Being Irish

I could have picked another ethnicity to make the same point - being Greek, being Swedish - but the information about the Irish immigration to America is the most generally known.

I wrote in a recent post about our many group identities, noting that these are not as stable as we pretend. There was a long migration from Ireland to America in the 19th C. We picture this as a trickle growing to a flood at the time of the great famine in the 1840s and 50s, then subsiding. It is much more complicated, and when we assemble the pieces we have a clearer picture of how great a change in meaning it was for a person to think of himself as Irish in 1800 versus 1900. When we look nostalgically back at the Auld Sod, even if we have never been there, we think of the items of continuity. Instruments and music, foods, remembered historical events, accents and scraps of language, legends, and decorative items. Those items themselves change over time - what we think of as Irish music or Irish legends are not that similar to what even my parents' generation would have thought in their youth, because Celtic revival has brought back intentional elements from many centuries. Corned beef is more Irish-American, because it was a luxury for export in Ireland, not affordable by the Irishmen resentfully packing it. Thus even the supposedly solid ground is marshy.

There was considerable migration from Ireland well before the famine and well after it.  The numbers were about doubled, occasionally tripled to America in the most intense years. In 1800 an Irishman seeking fortune or even just survival might think "I could go to America," and would know some who had already done so.  He might first internally migrate to Dublin seeking work, or cross eastward and try to find work in Liverpool, Manchester, or London.  Australia and Canada were also possible.

There was also back-migration, of people returning to Ireland after having made money, or failing to make money, in one of those places. Some went back and forth a few times. They came back different. Their fathers and grandfathers would have thought of themselves as O'Tooles from County Wicklow or even from a small cluster of villages, but they would have thought of themselves as more generically Irish.  They would know different versions of the old songs, Irish music from Mayo never heard in Cork, and even Irish music written in London or New York.  They would have done entirely new jobs, seen different places, and not shared in the joys and sorrows of the events in the intervening years. They had married a woman from another part of Ireland who made food a slightly different way. Or was not Irish at all. To be Irish meant something different to them not only than it had to their grandfathers, but even their brothers and sisters.

To be Irish in New York in 1900 likely meant never having seen Ireland, and speaking little if any Gaelic. Yet they perceived themselves as a separate and identifiable group, and some still do. They would also know Americans who only vaguely knew they were at all Irish. "Oh is Cody an Irish name?  I always thought it was English."

This on top of the changes that happened to everyone in that century, as new technologies came into use and nationalisms became increasingly important.

Tangential note:  America has had the advantage in tying its heritage to ideas, principles, and written documents.  This is not entirely so, as Americans also define themselves according to historical events and geography, but it is more true of us than of others. As those abstracts become less unifying, I'm not sure what we have left, as even the history and geography are seen differently.  Even myths have their usefulness.