A Little Bit Irish

There’s an American adage that states: “Everyone’s a little bit Irish on St. Patrick’s Day”. This may be true, but as an American who happens to be of Irish descent, it’s way more complicated than that, for me.

My father was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1913. His father left Belfast for America in 1920, and established himself on an estate near Beverly, Massachusetts, where he cared for the horses and ran the stables. He was a member of the North Irish Horse regiment during WWI and, according to my grandmother, always preferred horses to people. My grandfather saved enough money to send for her and their four children two years later, proud of the fact that he was able to pay for them to travel in second-class accommodations on the ship. The family remained in Beverly for a few years before settling in New York City where they lived above the candy store they owned in the Bronx.

My maternal grandmother was born in Dublin in 1898 and her family emigrated to New York City in May 1912. They had originally booked a passage on the Titanic, but the psychic genes apparently run deep in this branch of my family tree and one of my grandmother's aunts had a premonition that foretold a tragedy connected to the voyage. My great-grandfather decided not to risk it and changed the tickets. Whew! I wouldn’t be here to tell you the story if Aunt Kate hadn’t warned them, or if Grandpa Frank hadn’t heeded the warning.

So, my father was Protestant from Northern Ireland and my maternal grandmother was Catholic from Dublin (her family was originally from Wexford and Wicklow). My mother met my father in the spring of 1942 at a USO dance in New York City. Not long after, she broke off her four-year engagement to a perfectly suitable Catholic Italian American, and married my father three weeks later. To say it didn’t go over well with my grandmother is an understatement. In an attempt to stop the my mother from marrying "a Black Irish", my grandmother locked my mother in her room on her wedding day. An explanation of what my grandmother meant by that term can be found here.  

https://www.irelandbeforeyoudie.com/who-were-the-black-irish-full-history-explained/  

I don’t know any of the other details, but she was apparently unsuccessful because my parents were indeed married that day.

As you can imagine, my father's family was equally unhappy about this development. Six months after my parents married, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and my father was called back up into the military and deployed to Hawaii just before Christmas that year. He watched the Catholic soldiers receive the benediction before being shipped off to Japan, decided it sounded like a good idea and converted to Catholicism. I am sure this pleased my Catholic mother. His own Protestant mother, probably not so much.

From that point on, my parents never lived in New York City again. My father remained in the military (first the Marines, then the Army), worked his way up to the rank of Major and they lived all over the world. They were not Irish, they were American. Well-traveled Americans who embraced the people and the culture, wherever they were. They carried a little bit of every place they’d been with them.

My dad retired from his military career before I was born so I never got the opportunity to travel. I grew up in Killeen, Texas, the city next to the Army base, Fort Hood. I’m a native Texan, but not really a Texan since my parents weren’t. They were from everywhere and nowhere by this time, as were most of their friends and neighbors. Killeen was a true melting pot. The kids I grew up with were a mix of ‘old Killeen’ families, and military brats whose families were either stationed there temporarily, or decided they liked the area and stayed, like mine did. They came to Killeen from posts in Germany, mostly, but some had been stationed in Japan and Korea. It all sounded wonderfully exotic to me.

I grew up knowing my mother was Irish and that my father was born in Belfast. That may sound like a strange way to phrase it, but it is the most accurate way I can think of. I once asked my father if he was Irish. He responded “no, I’m Presbyterian”. I’m pretty sure he was joking and while I didn’t entirely understand the reason for his response, I got the gist and never asked him again. He never spoke about his life before I came along. Not about Ireland, his family, their immigration to America, the wars he’d fought or the places he'd been. By this point in his life my father had learned to live in the moment. My mother mostly followed suit, so I grew up with parents who had basically made themselves adult orphans out of necessity. My mother was close to her two sisters so I had a sense of that side of my family but they were one-hundred-percent New York City girls when they got together.

The irony isn’t lost on me that years later I was able to obtain my Irish passport because my father was indeed Irish, making me a foreign-born Irish citizen by their rules.

When I was growing up, St. Patrick’s Day was the only time there was anything remotely ‘Irish’ happening in my world and even then, it was the Americanized version of the holiday. I wore green (so I wouldn’t get pinched because no one ever believed you if you said you were wearing green underwear), I sang ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ to myself while looking for faeries in the thick patches of dark green clover that appeared on the lawn well before the grass woke up, and I dreaded the dinner of corned beef and cabbage my mother would boil to the point of no return later in the afternoon. (I still detest corned beef and cabbage.) My mother wore a green leprechaun pin on her collar when we went to mass (it is a holy day of obligation in the Catholic church), wished everyone ‘Éirinn go Brách’ and we called it a day.

With this background, it was easy for me to romanticize my Irish roots. I’d imagine the people I’d never met who spoke in a lovely Irish lilting brogue, tended lush gardens and livestock on farms with thatched-roof houses or lived in quaint cities along cobblestone streets, moving through their gentle lives among all the rolling green hills of the Emerald Isle. I know now that this couldn’t be further from the truth. My father’s family faced daily dangers from the fighting and civil unrest that overtook their gritty, industrial Belfast neighborhood. He never spoke about it and was distanced from his family, but I later understood why they left. My mother’s family likely left Dublin for economic reasons that weren’t immediately resolved by the move, but most of the generations that followed fared better than the earlier ones. These are the same reasons most immigrants set their sites on America and my family were no different.

I made a trip to visit my father’s last two living sisters in the late 1990s, specifically to learn whatever they could tell me about their family. For two days they filled me in with their version of the missing family details as they remembered, and the time with them gave me a sense of connection to my father’s people I’d never had. If I could give you one piece of advice it would be to make time and ask your aunts to tell their stories and write them down. Do not wait.

I later began to understand the complexity and abject horror of Irish history while researching my family tree. When studying Irish paganism, I learned the role both England and the Catholic church played in the genocide of Irish culture. Most of my Irish family surnames have been anglicized. The English and Scottish people who moved, or were moved, to Ireland married into my Irish family throughout both sides of my family, as was the case throughout Ireland’s history. Were they both the oppressor, as well as the oppressed, taking the land and the language as well as the names? Or, were they like my more modern Irish family in America, marrying Americans because that’s where their life was now? Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it, but my parents were an anomaly of an entirely different sort. They took our history and shook it like a kaleidoscope, breaking the mold so my siblings and I had the opportunity to recreate our families into something unique and beautiful. My parents ended the generational trauma in our family before anyone even knew such a thing existed.

Today, I have conflicting feelings about St. Patrick’s Day. The child in me holds dear the magic of ‘feeling’ Irish while immersed in patches of clover, singing to the Fae. The adult in me detests St. Patrick the man even more that I do corned beef and cabbage, but the one thing I know for certain is I’m only one generation removed from Ireland. I’m a lot more than just ‘a little bit Irish’ and I understand and appreciate what this means.

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