Preface

Abstract

When I was growing up in the 1950s, in New York’s borough of Queens, in St. Patrick’s parish (the church’s administrative grid still serving then as our global positioning system), the question of national origins often came up. At such times, my mother, Grace Duggan, would assert that we were “Irish- American”—the stress in her voice, accompanied by a nod of her head and a just-perceptible squaring of her shoulders, falling decisively on the latter element of the term. In that little apartment, the only sign of the “Irish” in Irish-American was a shillelagh, said to have been brought from Ireland by my father Raymond’s father Frank. Aside from the shillelagh, nothing in the apartment attested to the Irish background of its three inhabitants. Catholicism was everywhere—prayer cards, rosaries, crucifixes, a holy water font at the front door—but Irishness, nowhere. No books about Ireland were read, no Irish music was played, nothing remotely Celtic decorated thewalls, or, in the form of jewelry or clothing, ourselves. Neither of my parents had been to Ireland or expressed any desire to do so; neither had any specifically Irish interests or were affiliated with any Irish groups; neither celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in any way other than watching the parade on television, which was almost unavoidable if television was to be watched at all, given the few channels available in those days.

There are few real Irish people in the United States. They know little about authentic Irish culture, and care less. The Irish American is a victim of cultural disintegration, as much so as the Mayan Indian. We have to go back to the beginning, to learn again what it means to be Irish.

—Brian Heron

I am Irish and Irish Americans always irritate me. They pretend to be Irish when in fact they are Americans through and through.

—Bob Geldof

The tricksy tiny hyphen … is used quite distinctly to connect (or separate) individual words.

—Lynne Truss