GAZETTE COLUMN: THE SPIRIT OF THE IRISH by John P. Flannery

County Mayo - western coast - home to Flanebragh (Flannery)

My maternal grandmother, Catherine McCoy, was born in Ireland on May 9, 1897 and was baptized according to the Rites of the Catholic Church in the Church of St. Patrick, Crossmaglen, in the County of Armagh. 

Even in her sixties, you were certain she must have just breezed in from Ireland the day before because, what this delicate lady described, in her slight brogue, with blazing blue eyes, was a life-like picture of honest hard working folk, in Irish villages and towns, who helped each other and trusted in their faith to make it all right. 

Catherine lived her life in America – as her Church would have it.  But life in America didn’t begin when she was Sixty -- as one who heard her might suspect.  Catherine left Ireland by boat for New York with her parents when she was only six years of age.   She saw Ireland, in all its wonder and sorrow, through her father’s eyes, in many dinner table conversations, as she came of age in America.  That’s why she could never leave behind the spirit of Ireland born in her and nurtured by her parents.  It defined who she was.

Irish who were not born in Ireland, and have never been to Ireland, feel like they have never left the place, and that somehow it defines or shapes their character, and makes them who they are.  They find their courage, their grit, their skill with words, their love of people, and their faith, in their Irish ancestry.  They tap their feet to Irish tunes, strain to mimic a word of Gaelic to find a soulful connection, swear to their fighting prowess, and swell with pride before the Irish tri-color flag representing the division between north and south separated by a white bar, signifying the elusive peace that all Irish desire.  I don’t mean by this to suggest that these Irish are not Americans.  But they are tied to that distant windswept island by one of those fabled Irish knots you’ve seen in the Book of Kells. 

To put this in perspective, in America, there are 34 million persons who have an Irish family tree, a branch through the Atlantic, to an Irish County and village – and that’s nine times the present population of Ireland itself. 

The Irish in America will tell you, at the drop of a hat, of their historic role in the American Revolution and every war since and in politics as well and how one-quarter of our Presidents had Irish ancestors.  Yeats wrote, “It is an Irish curse to dream things the world has never seen.”  But the Irish also believe that they make their dreams come true.

Every year, St. Patty’s Day invokes the tugs and ties to Ireland for the Irish diaspora.  For years, I was asked if I’d been “back” to Ireland – as if I’d been born there.  So I have gone to see Ireland for myself.  What I found was a green that’s unimaginable, roads so narrow that the bushes and trees sometimes brush both sides of your car, horses so grand and strong you need only stay out of their way if you hope to ride them, and a people so friendly and talkative that even a request for simple directions down the road could prompt a Joycean dialogue about the surrounding region and its history. 

           

          The beauty of the Irish is that you truly need not even have an Irish ancestor on St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate.  After all, St. Patrick himself was the son of a Roman-British army officer, and thus not Irish at all.  So, on his day, all are Irish in spirit, in the spirit of St. Patrick, who celebrated what’s best in each of us.