Practically everyone must know
that the great migration of the Irish to America took place after the terrible
potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. However, even before that disaster
the Irish had been the subject of persecution ever since the Protestant
Reformation in the sixteenth century after King Henry VIII seized control of
the English church.
The Irish were longtime enemies of
the English and when Henry, who considered himself King of Ireland as well as
England, attacked their thousand-year-old faith the enmity only grew worse.
Henry’s daughter Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to subdue the Irish Catholics
throughout her reign. After the Puritan revolution in England in the
mid-seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed Irish resistance.
By the end of the century William and Mary, after driving Mary’s Catholic
father James from the English throne delivered another devastating blow to the
Irish at the battle of the Boyne.
The almost perpetual Irish
resistance led the English and their Protestant friends in Ireland to pass
penal laws that had the effect of depriving most Irish Catholics of all their
rights including the right to their own confiscated properties. Many Irish left
their homeland for good in the century before the great famine. They were
sometimes called the “wild geese” and many of them made a name for themselves
in Europe. In the nineteenth century the ruling family in Serbia was the
Obrenovich family, heirs no doubt of some Irish O’Brien. Years ago Ed
Obradovich played linebacker for the Chicago Bears. His family must have come
from central Europe but there must have been a Brady ancestor. I recall meeting
a Polish American priest whose name, Okonski, must have derived from O’Conner.
When the Irish came to America,
they didn’t starve because of the availability of jobs and land. Nevertheless,
despite separation of Church and State in America, the Irish were still objects
of prejudice and discrimination primarily because of their Catholicism. An American historian once argued that the most long lasting and abiding
prejudice in America was directed not against Jews or Blacks but against
Catholics. That assertion may be disputed by some but the KKK was so called
because its hatred was directed against Koons, Kikes, and Katholics.
Just because a national or ethnic
groups have been victimized by prejudice and discrimination does not mean that
they themselves cannot practice such behavior when given the opportunity.
Growing up in New York City in the 40s and 50s I vividly recall that only Irish
need apply for membership in the City’s Transit Workers Union. I have never
forgotten the resentment of my mother in law when her Italian parents were told
by an Irish priest that they did not belong in predominately Irish St. John’s church
and that they should attend the Italian church in town.
Still, the success of the Irish in
America means that we all are in their debt. I would just like to give a few
personal examples. I was born and raised in the Woodside section of Queens, a neighborhood
after WW2 made up largely of the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants. My best friend was my cousin Pete whose
father’s ancestry was Irish and German. Pete’s father, my Uncle Pete, was a New
York City policeman who always seemed all Irish to me, and so did my cousin
even though his mother was Italian. My next best friend was Dermot (Dermie)
Woods whose family was very Irish. Both of Dermie’s older brothers had served in
the Navy during the war.
St. Mary Help of Christians, my
elementary school, matched the ethnic make up of Woodside. There were some
Italian kids in my class but the majority was Irish. I still remember Richie
Moylan, John Regan, Tom Fay, Charley Dunphy, and top student Pat Ryan who would
go on to become a Jesuit priest and get a doctorate from Harvard in Islamic
studies. Of course, most of the nuns were of Irish ancestry. They were of the
order of St. Dominic and their formidable black and white habits helped them
keep almost perfect order in classes sometimes numbering over 50 students. Only
years later did I come to find out that many of them were barely out of their
teens and still attending college.
It seemed natural for me to follow
cousin Pete to Power Memorial high school in Manhattan. Power was a Catholic
school for boys run by the Irish Christian Brothers whose most famous graduate
would be Lou Alcindor, who would later call himself Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I
still remember some of the Irish brothers with great affection and respect.
There was Brother Hehir, my first home room teacher, a saintly innocent man who
was the butt of innumerable pranks and jokes by us “dirty little stinkers.” No
one fooled around with wise old Brother Gleason however. He was the Latin
teacher with a passionate love of ancient Rome. Many years later did I discover
that it was the Irish who had saved Western Civilization during the Dark Ages
when monks in the mold of Brother Gleason preserved and later revived the lore
and wisdom of antiquity. Finally, I remember Brother Conefrey who ran our
honors class and exposed us modern barbarians to the wonders of English literature.
For some reason that still remains
unclear to me I went to college at Fordham University, a famed Jesuit school in
the Bronx. The Jesuits had been founded in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of
Loyola, a young soldier from the Basque country in what is now northeastern
Spain, but the Jesuit fathers at Fordham seemed to be largely of Irish
ancestry. Nevertheless, in 1957 they taught and revered an old curriculum based
on a model devised during the Renaissance. We studied Western philosophy,
theology, history (eight credits in medieval history were required), rhetoric,
literature, and language under scholars named O’ Sullivan, O’Callaghan, Mc
Nally, Walsh and Clark.
Three cheers for the Irish on this
St. Patrick’s Day.
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