Language is a proxy for identity, and so code-switching is an apt metaphor for handling more than one identity.”

When I was growing up there was certainly a stigma attached to this kind of thing. The perception being that it was “inauthentic” or “fake”, that you were trying to “be something you were not”, but code-switching is very different from “putting on an accent”.

It is using a voice ostensibly your own, but adapting it accordingly, and it is a survival technique for people navigating racial, national and class lines. In a society that was as homogenous as Ireland was in the 1990s I can understand why the use of different accents might have been viewed as suspicious.

[...]

My advice to you would be g’wan, use the slang, you’ve probably already picked up the accent more then you know. But at the same time don’t feel that you only have recourse to one accent that now becomes your “authentic voice”.

2018

In response to another question, which brings up the time Traveler actor John Connors tweeted in response to the smashing of a Lidl,

“Put it this way, if I see any young ones or young fellas robbing a few loafs from a big corporation I will not be calling @gardainfo. These c***s are robbing all of us everyday”,

Dabiri includes,

I think the incident you refer to with John demonstrates the ugly reality that lies just beneath the surface of civility. It is something I’ve experienced many times myself. Everyone is polite and progressive until something happens where the truth of how Travellers or black people are really perceived, is quickly revealed.

Emma Dabiri was also one of the participants in the conference Where Do We Go From Here? Revisiting Black Irish Relations and Responding to a Transnational Moment, part of the Black, Brown & Green Voices report, by Myriam Nyhan Grey.

Mainland Irish will say they're the only/one of the only countries in the world whose population is lower now than it was at the turn of the century. This is a horrific reality. But mourning that reality, and embracing what that reality looks like today in the form of descendants, don't always merge. This continues even as Ireland continues to produce MORE diaspora! It’s never stopped, not even once! The country overall is experiencing a shocking and easily addressed housing crisis, cost of living crisis, addiction and mental health crisis as a result, gutted and scammed by tech companies like Apple and Airbnb, which has resulted in Dublin now being one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live.

When your people are starving and you point fingers at the diaspora, many of whom are also starving... well it should be more embarrassing than it is.

If the conditions are the same as always, at home and in America, what exactly divides the fundamental struggle aside from lack of reach/solidarity? If the problem is that Irish Americans have been separated from "the struggle" for too long and now don't recognise their own hand in it, might the same be said for not only the upper classes in Irish society but also working-class conservatives?

Flynn reminded her audiences that they were not strangers to labour struggles in their motherlands, and they must redefine ‘Americanism’ to meet their demands for economic justice and reflect their growing presence in American society. After the foundation of the ISF, she travelled to Wobbly strongholds in western states, organising in Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington. By 1912 the IWW had gained traction in eastern cities such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and captivated the mainstream press with its ‘revolutionary tactics’.

What America and the UK have done to the island of Ireland as occupied territory is THE SAME as what was/is done to Irish diaspora. If it was any different, they wouldn't be in-- or would have very different reasons to be in-- America or Canada (commonwealth of the UK, remember.) Or Australia. Or whatever.

What is your "real" Irishness?

Is it about history? Well, we share much of that and all its traumas— and remember, “history” is not an objective concept. The “forward” march of time is a very capitalist and Protestant concept. There is no cutoff point, because the diaspora population continues to grow. Diaspora arrives at different times and those times shape their politics and actions. Is it about language? Not every Irish person speaks the language and many Irish people abroad study the language. Is it about values? How unified are those, and whose voice counts most? If we aren’t unified in a particular cause or set of values, whose responsibility is it to spread accessible information about that cause, other than all of us together? Is it about keeping up with the trends? Do all people across all classes, ages, ethnicities keep up with trends? Are trends really where we form identity? Is it about political action? Not only can learning about history and current events be done from afar, the diaspora can campaign and canvas for radical political changes on Irish soil with you. (The Irish government, for better or worse, allows conservative American politicians to advertise in Ireland-- even in Irish!-- so that Irish families will in turn request their American children vote in favour.) If it's about what you looked like and who raised you: that's a bit slippery, isn't it?

If they don't shirk their cultural ties, it's the responsibility of the diaspora to be an expert and a historian on themselves, whereas the responsibility of the citizen may simply be to exist.

While I don't consider NI as "diaspora," i do think the imposed separation modifies their experience such that it does apply in some instances. I see ROI mocking NI for their accents, their lack of access to the Irish language, lack of access to what's considered essential or "pure" Irish experiences, their poorness and living conditions, and many even shrug at the idea of integration... and, much the same or worse is done to GRT communities. If the news tells me partition isn't a going concern, that partition is a fact of life and to get over it, should I believe it? Of course not. Should I trust only voting as political action? Of course not. But numbers are a quick and easy point. Anything else requires work and familiarity to find.

Divisions like these are simply another type of sectarianism. The location is closer to "home" and the militarised coloniser looms much larger and more visible in public view and in the mind, yes, that is a key difference. For all the material support Irish Americans supplied, the Troubles did not take place on American soil. but for a country so proud of their revolutionary history, Ireland is still divided among its population, and divided in the north, and subject to capitalist design.

In "The End Of the Affair: Irish Migration, 9/11 and the Evolution of Irish-America" (2007) author and conflict analyst Feargal Cochrane characterises the Irish people's disdain for Irish Americans as being predicated on which administration is in power at the time-- which at the time of writing, was the Bush administration, incurring fights among more conservative Irish American visitors, and allegedly incurring few fights among more progressive (or perhaps just disinclined to political discussion) Irish American visitors.

The use of Shannon airport by US planes increased significantly between 2004 and 2005 with an expectation that more than 1000 US military planes would fly through Irish airspace on their way to or from Iraq in 2005. Apart from the issue of Irish neutrality, none of the US military personnel who have landed at Shannon airport have been subject to any inspection by the Irish security services.

It has been alleged by a number of Irish human rights activists and leading political figures that Ireland was being used as part of the Bush administration’s covert “extraordinary renditions” program. It has been claimed that under this scheme, individuals have been kidnapped by US intelligence services and smuggled around the world in unmarked aircraft for questioning/torture by US intelligence operatives and then moved on to Guantanamo Bay. Former Labour Party leader Ruairi Quinn commented that the use of Shannon airport by the US military, without any inspections being made of US aircraft by the Irish police, was extraordinary, “considering the evidence that exists indicating that people have been illegally kidnapped and transported through Ireland to destinations unknown for torture.”

Whether or not these complaints were really made in such higher numbers, it's hard to know if they're reaching the people who need to hear them. Social shaming only works if it's employed with a clear target. We should also, and maybe always consider: of the Irish American population, who among them has the wherewithal to travel to Ireland? Which part of the population can afford the money and time? Who is missing?

As long as Irish men, women and children are tortured, brutalized and murdered by the British army of occupation, it's not enough for their kinsmen in this country to drink green beer one day a year and tell the world that they're proud to be Irish. It is the responsibility of every man, woman and child of Irish descent to do all in their power to alleviate the sufferings of the nationalist population of the north by working for peace, justice and unity in all Ireland. The struggle for freedom and justice, and against tyranny and oppression - this is the true meaning of our Irish heritage. James V. Burke, 1985

My connection is severed, in my opinion, much less due to geographic barriers as familial ones. If my family wasn't abusive, my connection wouldn't be severed and the work wouldn't fall on me alone, I would have the benefit of community and its stories/histories. If I were wealthy and without debt, and had the time for travel, if I weren't trans, if I weren't disabled, I would be able to move around more freely regardless of citizenship status.

I feel this ugly need to prove myself. Because that's what it's about, isn't it? The proof, the recognised trappings. Despite how shit-awful my family is, they for whatever reason didn't let the fire die. We ate dinner under a portrait of the seven signatories and some of the earliest things I learned about weren't personal on an intimate level, but personal as in political-- the presence and importance of the language, the socialist fight for freedom, the troubles, the economy and the fickle stiltedness of the Celtic tiger and commodification of identity, the continued violence in Northern Ireland, the importance of allyship with Cuba and Palestine, solidarity with Indigenous peoples in America, Canada, Australia, Caribbean, and beyond. ourt visual arts and films were a fixture. And... I saw my family walk these connections back as their relationships to one another became more and more fraught and no outside help was sought or available. Mired in addiction and illness with no social supports, a type of justified bitterness toward the lack might become a reactionary isolationism. It's important to identify the difference and where it begins. But I'm not sure children should play teachers in these conditions.

The work of suppressing a person, stripping away their identity and family and community, dissolving and subsuming them, beating a person down to pulp and fatiguing them only to tantalise them with the brutal escapism of production of capital, climbing the ladder or scheming against your fellows so they do the work and you profit, the capital that justifies the construct of White Supremacy... that is an ongoing escapade.

In Tiffanie Patricia Sesko's insightful and personal thesis, "Culture and Mental Health: Considering the Role of the Complex Cultural-History in Irish-American Population" she describes various approaches to and theories of psychology and of therapy, with the hope of applying them to the development of treatment processes most helpful to the Irish (at home and abroad)

According to the United States Census, as of 2013, 34.5 million Americans list their heritage as Irish or partially Irish. That number is seven times larger than the entire Irish population (United States Census, 2013). What I found most intriguing about this is that based on my experience as someone with close relatives still living in Ireland, is how profound this statistic may be on Americans as the Irish are known to be loyal to old traditions McGoldrick, 1996). I asked myself, “What does this mean for Americans?” “What does this mean for Irish immigrants and their children?” “What about Immigrants and their American born children?” I feel it is important to understand how to help the Irish as Irish, not just Caucasian-Americans when depression, anxiety, alcohol and substance abuse, and other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia for example, are being treated. The therapist must be aware of religious and spiritual beliefs as well as the possible reasons families hold on to traditions that may seem to be a hinder to positive well-being.

[...]

Aside from anthropological views on culture and mental health, there have been sociological studies of mental illness analyzing frameworks of epochs; periods of time in history.

In “Modernity Theories and Mental Illness: A Comparative Study of Selected Sociological Theorists”, Yawo Bessa, (2012) used four perspectives to explain how culture affects mental illness in societies; structural strain theory, anomy theory, the social stressor theory, and the labeling theory.

[...]

Karl Marx’s conflict theory (argues that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. In greater detail, this means the oppressor owns channels of production and is economically, politically, and socially advantaged to the oppressed (Bessa, 2012). The perception of gender difference can be used in conflict theory as it would guide sociologists in understanding why women suffer mental illness more than their male counterparts. Bessa discusses studies in gender difference and power that highlight the phenomenon of male dominance; the dominant and the dominated, like the oppressors and the oppressed. Marx’s theory suggests the dominated and the oppressed will suffer from greater mental health problems as these groups do not have the tendency to vent their dissatisfaction to the dominant group (2012).

The paper's assertions would strengthen with a broader interest in gender variance rather than just cisgender men and women-- and since it's Irish-specific, this would be especially beneficial considering prominent TERFs in Ireland and the UK, but more important than them, the (possibly anecdotally to my own experience but I doubt it's restricted to that) high numbers of extant and future transgender Irish people. There's also the incredibly high numbers of autistic and schizophrenic Irish people in Ireland and the diaspora. It's even more important because if mental health is SUCH a marginalising experience for Irish people, and neurodivergence-- or even just a divergence from what's termed "consensus reality." I do believe a divergence from consensus reality and living between worlds is a longstanding Irish experience, enough to have necessitated the systems therapy of The Fifth Province.

To discuss "consensus" or "consensual reality," i'd like to shift to the focus of Erick Fabris' comprehensive 2012 thesis, "Experiences Labelled Psychotic: A Settler’s Autoethnography Beyond Psychosic Narrative" which was aided by the support and cooperation of First Nations peoples.

Perhaps it is most important to relate my experience to others. Let me start with a quote from Toronto author Shelagh Lynne Supeene’s autobiographical book, As For the Sky, Falling (1990). In this book she tries to explain the experience of her presumed illness in such a way as to remember her actual experience, whether or not this is contradictory or impossible.

Within a few months several other things happened too. I began to hear a ringing sound almost all the time. It sounded like a phone ringing, and sometimes it was really loud. The air shone, often golden, semi-solid, like clear jelly, and seemed to offer the same resistance to movement that water does when you walk through it. Other things glowed–people’s faces, objects– very pretty, but distracting […]. (Supeene, 1990)

This description immediately moves me, my heart, and my thoughts. It moves my nerves, my hands, as if anticipating something. I remember aspects of this textual recollection. It moves me as a person to think beyond the explanations I have been given for this experience. I remember the wonder of seeing “shining” air, years ago. It moves me to write, because these are the wonders we should all share. But then a barrier arises: how is this text understood by people without that experience? How is it understood in sanist texts? Does it provide an example of experiences for the sanitization of psychiatric work? Does it participate somehow in the psychiatrization the author abhors? Is it romanticized as somehow too wonderful or too bizarre an experience?

Supeene is relating through her body, and memories, as they occurred in a certain place. That place, as I will argue, is not only a location; it is a memory. Memory relates to the social, cultural, and political world. Rather than use disability theory alone, or feminist theory, to consider memory, I use anticolonial theory as a settler. This helps me address the source of interlocking oppressions in the place I live. Thus, a temporal grounding bridges my dominant status and my failed status of “incapacity.” This grounding begins in texts through an exchange between colonizer and colonized, which I read in the anticolonial work of Dr. Njoki Wane (2008) and Dr. George Dei (2010). Through privileging local and inter-local knowledge in a conception of narrative education, Wane and Dei theorize Indigenous thought without turning to universalities that would imply metaphysical orientations (personal communication, October 27, 2009). Thus the question of story, history, and place is central to Indigenous anticolonial thought without it being “essential.”

Later in the paper, a crucial point ties back to the lack of and importance of language or communicative abilities/techniques Sesko is also exploring,

Language, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1986) reminds us, is a formidable tool of colonization and decolonization. As a White male who questions his power, I will to recognize my place amongst people who have been colonized, among people of other genders, among queer and disabled folk. However, I am disturbed by sanism, and therefore disturb allies or supporters who do not recognize their own sanism, even if I cannot help them properly denote it in their own cultural languages. Madness discourses (e.g., talk about madness as a phenomenon), including psychotherapeutic theories, arise in White male straight power structures insofar as the term “mad” arises in Anglophone culture (and before in Latin, in the term “mu,” meaning to “change”). Thus race and madness are intertwined as constructions from the start, and all therapeutic or otherwise corrective ideas partake of making the “problem” appear (e.g., occur).

These excerpts on illness also tie into something I've tried to describe, which is the making of and toll of suppression through lack of access to material support;

As Flynn later remarked, ‘then came the grand finale—no money’.

Flynn regarded the Paterson strike as a failure, echoing many who witnessed the Dublin Lockout. It ended on 29 July 1913, with a shop-by-shop settlement restricting negotiations to the individual mills. In a speech to the New York Civic Club Forum the following January, Flynn described ‘English-speaking conservative elements’ in the strike committee as a ‘complicating factor’ who strained finances and morale.

On the Dublin Lockout, Flynn commented:

‘In Ireland today there is a wonderful strike going on and they are standing it beautifully. Why? Because they have had half a million dollars since the thirty-first of August (five months) given into the relief fund, and every man that goes on the picket line has food in his stomach and some kind of decent clothes on his back.’ She contrasted this with the ‘tragedy of the Paterson strike’, a ‘solid phalanx being cut up into 300 pieces’.

Pretending like everyone is completely fine with whiteness and with capitalism obfuscating struggle and personhood is just false. There is so rarely an instant and passive, tacit acceptance of invisibility and disenfranchisement particularly by the youngest populations, while the older dominate their choices and curb their futures. The biggest problem for the Irish diaspora isn't only the breakdown of culture and access to the rungs of the ladder, it's that the traumatic process of doing so is accepted as a symptom of living, and at this point, removed from its inception, the language for that insidious process doesn't exist in common parlance. And to name it and work against it with others in much much more marginal positions, while living inside it, is to be quite radical indeed.

I found it interesting that McGoldrick revealed some test results on pain and ethnicity that is quite characteristic of my own Irish family, stating the Irish have a very high tolerance for it, and because of this, have trouble describing it. Therefore, the Irish will be much less likely to seek medical help. This is the case even when they or their children need medical help; it is very difficult to communicate this which has negative effects on overall health as “the mind and body are inseparable” (Sathcher, 2000). Perhaps the Irishman is known for a heavy use of avoidance coping or denial of hardship. It would benefit the therapist to become familiar with McGoldrick’s position on Irish denial. “The Irish are not fond of the truth because they often fear it will reveal how bad they are” (McGoldrick, 1996).

In McGoldrick, Giordano, and Garcia-Preto’s Ethnicity and Family Therapy (2005), the Irish are portrayed much like they are in Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics in terms of how colonization, extreme poverty, mythology and religion, and economic change molded a culture. McGoldrick goes into detail about how these factors effected communication and conflict, use of humor and alcohol, family patterns in Ireland, and for Irish-American families in therapy. McGoldrick writes about the paradoxes of the Irish; the pragmatic dreamers, the loyal yet fickle, the deniers yet fearers of shame. A culture of people who have given up a greater proportion (of single women and) immigrants to the United States than any other country in the world. Despite their power in numbers, Irish immigrants remained invisible to society at large (McGoldrick, 2005). In the United States, just as in Ireland, the Catholic Church was the primary unifier.

The Irish who have attained whiteness found permission and safety there, a privilege that will never exist for non-white Irish. But the attainment of it came at great expense and we need to remember this, the arbitrary nature of the construction of race, the court cases and laws that defined it in real time.

COLONISATION is not a hard stop. ASSIMILATION becomes necessity when the alternative is policed and tortured, but this is not to say assimilation is "good" or can't be undone. It's unsafe, but not impossible. Assimilation offered a cruel and reactionary safety to the detriment of all else. Assimilation is the coaxing tactic of colonisation, and colonisation is enforced all the time. it's given new, prettier or more absolving names. gentrification is colonisation. appropriation is colonisation especially when it's infused into some larger practise (see: crystals and sage with white witchiness) that it's barely named or recognised except by the group it's taken from, obscuring its lineage. Capitalism, or America as an imperial structure, is a parasite that simultaneously adopts or even "celebrate" what is dear to oppressed groups, without permission, without care, disseminating it into a kind of cultural ether, which at the same time eradicates it.

We can't be caught placing undue trust in the violating force.

I don’t illustrate the following with the view that they're mirror, 1:1 experiences at all. The point instead is that there is a divergence in these experiences and the divergence should be as provoking as any commonality, because it calls into question the "righteousness," the "sense-making" of supposed divisions— it should provoke a vengeful compassion to stamp out the ideologies that created the divisions. We can draw upon the marginalised maritime provinces of Canada and the further-marginalised First Nations people there. We can draw upon the marginalised area of Appalachia and the further-marginalised Native people who live there. Look at these enclaves of robust Irish/Ulster/Scottish history— music, language, intangible culture, religion— and the way they're mined for resources and left to languish in completely manufactured poverty and drug epidemic. The poor are, when convenient, either vilified for their conservatism or valourised for their "traditions." And this is not new. The gutting and gerrymandering of resource-rich, diverse areas is the US and in Ireland, particularly the North. Southwest Asia and Northern Africa and the entire world is destablised and left for dead. This is how Irish and Native and Black people have been treated repeatedly throughout history, and it should be one that is discussed more especially in trying to build solidarity and allyship across much more dissimilar experiences as well.

The construction of race, of Whiteness and Non, and the legal mandates and court cases that constructed new ideas of race in real time, should be of major concern. This is happening again due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, where the entire population of Russia (which is quite diverse, of course) is being othered as a warmongering people through an orientalist lens in the media at the very same time that other Central/Eastern European countries are showing just how little they care about non-white immigrants, trans people, and build their militias of white nationalists lauded all throughout Western media. This is all while conveniently diverting attention away from the US' bloodlusting hands in it. We are ground down by its cogs, juicing us for whatever we're worth and then replaced.

Race— or rather, white supremacy— is so precious and fragile a thing that it needs unbelievable violence and cruelty, entire armies and systems to protect it. Land Back, as a movement, should matter very much to all Irish people the same way so many Irish people take up Palestine as a call to action, drawing on historic similarities that also don't outshine cultural/ethnic/religious differences compounding the devastation of Palestine. Remember that it was the Choctaw who sent money to Ireland during An Gorta Mór. And we do see Irish people jump to fund indigenous causes and strike or boycott in protest of apartheid goods.

Deprivation of connection to land is troubling but a connection to land isn't necessary to be. Consider just how many people lose their ancestral lands and how catastrophically disturbing that is, the means of separation so traumatising that it ripples through generations. And yet despite all suppression, many don't stop being themselves, or forge connections much later in life, even generations later, because it must be done. Consider mixed people, with more or less connection to some aspect of their culture/ethnicity over another, may participate in one more or less or not even know until they know. This even came up very recently in Jacqueline Keeler's dehumanising interrogation of Sacheen Littlefeather's indigeneity (following a list she compiled of "pretendians") following her death.

Palestinians don't stop being Palestinian when their land is stolen by a terrorising and heartless colonial force. Jewish people don't stop being Jewish when driven from their homes, when they're anti-zionist/not centering Israel in their Jewishness. Whether Kurds, natives/first nations or black South Africans or the African diaspora, loss of connection is a harsh and horrific process and its methods don't originate with the people themselves but from the bloodthirsty oppressors seeking resources and self-preservation. But to say you must have a documented connection to land, or be of some blood percentage to claim heritage, is dangerous and relies on the oppressor to negotiate and honour whatever rights of the oppressed the oppressor has penciled for them.

Allow me to share a disturbing excerpt from Armin Langer's bold paper, "Irish Nationalism as an Inspiration for American Zionists in the Early Twentieth Century: As Exemplified by Boston Lawyer Louis D. Brandeis’s Speeches and Writings" from 2021,

Irish Americans were greatly interested in the struggles for statehood in Ireland. In fact, Irish nationalism may have been stronger in America than in Ireland itself, as a national consciousness increased among these immigrant groups after arriving in the multiethnic US. For example, Oscar Wilde was perceived as an Englishman in England but as Irish on his 1882 lecture tour in Canada and the US; it was in North America that Wilde rediscovered his Irishness (Mendelsohn 1993, 132-133). Despite the similarities between the Irish and Jewish nationalist movements, there was a key difference: Jewish immigrants to the US did not come from Palestine like the Irish did from Ireland.

Most American Jews had never even been to the Middle East, nor had their ancestors going several generations back. Nevertheless, patterns of Jewish support for the creation of a Jewish society in Palestine were comparable to Irish Americans’ campaigning for an independent Irish state. The representatives of these national movements were aware of their similarities and they repeatedly pointed to each other as a source of legitimation (133). Some major Zionist leaders in the first decades of the twentieth century expressed their sympathies with the Irish cause. In the United States, there was one Zionist leader who was especially noted for repeatedly referring to the Irish experience and its struggles in his speeches and articles and for connecting the Jewish and Zionist narrative to that of Irish nationalism. This person was Louis D. Brandeis (Kibler 2015, 42).

[...]

Brandeis ended his talk “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It” with the words “Organize, Organize, Organize” (24). He urged American Zionists to organize despite their differences, “until every Jew in America must stand up and be counted–counted with us” (ibidem). According to Jewish studies scholar Frances Malino, it was nineteenth-century Irish leader Daniel O’Connell – who campaigned for the Catholic’s right to representation in the British parliament – who inspired Brandeis for this motto with his saying, “agitate, agitate, agitate!” (Russell 2019, 7).

This paper's abstract goes so far as to include, "An article on this particular aspect of the intersection of Irish and Jewish history might be especially helpful since today the Irish independence movement is usually compared to the Palestinian resistance movement rather than to early Zionism."

This paper portrays a notable American Zionist who wrongly appropriated a prominent and, to a point, radical abolitionist from Irish history, and we might interpret this as the author suggesting it has legs in the same way other Zionists have appropriated the Land Back movement to pretend at commonality between their entitlement and the rights of Native peoples. I would assume that this appropriation shouldn't diminish from the fact that the people of Ireland, including many young Irish Americans, strongly support Palestine's liberation and sovereignty, and view the Irish struggle through the particular lens of indigineity versus oppressive forces, and NOT in allyship with that oppressive force. It should also be noted that Daniel O'Connell quickly lost favour during the famine period when rather than fighting for Ireland's independence, he attempted to make deals trying to ensure Irish representation in Westminster, the same way some consider Michael Collins a traitor for his agreement to partition rather than strike out for full independence.

When Angela Davis met Bernadette Devlin

As abolitionists in Britain, we often see America — specifically the Black radical tradition in America — as the home of abolition. This is for good reason; with revolutionaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Jackson and Angela Davis, Black Americans have been pioneering abolition for centuries. However, an abolitionist tradition is much closer than many of us realise. If we were only to look to the North of Ireland — or occupied six counties — we would find a long, popular struggle against the oppressive forces of prisons and policing.

Policing in Ireland was a colonial invention to suppress anti-British dissent, and it has functioned that way ever since. After the partition of Ireland in 1920, Irish Catholics in the North of Ireland faced brutal and unrelenting state violence for their very existence. Gerrymandered into squalid ghettos, terrorised by police and segregated from society, any attempt to agitate for basic civil rights was ruthlessly suppressed.

‘When we break the law, we go to jail. When the government breaks the law, the government changes the law.’

Bernadette Devlin would later become friends with the revolutionary abolitionist Angela Davis after Devlin visited Davis in prison in 1971. In future, Davis would be a leading voice in the struggle to free Bernadette Devlin’s daughter, Róisín McAliskey, from prison. Speaking at a rally protesting McAliskey’s detention, Angela Davis condemned the ‘terrible treatment of Róisín McAliskey by her British captors… Róisín must be freed, and Northern Ireland released from the shackles of British imperialism!’

No one is more aware of the violence of policing and prisons than oppressed communities across the world, and no one is more imaginative in their resistance. It’s time we learnt from their example. Let’s liberate our communities like Bogside residents liberated Derry. Here’s to an abolitionist United Ireland and a Free Derry World.

Whiteness, in hand with capitalism and neoliberalism; America, which above all else has profited immensely (unfathomably) from these demoralising and destructive practices; Ireland, which in turn encourages landlordling and profiteering such that instead of foreign colonising powers, Ireland's own government has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens and kept immigrants in punitive and often life-ending "temporary" housing with a gardaí that targets nonwhite people and members of the Traveler community; is not passive. These coercive forces don't occur as a natural byproduct, and they are not unique to a particular country. Wealth and power stand in place of culture and contrary to it. Wealth and power will shift culture not as natural evolution rooted through time and practitioners but purely at its whim, to its ends. And this should be all the more reason to reject it.

I don't think it's fair to claim that once the parasitism of capitalism has taken root and sapped you of whatever made you feel whole and connected, but now has rendered you disaffected and aimless, that it manifests the exact same way even for all white people-- and, or especially, is something that at a certain point no longer needs or can accomplish dismantling globally and inwardly. The destruction can’t be changed retroactively, no. but acknowledging the wrongness and what it rotted out of us isn’t unimportant. For the Irish “at home” and abroad, there are so many things we can share together that aren't affixed to land. we can make a "home" wherever we are, and to entertain otherwise will require drastic new policies in Ireland-- because without them, it is, again, flirting with notions of blood and soil.

Patrick Pearse, a divisive figure in Irish revolutionary history, who often leaned on turns of phrase and archaic imploring that might be familiar to those familiar with fascism-- for example, that Irishmen had lost and needed to reclaim their "manhood"-- welcoming WWI in 1915:

It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

from HistoryIreland

Much of this started with the strong emphasis on patriotism, which also permeated the curriculum presented to his pupils at St Enda’s. In the school prospectus of 1908 their duties were clearly spelled out: ‘It will be attempted to inculcate in the pupils the desire to spend their lives working hard and zealously for their fatherland and, if it should ever be necessary, to die for it’. Pearse felt that what he saw as a feminised society should recover the ideals of courage, strength and heroism. Through war, he argued, it was possible ‘to restore manhood to a race that has been deprived of it’. In this the shedding of blood was even considered a good thing:

‘I should like to see any and every body of Irish citizens armed. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing.’

and James Connolly’s reaction to Pearse’s celebration in 1915:

No, we do not think the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot. We are sick of such teaching, and the world is sick of such teaching.

In 2001, in the magazine named after her, a writer describes the failings of Mother Jones' as thus:

Her agenda was also limited, even by the standards of her time. Mother Jones opposed giving the vote to women — or, to be more precise, she believed that suffrage was a false issue, a bourgeois diversion from the real problem of worker exploitation. She argued that only powerful organizations of workers — industrial unions — could bring justice. And while she helped organize women in various trades, she believed that working-class women were better off in the home than having their labor exploited.

Years later in 2019, in the NYT, another writer describes the movement as having failed Black American women in part by prioritising a middle class and white womanhood:

While middle-class white women celebrated with ticker tape parades, black women in the former Confederacy were being defrauded by voting registrars or were driven away from registration offices under threat of violence. When the black suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell petitioned her white sisters for help, they responded that the disenfranchisement of black women was a race problem — not a gender problem — and beyond the movement’s writ.

Participation or maintaining of culture is not a passive act for anyone but the white people who lose themself in its blank emptiness for the sake of what it promises. The promises, of course, aren't empty: whiteness when asserted is clearly rewarded, and when stepping out of the void to confront it, it retaliates through violence. Whiteness wasn't/isn't created without intention and it is fraught and strictly, confusingly maintained from the top down. Governments are not passive and capitalism is not representative of a people-- a culture's-- needs.

Culture is/can be different from ethnicity. Culture is something imbued, and in that way, something to actively support or actively resist and examine and reflect on and critique, or at least be mindful of-- especially because many more (if not most) people can't choose to slide blithely through it unseen. Colonisation doesn't take place in one fell swoop, and its motivations are upheld at the expense of our world, and it benefits from meticulously and violently separating people from their own selves and one another.

Edward Said and James Connolly both warned how nativism and uncritical nationalism are failures of the liberatory cause. Connolly said that Ireland while home of the Irish is also allied with and home to anyone of any race. Him and Jim Larkin came to the US to speak to working class Irish Americans about this, about the importance of solidarity across these imagined divisions. For white Americans, and especially the Irish in this case, it should give you even more perspective. It SHOULD be thought less as a given more as a choice one makes to participate in and make sacrifices to a terrifying myth of a "white monoculture." Irishness can't just be something emphasised as a convenient barrier between yourself and the diaspora to absolve you of your participation in these machinations.

Irish America and Race

But that’s not the whole story. Irish America isn’t one mindset, and is far more textured and layered than that. It was an Irish priest in San Francisco, Father Eugene Boyle, who was the first to open his doors to the Black Panther free breakfast program when it began in 1969. According to the Black Panther newspaper he allowed his Sacred Heart parish hall to be used for Panther political meetings, and appeared as a character witness for Black radical leader Bobby Seale when he was on trial for murder.

Representatives of the U.S. Black Lives Matter movement have for years spoken at Bloody Sunday commemorations in Derry.

This alliance has a long tradition, from former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass visiting Ireland in the 1840s and striking common cause with Daniel O’Connell, to radical black leader Marcus Garvey’s support for Sinn Féin and hunger striker Terence MacSwiney in the 1920s, to the artistic connections between the Gaelic revival of the early 1900s and the Harlem Renaissance 20 years later.

Irish-Americans have long legacies of anti-racism in the U.S. and in Ireland to draw and, and learn from. These traditions go beyond the simplistic stereotype of the racist Irish American cop, but there are reasons why those stereotypes exists, and why accusations persist of double standards about opposing discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic.

Now’s an opportunity for Irish American organizations and individuals to stand publicly on the side of justice, against police brutality, and against structural discrimination. Just like they have for many years when it comes to Ireland.

For myself, the things I've been taught about the past and present (intentionally and not) and the things I've learned and examined on my own, the core emotional responses to more intangible cultural touchstones is literally not something I'm willing or at all able to forget. Even many of my illnesses and many abuses I've taken and affinities feel overwhelmingly real when examined through a wider lens like this-- what created this, and what do I do with that? I find meaning and understanding there, political meaning and action, praxis, fraternity, not separation. I don't believe time is a forward march toward some end and I don't view culture as a hapless victim to the march, either.

Capitalism protects itself and shifts the goalpost on culture, the role of religion, even ethnicity when it can benefit from doing so. Rather, I want to remember the cruelty, and what it has come to define, and what becomes of people as a result, and what can be different. It reframes my suffering but it also gives me room for more than that. I reorient myself through understanding this.

If culture in a colonised country has any purpose at all, maybe it should be the lawless medium through which people strive to understand each other and their needs and what prevents them from satisfaction. Ideally unattached to larger machines but emboldened by their presence. "Self-determination" stands in opposition to the thing necessitating it.

I don't want to take it for granted. To the best of my ability I do refuse these methods of and reject the hollow promises of assimilationism. I adamantly refuse to be united only through the absolute worst things about our governments, because if that is so, then there are few differences between Ireland and the UK as well.

In a 2013 article for the Irish Times, the author describes the then-new exhibition (presented as a dual and traveling exhibit in the northeast US and in Ireland) about the influence and scope of James Connolly's time living in America,

A champion in particular of the rights of foreign-born workers, Connolly was scathing of American individualism in his writings and wrote angrily about how the country’s capitalist leanings benefited only a minority. The shockingly poor working conditions and living standards of workers were mirrored in Ireland and the US during the first decade of the 20th century.

Believing that the American Dream and its offer of equal opportunities for all was illusory, he described the Statue of Liberty in the Harp in scornful terms:

"It is placed on a pedestal out of the reach of the multitudes; it can only be approached by those who have the money to pay the expense; it has a lamp to enlighten the world, but the lamp is never lit, and it smiles upon us as we approach America, but when we are once in the country, we never see anything but its back."

And concludes with a quote that fortunately doesn't quite mitigate the effect,

“We are not suggesting that the American labour movement influenced what was happening in Dublin, or that the Irish in the United States dominated labour leadership, or that James Connolly engineered any part of it,” said Wolf. “What we want to consider is how much these movements were fluid and interactive, how they reflected the worldwide plight of poor working people, how . . . information between labour agitators was flying freely back and forth across the Atlantic. We want to make it clear that Ireland was not isolated, and that the Lockout did not happen in a vacuum.”

To close,

Frankly, it's weird to be completely fine with and substantiate ones own position as an "authentic" Irish person by way of the geographical, generational, and intangible mental border between mainland and diaspora… And then turn around and feel somehow different about the border between ROI and NI citizens on the same terrain.

Coercive forces don't occur as a natural byproduct, and they are not unique to a particular country. Wealth and power needs no culture and even stands in place of culture and contrary to it. Wealth and power will shift culture not as natural evolution rooted through time and practitioners but purely at its whim, to its ends. And this should be all the more reason to reject it. I do think Irishness takes some work, if the problems we have are a fracturing of memory then it takes the sharing of memory and cultural practitioners, and even the language requires a reorienting of the self within the world. And I won't deny that Ireland feels like home in a way that transcends reason. "Feels" is too small a word for how it moves through me. And language can be carried with us anywhere, if we try.

When prioritising a connection to land, it is seemingly easy for more privileged people to turn to ethnonationalism and invent ways to tell the difference between pure ethnicities and not-- valourising purity and tradition such that genocide or extinction becomes permissible.

And for that reason, I'm not interested in having my Irishness litigated by people who ultimately are only interested in their own Irishness as an enforcement of borders.

#irish america #writing #éire #Éire #ireland #blistering takes cooled #marxach #marxism #anticapitalism #james connolly #edward said #mental illness #trans #antifascist #working-class history

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