In 2013, we are led to believe, the country will be revelling in a year-long celebration of its diaspora. They’ll come ‘home’, meet their extended families, visit their homesteads and drop huge sums of money on merchandise. This is the hope.
There are problems, though. Gabriel Byrne, former Irish cultural ambassador to the US and probable Keyzer Soze, thinks it’s a shakedown of emigrants with no real basis other than as a moneymaking scheme. He’s right there, actually, as everyone knows, even if their sensibilities were offended, in keeping with tradition, by Byrne verging on breaking the ‘only I can insult my family’ rule.
In 1988, Dublin celebrated it millennium, despite the fact that its millennium had actually occurred in 1841. Guess what was going on in 1988? Correct, a recession. This time, the festival doesn’t even have a flimsy historical basis. It’s just Leo Varadkar and Enda Kenny on a platform saying “no time like the present” to any Americans or Australians that might be listening.
If all Irish-Americans were as astute as Byrne, though, there wouldn’t be so many Carrolls gift shops around town, and they wouldn’t come at all. The problem he pointed out is, inadvertently, deeper, not so much with the cynical wheeler-dealership of the Gathering as with the vexed Irish attitude to its diaspora in the first place.
Every time an American says “I’m Irish” to an Irish person, it boils blood. “You’re not,” we might think. “You’ve never had a crisp sandwich. You’re not sitting around thinking about whether the team would be better if Trapattoni hadn’t alienated half of our creative midfielders. Your fucking politicians are still talking about cutting taxes.”
And that’s fair. If an Irish person said they were American because they had an American grandparent, they’d be considered either stupid or pretentious to a ridiculous degree. Because nationality is not hereditary. It’s both absorbed and performed on a daily basis. It’s not like we speak Irish any more. To be Irish now, you have to live a protean but real set of cultural markers. You might even say that resentment of Irish-Americans is one of them.
But consider that Byrne is right about another thing, too. Irish-Americans really do feel a ‘deep, spiritual connection’ to Ireland, whether or not they have any idea what life and attitudes are really like here. It’s in good faith. America lives by the rule of the market, and if Irishness is still so important as a substratum there, then it must be doing something right in terms of its appeal.
They’re not really saying they’re Irish, either. They’re saying they’re Irish(-American), they’re just not pronouncing the last bit. It’s a nation of immigrants, and that’s how you say it. But if they feel the urge to find their family here, more so than in Germany or Holland whose diasporas were subsumed more quickly into the American whole, why should we resent that? Nobody’s mad at Swedish people on weekend breaks.
