CHAPTER 43 Y Irish Families Monica McGoldrick The tis are a people of many paradoxes. While having a tremendous flair for bra- vado, they may inwardly assume that anything that goes wrong is the result of their sins. They are dreamers but also pragmatic, hard workers. They transformed themselves from rural peasants in Ireland into die-hard city dwellers in the United States. They are good- humored, charming, hospitable, and gregarious, but often avoid intimacy. They love a good time, which includes teasing, verbal word play, and sparring, yet are drawn to trag- edy. Although always joking, they seem to struggle continuously against loneliness, depression, and silence, believing intensely that life will break your heart one day. Although they are known for fighting against all odds, the Irish have also had a strong sense of human powerlessness. As a legacy of their heritage, perhaps, they have placed great value on conformity, compliance, and respectability, and yet tend toward eccentric- ity. Their history is full of rebels and fighters. They have supported liberal democracy but also an authoritarian religion. They often feel profound shame about, and responsibility for, what goes wrong, yet they characteristically deny or project blame outward. They are typically clannish and place great stock in loyalty to their own, yet they often cut off rela- tionships totally. Discussing Irish characteristics honestly may leave them feeling exposed and vulnera- ble, but it will also, I hope, be reassuring by giving voice to experiences that have often not been validated. I have tried in this chapter to be sensitive to the Irish fear of being judged negatively, which has plagued them for centuries, and at the same time I have tried to help to move past the Irish tendency to cover over negative issues by joking or denying them. THE IRISH DIASPORA Many traditional Irish characteristics can be traced to the geography and history of Ire- land, an island about the size of New Jersey located at the extreme western point of Europe; Ireland has much rainfall and few natural resources. For many centuries this 595596 we VII. FAMILIES OF EUROPEAN ORIGIN “marginal” country was dominated and exploited by the British. Irish history has included starvation, humiliation, and heartbreak, on the one hand—and on the other, a remarkable adaptive ability to transform pain through humor, a fierce rebellious spirit, and the courage to survive. The Irish diaspora since the mid 1800s has meant that although there are currently only about 5 million people living in Ireland itself, there are about 70 million people throughout the world with some Irish heritage; of these more than half, or about 44 mil- lion (one seventh of the population of the United States) claim some Irish ancestry (Gilfoyle, 2004), although many of these are Scots-lrish, described by Morris Taggart in Chapter 47. Separating the Catholic Irish from the Protestant Irish is, however, like most cultural categorizations, an oversimplification, because the Protestant Irish have influ- enced “Catholic” Irish culture profoundly. Many of those most often claimed as Irishmen were actually Protestant Irish: Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Swift, Beckett, O'Casey, Synge, Lady Gregory, and Charles Stewart Parnell. ‘The discussion here focuses on families that were traditionally Irish Catholic, who generally formed a group apart from the Protestant Irish in culture and values (Biddle, 1976; Fanning, 2001). The large group of Irish Protestants, mostly Scots-Irish (see Chap- ter 47), who immigrated to the United States had been planted in Northern Ireland in the early 17th century and did not identify themselves as Irish; they had the highest rate of out-marrying of any ethnic group in the United States and tended to eschew any sense of ethnic identity (Fallows, 1979). For centuries the British controlled Ireland, turning Protestant against Catholic under a series of codes called the Penal Laws. Catholics could not attend school or serve in the military or civil service. By converting to Protestantism a son could disinherit all his brothers. Marrying a Catholic deprived a Protestant land- owner of all his civil rights, and the rare Catholic Irishman who owned land was limited in the profit he could make and was forced by law to divide it among all his children rather than let the land remain whole (Ignatiev, 1995). THE IRISH IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT For centuries extreme poverty prevailed in Ireland. By the 19th century, rapid population increase, continual subdivision of the land, and exorbitantly high rents contributed to the coverdependence of the Irish on potatoes, which had become almost their only food, leav- ing them extremely vulnerable to failures of the potato crop. Such failures were the major precipitant of the massive Irish immigration in the 1840s that led more than a million Irish peasants to immigrate in less than two decades (Kennedy, 1983; Scally, 1995). Indeed, there was plenty of grain raised in Ireland during the years of the famine, which could have fed the whole population, but the British controlled the crops and chose to export it, while the peasants died by the millions (Kinealy, 1995). The British leader of famine relief said the great evil was “not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the Irish people” (Miller 8 Wagner, 1995, p. 29). The London Times declared that Ireland’s catastrophe was “a great bless- ing,” offering the “valuable opportunity for settling” once and for all “the vexed ques- tion of Irish . .. discontent” (Miller & Wagner, 1995, p. 29). No other country has given up a greater proportion of its population to the United States. And no other country has sent such a large percentage of single women as43. Irish Families wy 597 immigants (Diner, 1983; Nolan, 1989; Rossiter, 1993). In recent decades there was a new wave of immigrants from Ireland, many of whom came to the United States illegally, with little hope of changing their status. Like other groups of illegal immigrants, they had to rely on an informal work network and remain invisible within the larger society (Aroian, 1993). Although many Irish Americans continued to demonstrate concern for the fate of Ireland, the majority of 19th-century Irish immigrants thought of themselves more as political exiles of British oppression than as immigrants seeking adventure or economic opportunity (Foster, 1988). They moved away from the history of oppression and suffer- ing, and by the second generation thought of themselves primarily as Americans. Though they started out on the side of the oppressed in the United States, having been treated as. an inferior race in their own country, they soon learned that they could redefine them- selves as being of the dominant race in relation to people of color. They moved toward this redefinition of themselves as part of the dominant White group as quickly as they could (Ignatiev, 1995). Their experience varied widely according to the region in which they lived (Clark, 1988), but in general they adapted and flourished in the United States. They began to intermarry with other ethnic groups, although mostly with other Roman Catholics. Their Irishness was a sentimental part of their lives, and often they knew little of their heritage. Still, the Irish seem to have retained their cultural characteristics longer than most other ethnic groups (Greeley, 1977, 1981; Greeley & McCready, 1975), proba- bly because assimilation did not require them to lose their language, which they had already had to give up generations earlier. Their values permitted the Irish to accommo- date to U.S. society without giving up their deeply rooted culture, and Catholic schools run primarily by Irish nuns and priests transmitted Irish cultural values to generations of Irish American children, and even to non-Irish Catholic children. THE CHURCH For the Irish in the United States, just as in Ireland, the Catholic Church was the primary cultural and national unifier (Byron, 1999; Jacobson, 2002); unlike its place in the lives of other cultural groups, such as Italians, for whom family came first, for the Irish, the Church took precedence over the family. However, as McCaffery (2000) puts it, “Today Catholism no longer reigns as the core of their national or cultural identity” (p. 17), yet for generations after immigration the prejudice the Irish experienced in the United States drew the bonds between their religion and their ethnicity tighter. The role of the Church has deep significance in Irish history and Irish national identity. Early missionaries to Ire- land, such as St. Patrick, established a strong Church, which developed a cultivated reli- gious tradition that was the main source of culture for continental Europe from the 8th to the 10th centuries (Cahill, 1995). Later, amid the struggles with the British, religious loy- alty became closely tied with the aspirations of the Irish to regain their freedom. Even in the United States, the parish rather than the neighborhood defined the Irish community for generations. Unfortunately, the Irish church came to be dominated by Jansenism, a mystical movement with a grim theology, emphasizing the evil and untrustworthy instincts of human beings, rigid asceticism, sexual repression, and glorification of self- mortification, which had been expelled from France. Isolated from external influences, the Irish Roman Catholic Church became rigid, authoritarian, and moralistic, teaching