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FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 CANADA $4.95 / U.S. $3.95
SAINT BRIGID: Ireland’s Lady of The Gaels
NEVER FORGET U WHERE YOM CAME FRO edy —Joe Kenn
THE HEIR OF CÚ CHULAINN: Wexford Hurler Lee Chin AN IRISH AMERICAN ODYSSEY: The 19th Century Travels of Artist William James Hinchey TARA SULLIVAN: The Boston Globe’s Newest Sports Writer PLUS The Story of W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Ireland’s Most Famous Airman
Why the Dream Will Never Die CONTINUING THE KENNEDY LEGACY IN POLITICS, CONGRESSMAN JOE KENNEDY III IS MAKING A NAME FOR HIMSELF AS A CHAMPION OF THE UNDERDOG. COULD HE BE THE NEXT KENNEDY PRESIDENT?
JOE KENNEDY INTERVIEW BY NIALL O’DOWD
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contents | Vol. 33 No. 2 February / March 2018
Features
28 Why the Dream Will Never Die
Congressman Joe Kennedy III carries on the family legacy in politics. By Niall O’Dowd
34 The Mary of the Gaels
St. Brigid’s powerful determination and kind heart paved the way for Ireland’s international reputation for hospitality. By Rosemary Rogers
HIGHLIGHTS
50
Irish Eye on Hollywood
28
The Mara sisters, Michael Flatley’s spy flick, John Cusack’s Irish western, and more. p. 14
38 Setanta’s Successor
The rise of Wexford’s Lee Chin and his athletic prowess. By Dave Lewis
Hibernia Arts
42 A 19th Century American Odyssey
How Dubliner William James Hinchey painted his way into the American history books. By Jack Morgan
38
48 From Padua to Kiltartan Cross
A poetic tour inspired by Yeats’s elegy to Ireland’s most famous airman. By Philip Kokotailo
Limerick Girls
Remembering The Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan.
54 Shipping Up to Boston
Tara Sullivan, die-hard Jersey sports fan and Irish dancer, is the Boston Globe’s new sports reporter. By Kristin McGowan
p. 22
Manhattan Beach
56 Roots: The Kennedys
The history and legacy of one of the most recognizable Irish families. By James G. Ryan
Rosemary Rogers reviews Jennifer Egan’s new historical novel. p. 57
34
58 Motherfoclóir
How a Twitter account and a new book is making the Irish language cool again. By Sharon Ní Chonchúir
The Last Word
44
60 Shamrocks and Salsa
A celebrant of Irish and Mexican culture, Jerry Cox spent his life ministering to California’s immigrants. By Mark R. Day
Irish drag queen Panti Bliss and Harry Potter’s Evanna Lynch will take to the stage in New York this year. p. 16
22
62 Sláinte! Pancake Tuesday
The Catholic tradition of Fat Tuesday takes a sweet and fluffy form in Ireland. By Edythe Preet
66 Family Photo Album
Photographer Kit DeFever on his father’s Navy years aboard the U.S.S. Breton, which carried a convalescing young JFK home from WWII.
Irish America Magazine ISSN 0884-4240) © by Irish America Inc. Published bi-monthly. Mailing address: P.O. Box 1277, Bellmawr, NJ 08099-527. Editorial office: 875 Sixth Avenue, Suite 201, New York, NY 10001. Telephone: 212-725-2993. Fax: 212-244-3344. E-mail:submit@irishamerica.com. Subscription rate is $21.95 for one year. Subscription orders:1-800-582-6642.Subscription queries:1-800-582-6642, (212) 725-2993, ext. 150. Periodicals postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Postmaster please send address changes to Irish America Magazine, P.O. Box 1277, Bellmawr, NJ 08099-5277. Irish America is printed in the U.S.A.
Kerry McElroy on U2, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, and the Irish trying to save America. p. 65
DEPARTMENTS 8 First Word 10 Readers Forum 12 Hibernia 20 Those We Lost 57 Books 64 Crossword
Cover Photo: U.S. House Office of Photography
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contributors |
Philip Kokotailo is dean of faculty at the
Roxbury Latin School in Boston, where he teaches English. The author of John Glassco’s Richer World: Memoirs of Montparnasse (ECW Press, 1988), he has a particular interest in the literature, art, and music of the early 20th century.
Kristin McGowan is a
former Irish America intern and current freelance writer living in Glen Rock, NJ, with her husband and three young daughters.
Jack Morgan is emeritus research
professor of English at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He is the editor of The Martyrdom of Maev and other Irish Stories by Harold Frederic (Catholic University of America Press, 2015), Joyce’s City: History, Politics and Life in Dubliners (U. of Missouri Press, 2015), New World Irish: One Hundred Years of Lives and Letters in American Culture (PalgraveMacmillan, 2011), and other books and numerous journal articles. He lives in Winsted, CT.
Dave Lewis is
from Rahway, NJ, and a graduate of Kean University, where he established the Kean Hurling Club. He is currently operations coordinator at Turlough McConnell Communications.
Sharon Ní Chonchúir
lives and works in west Co. Kerry, and much of her writing is concerned with the changing face of modern Irish culture. She is a fluent Irish speaker.
Rosemary Rogers co-authored,
with Sean Kelly, the best-selling humor/ reference book Saints Preserve Us! Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You'll Ever Need (Random House, 1993), currently in its 18th international printing. The duo collaborated on four other books for Random House and calendars for Barnes & Noble. Rogers co-wrote two info/ entertainment books for St. Martin’s Press. She is currently co-writing a book on empires for City Light Publishing.
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the first word | by Patricia Harty
The Dream That Never Dies
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Vol. 33 No. 2 • Feb. / Mar. 2018
IRISH AMERICA Mórtas Cine
Pride In Our Heritage
“As the first of the racial minorities, our forefathers were subject to every discrimination found wherever discrimination is known.”
– Robert Kennedy speaking at a Friendly Sons of St. Patrick Day dinner in Scranton, PA
t is fitting that we have Joe Kennedy III on the cover of this issue that marks the beginning of our 33rd year in publishing. Joe’s father, Joe II, the thenyoung Congressman from Massachusetts, was featured on the cover of Irish America in 1986, and he attended the Boston launch of the magazine that same year. What I remember most about our launch in Boston all those years ago is not the young Kennedy’s wide smile and great hair, but the fact that our car was stolen. When it was recovered, a week later, our personal belonging were still in the trunk but our boxes of magazines were missing. I never could figure out if it was a British plot, or if the thieves thought our magazines were more valuable than our clothes! As Irish America’s first family, we have featured many stories on the Kennedys over the years, including cover stories on Senator Ted Kennedy (1991) and Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith (1995), both of whom helped shepherd in the peace process in Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement (20 years ago this April.) Looking at the gridlock in today’s government, one can only wish that Ted were still alive. He was so willing to reach across the aisle in the spirit of bi-partisan compromise. And his advocacy was always on behalf of the poor, the elderly, and the handicapped (almost all the significant legislation affecting these groups has Ted’s his stamp on it). So it’s comforting to see those same political ideals reflected in young Joe Kennedy’s work today. In speaking out on behalf of immigrants and minorities, Joe is following the family tradition. His grandfather Robert Kennedy, speaking at a Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner in Scranton – his first public appearance after the death of President Kennedy – talked of the discrimination the Irish had faced as “the first racial minorities,” and he asked his audience to be mindful of “the walls of silent conspiracy that block the progress of others because of race or creed, without regard to ability.” What makes the Kennedys such great politicians and champions of the underdog is the knowledge they have of their own family’s early 8 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
struggles in America. In that respect, there is one person who often gets overlooked by the general public, and that’s Bridget Murphy. If Niall O’Dowd walked away from his Joe Kennedy III interview with the catchphrase, “Why the Dream Will Never Die,” it’s because Bridget Murphy wouldn’t let it die. Bridget (who is said to have hated her name because all the Irish maids were referred to as Biddys or Bridgets) immigrated from Wexford to Boston in 1848 and married her fiancé, Patrick Kennedy, on September 26, 1849. In seven years, they had five children – three girls and two boys. John, their first son, died before he reached the age of two. And within a year of John’s death, Patrick would be dead too, having succumbed to cholera, which was rampant in their East Boston neighborhood. As a young widow with four children to support, Bridget couldn’t give in to her grief. She ran a small shop down on the waterfront and kept her family together. And her American dream of a better life for her kids did come true. Her remaining son and youngest child, Patrick Joseph, “P.J.,” who left school at 14 to help out his mother and sisters in the shop, went on to become a successful businessman and serve in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and in the Senate. Bridget died in December 1888 having lived long enough to see the birth of P.J.’s first child, Joseph Patrick “Joe” Kennedy, who was born in September of that year. Could she ever have imagined that Joe’s son John would become the President of the United States, the first Catholic ever elected to the office? The Kennedy story is an American dream story, and an immigrant story. It is full of great achievements and unbearable tragedy, but most of all it’s a story of grit and determination and of rising above life’s sorrows. It’s a story that began with Bridget Murphy. So, here’s to you, Bridget. You are not forgotten. Like Saint Brigid herself, you were full of determination and courage, and you passed it down. It helped future generations overcome their own sorrows, and still have a care for others. Mórtas Cine
Founding Publisher: Niall O’Dowd Co-Founder/ Editor-in-Chief: Patricia Harty Vice President of Marketing: Kate Overbeck Deputy Editor: Adam Farley Art Director: Marian Fairweather Advertising & Editorial Coordinator: Áine Mc Manamon Copy Editor: Olivia O’Mahony Financial Controller: Kevin M. Mangan Editorial Assistants: Mary Gallagher Dave Lewis
875 Avenue of the Americas Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 TELEPHONE: 212-725-2993 FAX: 212-244-3344 E-MAIL: submit@irishamerica.com Subscriptions: 1-800-582-6642
www.irishamerica.com
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letters | readers forum Regarding Douglas Hyde
County Roscommon: Ireland’s Lake District
Strokestown Manor, County Roscommon.
I enjoyed your most enjoyable article on County Roscommon by Mary Egan. I was born in Roscommon near Strokestown and I was very much impressed by her factual description of the Famine, Boyle Abbey, Roscommon Castle, and Douglas Hyde. I was just hoping that in describing the lake districts in Roscommon that she might have mentioned the beautiful lakes of Kilglass and surrounding lakes flowing into the river Shannon. Congratulations on a choice piece of journalism.
Kevin Flanagan, submitted online
Kinealy, third-right, at the 2017 International Famine Walk in County Wexford.
When Irish Eyes Are Smiling
Chauncey Olcott, whose life I enjoyed learning about in Mr. Hauser’s feature, is interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx with another Irish American musical luminary, George M. Cohan.
Brian G. Andersson, submitted online
Roscommon’s Hungry Years
Informative piece by Christine Kinealy, a terrific historian. Anyone interested in a scholarly masterpiece that tells this story in full should read Robert Scally’s The End of Hidden Ireland.
Olcott (left) and Cohan (right).
Peter Quinn, New York, NY
Family Photo Album: A Visit to Santa I’m second-generation American, but your memories and mine are almost identical. Merry Christmas to you, and your staff. I love this magazine!
Kathleen Acker, submitted online
Visit us online at Irishamerica.com to leave your comments, or write to us:
Send a fax (212-244-3344), e-mail (submit@irishamerica.com) or write to Letters, Irish America Magazine, 875 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 201, New York, NY 10001. Letters should include the writer’s name, address and phone number and may be edited for clarity and length. 10 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
Some would claim John Moore of County Mayo, a leader during the 1798 rising, as first president of Ireland. Originally buried in County Waterford, he was reinterred in the 1960s with state honors in Castlebar, County Mayo. The inscription on his gravestone reads: “Ireland’s first president and a descendant of St Thomas More, who gave his life for his country in the rising of 1798 … By the will of the people exhumed and reinterred here with all honours of church and state.” His home, Moore Hall, in later time the home of his descendent George Moore, is now to be restored by the present Irish government. Patricia King, submitted online
It is true that Douglas Hyde was the founder of Conradh na Gaeilge, but it is incorrect to state that Hyde was the first president of Ireland because Hyde’s presidency, like that of others who have resided in Áras an Uactaráin, applied only to the southern Irish state, which encompasses about five-sixths of Ireland, NOT the whole nation. One could argue that Padraig Pearse was the first president of Ireland, the whole nation and all its parts.
Sean Curtin, submitted online
Bill McDermott: American Dreamer
Congratulations on having chosen Bill McDermott as the “cover boy” for your December / January issue. He is an a outstanding human being and clearly has never forgotten from whence he came. SAP’s involvement in Africa and with autism is gratifying and gives one hope.
Patrick McCormick, Colorado
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hibernia | news Band Aid Archive Donation
Over 400 G.A.A. Stars Unite to Fight Ireland’s Homeless Crisis
ob Geldof and the Band Aid Trust donated their archives to the National Library of Ireland in December, opening them to public viewing for the first time. The charity effort raised £8 million for famine relief in Africa with the release of the 1984 single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The following year, the organization hosted the first ever Live Aid concert, featuring the collaboration of popular groups including U2, Duran Duran, and Queen. Band Aid founder Bob Geldof characterized the gift as a token of “our thanks and gratitude to Ireland and the Irish” for the nation’s commitment to Band Aid’s mission and the library’s willingness
B
A
group of over 400 current and former G.A.A. players held a solidarity sleep-out in December to draw attention to Ireland’s homelessness crisis, raising more than $150,000 in the process. The sleep-out took place in 13 towns and cities throughout Ireland and abroad, including Dublin, Boston, New York, Quebec City, Wexford, Galway, and Cork. According to Focus Ireland, Ireland has seen a 24 percent increase in homelessness in the past year and has the highest child homelessness rate in Europe. “As G.A.A. intercounty players, many of us have been fortunate in our lives,” Dublin Gaelic football player Eamonn Fennell, who participated in the sleep-out at the Dublin General Post Office, said. “The G.A.A. is based upon communities and support. With the support of the communities across Ireland, we can make a real change.” – A.F. The sleep-out at Dublin’s General Post Office in December.
Mapping Irish DNA
n a study published late December Iresearchers in the journal Scientific Reports, have found 10 genetic
groupings that mirror the ancient and medieval boundaries of Irish kingdoms: Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connacht. The study was explored by a team of Irish, American, and British scientists that analyzed data from 194 Irish people with four generations of ancestry tied to specific regions on the island. Dr. Gianpiero Cavalleri (above), a co-author of the study from the Royal College of Surgeons, shed some light on how this came to pass: “The likelihood is that it’s a combination of things – a little bit of geography combined with wars or rivalry generates kinship in each distinct area.” As well as the wars and rivalries that the Gaels
George Michael, Bob Geldof, David Bowie, and Bono at the 1985 Live Aid concert.
to preserve the trust’s archives. On the receiving end, a number of Irish leaders expressed their own thanks for the donation – among them President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. In a statement, Varadkar reflected on Band Aid as a shining moment in Irish history in particular. “It showed Ireland and in particular an Irishman taking the lead in tackling hunger and injustice,” he said. The archive contains articles of publicity on the event, some physical donations, and letters from individuals public and private, including teenagers and younger. – M.G. PHOTO: DUNCAN RABAN / EMPICS ENTERTAINMENT
had participated in, the Ulster Plantation made an impact, as researchers found that population mixing occurred around the 17th to 18th centuries. A distinct Irish genetic landscape began during the Bronze Age when people living on continental Europe migrated across the English Channel and the Irish Sea. Out of the 10 more recent clusters, seven were found to be of Gaelic origin, and three had mixed Anglo-Irish ancestry. Notably, the study also found that Nordic ancestry comprised about 20 percent of the Irish gene pool, a greater share than previously thought, and a statistically significant higher share than in either English or Welsh. Slowly but surely, scientific and historical research are coming together to tell the true story of the Irish. – D.L.
PHOTO: EAMONN FENNELL / TWITTER
Ireland to Recognize Preferred Gender Pronouns in Registry of Foreign Births
n December, Ireland took further steps to grant tion Act, which recognized citizens’ preferred Ipolicy equality to transgender citizens by introducing gender and names for all purposes by the State. designed to formally recognize naturalized “Ireland was the first country in the world to citizens of the Republic’s preferred names and gender identity through the establishment of a register of gender recognition of foreign births. In a statement, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Coveney said, “For the first time, transgender citizens abroad will be afforded the same rights as all other Irish citizens to have their preferred gender recognized.” In 2015, Ireland passed the Gender Recogni-
12 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
recognize marriage equality by popular vote and we have a particularly progressive piece of legislation regarding transgender rights,” Minister of State for the Diaspora Ciarán Cannon, said. “Today’s announcement is a further step in the advancement of rights for our citizens overseas, who will now be able to self-identify in their preferred gender in the register of gender recognition of foreign births.” – A.F.
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hibernia | news he United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) T approved recognition of uilleann piping as an element of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” in early December. After initiating the application process in
March 2016, the Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht worked tirelessly for over a year to ensure the acceptance of Ireland’s first official request to UNESCO since ratifying the organization’s agreement to safeguard cultural heritage in 2015. Irish president Michael D. Higgins expressed pleasure at the victory in his public remarks, saying that Ireland’s artistic traditions “connect us in profound ways, weaving together cultural memory and contemporary vision.” Uilleann piping is a bagpipe tradition unique to Ireland that is over 200 years old. The practice has been largely disregarded in recent years, which is why groups like Na Píobairí Uilleann and the Armagh Pipers’ Club have combined their efforts on an international level to have it immortalized as A group of uilleann pipers in the 1950s, including prolific an essential piece of world heritage. – M.G. piper Leo Rowsome, front left.
Ireland’s First Astronaut Ready to Take Flight
ver since Dr. Norah Patten (below) visited NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, as a child, she knew she wanted to be an astronaut. Twentythree years later, the Mayo-born adventurer was selected as one of 12 scientists to train as an astronaut as part of Project PoSSUM, an astronautics research and education program that studies the Earth’s upper atmosphere and its role in its changing climate, which took place last October. “I’ve met many astronauts over the years and I am aware this is a long road. But I have spent my life focused on this goal of getting to space and for me, the journey has always been as important as the destination,” she told Irish news site Joe.ie prior to the training. “This is a fantastic opportunity for me to learn hands-on skills, to experience what it is actually like to operate in a pressurized spacesuit, and to feel the g-forces on my body that are experienced during a rocket launch. I really cannot wait.” Patten’s training during her time with Project PoSSUM included a variety of tests requiring her to wear special pressurized space suits in which she would experience up to four times her normal body pressure. As well as physical training, her educational background has her ready for space travel. Patten has a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from University of Limerick and has worked with big-time aeronautics institutions like Boeing and the International Space University. Though the program doesn’t guarantee space flight, she is now on a list of candidates available for the journey, one that, were she to take, would make her Ireland’s first astronaut. – D.L.
E
Celebrated Irish Author Eimear McBride Takes on Fellowship at Samuel Beckett Research Centre
AMcBride (right) has been named the ward-winning Irish novelist Eimear
inaugural recipient of the University of Reading Samuel Beckett Research Center Creative Fellowship, which provides exclusive access to Beckett’s archives. McBride, whose debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, will research at the center through the early summer, ultimately producing a work influenced by and honoring the works of Beckett. McBride also plans to document her personal experiences at the institute in a monthly record. In her first entry, she writes, “The remit is entirely open, which sounds wonderful and is… [Beckett’s life and body of work] have influenced, and generated, such vast arrays of artistic, academic, and critical response... So, the question is: where to begin?” Since 1971, the research center has held the largest public collection of archives of Samuel Beckett, including the author’s notebooks and first drafts. “This fellowship will ensure that the Beckett Archive, already a collection that inspires so much wonder and interest among writers and the public, becomes also a practical and inspiring creative workshop,” the center’s director, Stephen Matthews, says. – M.G. PHOTO: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Uilleann Pipes Acknowledged by UNESCO
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hibernia | irish eye on hollywood By Tom Deignan The Mara Sisters to Tackle Jesus and the Kennedys
he Irish American Mara sisters – Rooney and Kate – are not Jared just on their way to dominating Hollywood like few other Harris, Ciaran siblings have. They are also not afraid to court controversy along Hinds, and the way. Both have movies coming out soon that deal with issues Tobias Menzie in ABC’s The likely to get some Irish folks riled up. Terror First there is Rooney Mara, who has already worked with some of the biggest directors in the business, including David Fincher (The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Spike Jonze (Her), and Ireland’s own Jim Sheridan (The Secret Scripture). In March, just in time for Easter, look for Mara in the title role of Mary Magdalene, which also stars Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus. Such biblical he “Quality TV” era continues to provide Irish films are a staple of old-time Hollywood – think The Ten Commandactors with all kinds of work. ments and King of Kings – but in more recent years have been the In March, Northern Irish thespian Ciaran Hinds subject of intense controversy. From Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptawill team up with Jared Harris – former Mad Men tion of Christ to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, films about star and son of Irish Hollywood legend Richard Harris the life of Jesus and his followers – for the AMC thriller series The Terror. The show, have upset a wide range of folks based on the 2007 novel by Dan Simmons, (Irish Catholics among them), and chronicles the British navy’s attempts to Mary Magdalene may not be any locate and navigate the Northwest Passdifferent. Early word is that the film age, the waterway north of Canada takes a highly sympathetic view of bridging the Atlantic and Pacific Mary Magdalene, who has someoceans. The crew, not surprisingly, times been interpreted as a prostiencounters wonder – and danger. tute, and even Jesus’ Irish actor Ronan Raftery also stars. romantic lover. The film also takes Meanwhile, Irish actors Eoin a cue from the Hamilton school of Macken and Brían F. O’Byrne are casting and features a diverse interamong the stars of Nightflyers, a new national cast as Jesus’ followers, series from New Jersey-born Irish Amerincluding Academy Award nominee ican Game of Thrones creator George Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) R.R. Martin, which has already started as Peter and Algerian-French actor filming in Limerick. Boardwalk Tahar Rahim as Judas. Rooney Empire star Gretchen Mol is also feaMara will also appear in the tured in this show, which is a kind of decidedly more offbeat film Don’t Star Trek for the 21st Century. NightWorry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, flyers revolves around a crew of sciendirected by Oscar-nominee Gus van tists on a ship cruising the outer edges Zant, and which premiered in late Rooney and Kate of the universe in search of other life forms. January at the Sundance Film Mara Finally, the current PBS series Victoria is a Festival. Don’t Worry, based on a memoir by Irish thoroughly British show, and while the second season American cartoonist John Callahan, will receive a wider has received hum-drum reviews, the show does fearelease in May. ture an Irish plot line. The San Francisco Chronicle Meanwhile, in April, Rooney’s sister Kate will star as Mary Jo Kopechne in a new movie based on the terrible accident that cost recently wondered: “What has happened to this once Senator Ted Kennedy any shot he ever had at the presidency. promising effort to dramatize the very long and hisDirected by Irish American Utica, New York-native John Curran, toric reign of Queen Victoria?” the film is entitled Chappaquiddick, after the location of a car crash comparing the show’s second seathat left Kopechne dead when a car driven by Kennedy skidded off son to “weak, reheated PBS tea.” a bridge. Kennedy infamously waited hours before reporting the But Victoria does make an effort accident and Kopechne’s death. Questions about the incident would to chronicle how the British dog Kennedy for years, and it was among the factors that sunk his responded to the horrors of the presidential ambitions by 1980. Chappaquiddick also stars Jason Irish Famine, and features Irish Clarke (Brotherhood, The Great Gatsby) and Jim Gaffigan. characters such as Miss Cleary Further down the road, Kate will appear in a new Ryan Murphy (Tilly Steele), who work for the royal family but worry about starvmusical/drama TV series for FX entitled Pose, which will look at a ing family members back home. broad cross-section of Manhattan life in the 1980s.
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The Golden Age of Irish Prestige TV
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Novel Adaptations for Irish Writers
Flatley and McGinty Are Dancing to the Big Screen
wo accomplished Irish artists – a musician and a dancer – are trying to cross over into movies. World-renowned Irish dancer Michael Flatley is putting together a film in Barbados (nice work if you can get it), where he’s also been photographed relaxing on a ship in between shoots. Flatley, now 59 and retired from the rigors of Irish dance for a few years, is planning to not only star in, but also direct
T
McDermott
Lehane
rish authors have also been having a couple of good months in Hollywood. Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin recently snatched up the movie rights for The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott’s excellent recent novel. The Ninth Hour depicts the moments of grace and labor that fill up the lives of various mid-century Brooklyn nuns. The book’s action is set in motion by a tragedy involving an Irish immigrant and his Irish American wife. As always, McDermott presents a complicated, masterful depiction of Irish Catholic life. Then there is Dennis Lehane’s new book Since We Fell, which is also being developed as a movie. Like many recent best-sellers – Gone Girl, Girl on a Train – Lehane takes a close look at a women on the verge of a breakdown. Lehane’s protagonist is an internationally renowned jour-
English
nalist, who reaches a moment of crisis and has to figure out what her life – which on the outside Michael seems perfect – really adds up to. Flatley on set Lehane, of course, is no in Barbados last year stranger to Hollywood. His Boston Irish books Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, and Shutter Island have all been turned into big-time movie productions. Finally, journalist and crime chronicler T.J. English, whose books on Irish organized crime have set the standard on the topic, has a new book out that has already been and finance what has been described as a spy sold to Hollywood. English’s new thriller. Reports also indicate that Hollywood book The Corporation has been vet Eric Roberts is also on board – the acquired by Paramount. Currently, Barbadian ship, that is, as well as the film. The Revenant star Leonardo DiCaprio Meanwhile, Derry native Damian McGinty is attached to produce, while Benicio – who won a reality show contest to appear on del Toro is slated to play José Miguel the Fox TV hit Glee – is slated to appear in the Battle, Sr., the “godfather” of the 2018 Christmas film Santa Fake. McGinty Cuban organized crime syndicate at will play an Irish immigrant in New York who the center of English’s book. gets wrapped up in holiday hijinks that take him across the entire U.S. Fellow Glee graduate rish American star John Cusack is getting in touch with his Irish roots – Heather and his dark side – in Galway. Cusack is currently filming a western in Morris and Ireland entitled Never Grow Old, to be directed Breakfast Damien Cusack McGinty by Dublin native Ivan Kavanagh, who also wrote Club veteran the script. Cusack is reportedly playing a classic Judd Nelson black-hat villain named Dutch Albert. The film also star in also stars Emile Hirsch (Lone Survivor) as an Santa Fake, Irish immigrant named Patrick Tate. Tate is an which will undertaker who gruesomely profits from the naturally violence and death in his frontier town. But as feature a the violence becomes more and more threatening soundtrack to his own family, he has to decide whether he full of should sit back and leave things as they are, or McGinty step up and try to make some changes. Never tunes. Grow Old began shooting in Ireland late last year and could hit theaters later this year or early next.
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John Cusack Takes a Villainous Turn in Irish Western
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hibernia | arts Hayley Mills Stars in New Irish Play
P Enda Walsh Gets a Revival and a Premiere
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rish playwright Enda Walsh had a bit of a New York moment in January, with the joint stagings of two of his plays. In Manhattan, his 1998 play Disco Pigs is being revived for its 20th anniversary at the Irish Repertory Theater, starring Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch and Colin Campbell as the drama’s sole characters, Runt and Pig. The play, which runs through March 4, tracks one raucous night in Cork City as the two adolescents celebrate their 17th birthday. The New York Times, which lists it as a Critic’s Pick, gives fair warning of the manic content: “You may find yourself unsteady on your feet, with a vicious vicarious hangover, when its mayhem has come to an end.” The play also participated in the Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival, which ran during the month of January. Across the East River in Brooklyn, Walsh’s newest play, Ballyturk, made its American debut at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The play, which won the Irish Times Best Production award in 2015, received rave, if cryptic reviews: “I’m not going to pretend that I fully understood (any/all) but Enda Walsh’s BALLYTURK is standing ovationally mind blowing,” Irish TV presenter Ian Dempsey said. – A.F.
arty Face, a new comedy by Irish writer Isobel Mahon, made its OffBroadway debut as part of the 10th annual Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival in New York in January, starring Hayley Mills, of Parent Trap and Pollyanna fame. Directed by Amanda Bearse, the play is staged at the New York City Center and runs through April 8. It originally premiered in Ireland last year and had a sell-out national tour under the title Boom?. The story follows Mills’s character, a status-obsessed mother who crashes her daughter’s dinner party with her own food and a “suggestion” for her daughter’s new best friend. An all-female play, Party Face also stars Klea Blackhurst, Gina Costigan, Brenda Meaney, and Allison Jean White. – A.F.
An Irish Riot
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n February, New York City’s Irish Arts Center will stage a three-night run of one of the most unique Irish theater spectacles of the year. The production, called RIOT, won Best Production at the 2016 Dublin Fringe Festival and sold out shows in Sydney, Australia, in January. Starring legendary Irish drag queen Panti Bliss, the cabaret also features a host of aerial artists, Irish dancing, drag queens, and strippers. The show falls somewhere between a circus and performance art, unsurprising given that the theatre company behind it, THISISPOPBABY, is self-described as a consortium of “theatre makers, club creatives, and good time gurls” and rarely shies away from political overtones, queer ideas, and counter culture. The show runs February 15 to 17 at the New York University Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. – A.F.
Irish Wins at the Golden Globes
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he 2018 Golden Globe Awards were a smash success for Irish names in the movie business, with Saoirse Ronan winning Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for her starring role in Lady Bird, and Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri picking up four statues, including Best Movie – Drama. McDonagh himself won for Best Screenplay, and the film’s two top actors, Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, both won for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor – Drama, respectively. 16 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
Both recipients took the time to single out their Irish mothers in their speeches, with McDonagh even quipping, “I think she wanted Lady Bird to win!” As for the Academy Awards in March, Ronan and McDonagh both got nods – Lady Bird received five nominations, including Best Actress for Ronan and Best Picture, while Three Billboards was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for McDonagh. – A.F.
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hibernia | city links Danville and New Ross Poised to Become Official Friends
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ew Ross, County Wexford, is to be linked with a town in California where playwright Eugene O’Neill lived. O’Neill’s Tao House in Danville, California, near the San Francisco Bay, is preserved as a historic site. New Ross district manager Sinéad Casey said that in recognition of the great American playwright’s New Ross heritage, a proposal is in place to formally link the two cities as Friendship Towns. “This initiative is coming from Wexford County Council’s Arts department. The plan is only in paper but we want to bring the Friendship initiative to New Ross rather than let it go anywhere else. There won’t be any cost implications for the district,” Casey said. District director Eamonn Hore said the town manager from Danville will visit New Ross next year. He said friendship between towns is not as formal as twinning, but it does connect the towns in a meaningful way. “Danville is very similar in size to the New Ross district. The Eugene O’Neill Festival will start next October and I think it’s going to make this connection.” “It’s a no-brainer,” Wexford Councilor Larry O’Brien said. Councilor Oisin O’Connell agreed, saying the new links with Danville will build on the town’s links with America through the Dunbrody Visitor Centre, where the Irish America Hall of Fame is housed, and the Kennedy Homestead. He said President Michael D. Higgins has expressed an interest in the work of O’Neill, saying he could be invited to either the Friendship ceremony or the theatre festival if possible. Cathaoirleach Councilor Willie Fitzharris said: “It would be very possible.” – New Ross Standard Eugene O’Neill at his study in Tao House in Danville, CA, with his dalmatian.
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Running from Boston to New York for Charity
Tom McGrath speaks to reporters in advance of his Boston-New York run.
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om McGrath, an ultra-distance runner, can often be seen running all over Manhattan, whether he’s running in Central Park or busy running his bar and restaurant. McGrath, 68, has stamina for it all. He has so much stamina that he decided to run a marathon a day from Boston to New York in order to raise money for the American Wheelchair Mission. This run isn’t his first time running across the United States – he broke the Trans-Am record almost 41 years ago, running from New York to San Francisco in 53 days during 1977. His most recent endeavor was sponsored by many Irish American organizations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus. McGrath’s run, called “Miles 4 Miracles,” set out to change lives through mobility by helping the American Wheelchair Mission distribute wheelchairs to veterans’ hospitals, fire houses, ambulances, churches, and to the poor throughout the world. McGrath began his journey on December 1 in Boston, taking six days to complete the distance, where he finished at Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Lower Manhattan. “We made it. I came in a little worse for wear with the right leg flaring up,” McGrath wrote on Facebook following the run. “Not sure I could have gone another day, but thank God I was able to make it.” – D.L.
300 Years of Scots-Irish Immigration to U.S.
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his year marks the 300th anniversary of the first great wave of Scots-Irish migration to the United States, and over the next 12 months, several towns in Northern Ireland and the U.S. will be celebrating. In Aghadowey, County Derry, the Ulster History Circle will unveil a blue plaque to honor Reverend James McGregor and those that followed him to New England. In the U.S., Londonderry, New Hampshire, will celebrate the Scots-Irish’s settlement and the establishment of their town, originally named Nutfield. During the early 1700s, Scots-Irish Presbyterians were not allowed by law to hold office or conduct civil ceremonies such as marriages and funerals. The combination of few employment opportunities, little religious tolerance, and recent bad harvests led the Scots-Irish to the New World. Under the guidance of Reverend James McGregor (above), close to 500 Scots-Irish left to settle in the promised land of New England. (McGregor is the great, great, great, great-grandfather of former Secretary of State John Kerry.) Upon arriving in Boston Harbor, McGregor and his congregation were not welcomed by the Puritans and were left to establish their own settlements in the hinterlands. In addition to Londonderry, the Scots-Irish Presbyterians went on to become influential founding members of major New England hubs like Worcester, Massachusetts, and Casco Bay, Maine, which are also planning commemorations for the coming year. – D.L.
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hibernia | people Irial Finan to Retire from 30Year Career with Coca-Cola
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fter over 30 years of leading the beverage industry, Irial Finan (below), a native of Roscommon and a frequent honoree for our Business 100 list, is set to retire in March. Finan started his career at the beverage industry giant Coca-Cola in the 1980s as financial controller, later becoming finance director of Coca-Cola Bottlers, Dublin. Following his time in Dublin, in 1995, Finan was promoted to managing director at Molino Beverages, where he was responsible for expanding markets throughout the world. Under Finan, Molino reached new heights in his native country, Ireland, along with Romania, Russia, and Nigeria. Finan continued with his tradition of this kind of success in 2004 when he became president of the company’s bottling investments group and supply chain, as well as executive vice president after he managed the merger integration of Coca-Cola with Hellenic Bottling SA a year before in 2003. Since then, Finan has served as director on numerous boards, including the American Ireland Fund and the Smurfit Kappa Group. Coca-Cola president and CEO James Quincey expressed his gratitude for Finan’s hard work over the years: “I want to thank Irial for his leadership and dedicated service to our global Coca-Cola system over the last 36 years.” – D.L.
Samantha Barry at the 2017 Irish America Business 100 Awards with editor-in-chief Patricia Harty and publisher Niall O’Dowd.
Samantha Barry Named Glamour’s New Editor-in-Chief
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ew media paragon Samantha Barry has been hired as Glamour’s eighth and newest editor-in-chief. Barry, who is originally from Ballincollig, County Cork, is the epitome of Ireland’s burgeoning young emigrant work force. She is a regular recipient of Irish America’s Business 100 and Top 50 Power Women awards and has held positions at worldwide leaders in broadcasting and multimedia such as RTÉ, the BBC, and most recently CNN Worldwide, where she was the executive producer for social and emerging media. Her hire displays the shift that publisher Condé Nast is making for the 79-year-old magazine to focus on the ever-engrossing digital content market. Barry is entirely aware of this as she knows exactly the abilities that got her the job. Speaking to the New York Times, she said, “At the end of the day, I bring to the table being an expert in content.” In a statement, Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s famed artistic director and editor-in-chief of Vogue, expressed agreement with Barry’s confidence: “We realized that Sam would be the perfect editor for a new, more ambitious era of Glamour’s future. We cannot wait to see her vision unfold.” – D.L.
Irish American Director to Helm Washington National Opera
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imothy O’Leary (right) has taken the United States opera scene by storm as the recently-appointed general director of the Washington National Opera at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. O’Leary previously worked in New York City as a part of the management at the New York City Opera and was the first managing director of Gotham Chamber Opera. Most recently, he
Kennedy Center seen from the Potomac River.
served as the general director at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis. O’Leary is known for championing newly-created operas and enthusiastically claims this decade to be “a golden age” of new American works. Some of these works include Champion, an opera based around boxing and jazz, and Shalimar the Clown, based on
the Salman Rushdie novel of the same name. O’Leary earned a reputation in St. Louis for his strong support of the artists who write and perform in these new American operas and his great strides in interacting with the community surrounding the Opera Theater of Saint Louis. The lasting impact he made on the Opera Theater of Saint Louis piqued the interest of Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter. “He’s a very thoughtful leader,” Rutter, who handpicked O’Leary, told the Washington Post. As his track record suggests, this Irish American takes after the man in whose honor the home of the National Opera center was named. – D.L. FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 19
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those we lost | passages PHOTO: RTÉ
PHOTO COURTESY ANDERSON KILL PHOTO COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS
TOP: Liam Cosgrave with Eamon de Valera, 1973. CENTER: Jim Cullen. BOTTOM: Lawrence O’Shaughnessy.
Liam Cosgrave
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1920 – 2017 ormer prime minister of Ireland Liam Cosgrave died this past October at the age of 97 in Dublin. Cosgrave served as taoiseach from 1973 to 1977, during which time he was renowned for a firm stance against terrorism and for his skills as a diplomat. He is also remembered for his participation in the Sunningdale Agreement, a landmark negotiation in 1973 that is considered the primary stepping stone on the decades-long journey to the Good Friday Agreement. The son of W.T. Cosgrave, first leader of the Irish Free State, Liam established his own impressive career in Irish politics. He joined Fine Gael at the age of 17 and was elected to the Dáil Éireann just six years later, continuing to hold a position in the Irish government until 1981. His long career spanned several critical moments in Irish history, including the establishment of the nation as a republic in 1949 and its admission to the United Nations in 1955. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar publicly lamented Cosgrave’s loss in a speech delivered in the Dáil, Ireland’s parliament. “His entire life was in the service of the State, and he inspired so many with his quiet determination, courage and fortitude,” he said. Cosgrave is survived by children Mary, Liam, and Ciaran. His wife, Vera, died in 2016. – M.G.
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1945 – 2017 im Cullen, former president of Friends of Sinn Féin and prominent human rights lawyer most recently with the firm Anderson Kill, died in December at the age of 72. Cullen served as a U.S. Army general until 1996, when he retired as the Chief Judge of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals. Bearing a particular concern for Ireland and the rights of its people, Cullen was an essential force in helping to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement, and worked passionately to protect Irish Republicans in America, while always encouraging an American awareness of Irish current events. Born in Queens to Agnes Gorman of County Offaly and Patrick Cullen of County Sligo, Cullen attributed his personal penchant for justice to his Irish-Catholic upbringing. He received his law
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degree from St. John’s University in 1969, immediately after which he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private and was deployed to Vietnam. Cullen told the Irish Times in 2015 that he was turned by the Irish Republic’s need for representation while on a trip to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, after witnessing brutal treatment of the townspeople in Coalisland, County Tyrone, by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. In a statement, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams recognized Cullen’s fierce attachment to Ireland: “He was born in New York but his heart was in Offaly where his mother came from – and that bond remained ’til his death.” Cullen is survived by his partner, Catherine, children Tara, Kerry, Erin, and Sean, and eight grandchildren. – M.G.
Lawrence O’Shaughnessy
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1921 – 2017 awrence Milan O’Shaughnessy, a lifelong supporter of Irish studies programs in the United States, died in December at the age of 96. O’Shaughnessy was known most widely for his role as benefactor at the University of St. Thomas and St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Known as “Larry” to his friends, he was affectionately regarded for his commitment to the field of education and, specifically, to fostering an American understanding of the significance of Irish culture. He helped develop the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas with Eoin McKiernan, a frequent contributor to this magazine. O’Shaughnessy also backed the Irish American Cultural Institute in its nascent stages and served as associate editor of Éire-Ireland, the first journal to place a focus on Irish studies in the United States. The great appreciation O’Shaughnessy, whose paternal grandfather was born in Limerick, had for the land of his ancestors was recognized in the 1960s with his nomination to the post of ambassador to Ireland by Senator Eugene McCarthy, though he turned down the position due to the illness of his wife, Bonnie. His respect for the field of humanities and Ireland’s contributions to it is reflected most notably in the grant he created in 1996, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, which annually endows a poet from Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland with a $5,000 prize for their work. O’Shaughnessy’s proud tradition of philanthropy was instilled by his father, Ignatius Aloysius O’Shaughnessy, founder of the largest independent oil refinery in the U.S. Lawrence carried on his father’s legacy by continuing to support the University of St. Thomas, and expanded it in his efforts to improve the field of liberal arts. In addition to his wife, he is survived by five sons and daughters, and 21 grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. Speaking to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, his daughter, Molly, said, “All our lives we knew that the mind and the love of learning was the most important thing in life.” – M.G.
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hibernia | those we lost
LIMERICK GIRLS Remembering The Cranberries singer
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Dolores O’Riordan
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
By Cecilia Donohoe
(1971 – 2018)
was leaving the beer tent within yards of the main stage when The Cranberries came on. It was June 1994 and the band’s song “Linger” was a huge hit in the U.K., though I hadn’t heard of them when I bought my ticket for the Fleadh, an Irish music festival at Finsbury Park in London. For the past several hours I’d been soaking up the music of musicians I loved – The Saw Doctors, Christy Moore, Shane MacGowan. For a 23-year-old American girl who enthusiastically embraced her Irish heritage, things couldn’t get much better. So I whooped and cheered along with the crowd as Dolores O’Riordan rolled out in a wheelchair, her leg in a cast from recent surgery, guitar in her lap. As she began to sing, a good-looking Irish guy emerged from the beer tent. His name was Colin and I’d met him in a mutual friend’s kitchen that morning, before we all set off for the festival. He walked over and stood next to me. The Cranberries played 11 songs that day. “Put Me Down.” “Ode to My Family.” “Sunday.” O’Riordan’s plaintive voice sank low and then soared above us. Colin sang along, unselfconsciously. I gazed at his freckled arms and the strip of leather with a small blue cross hanging around his neck. “They’re from Limerick,” he told me, shouting over the noise of the crowd. “Did you know that?” I hadn’t known that. Earlier that day, within minutes of our meeting, Colin had told me that he was from Limerick City. The next time I was in Ireland, he’d said, I should come visit and he’d show me around. I’d said sure, oh yeah, that would be great, definitely. I was familiar with Mayo, Donegal, Galway, even Dublin, but Limerick – a word constructed of short, sharp syllables – was an unknown. I pictured a quaint
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PHOTO: EVA RINALDI / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
town, perhaps a single narrow street lined with shops and pubs. “Linger.” “I Can’t Be With You.” Colin and I stood closer together. His arm brushed mine. When the crush of bodies grew too stifling, he shoved them back, giving us breathing room. I hoped he’d put his arm around my shoulders. “How.” “Dreaming My Dreams.” “No Need to Argue.” After an hour, the set ended. O’Riordan smiled at the young, mostly Irish audience. Ecstatic, everyone hollered and applauded, having long ago risen from their seats on the grass to dance and sing. It was said The Cranberries were biggest thing to come out of Ireland since U2, and we basked in their display of ferocious Irish talent.
PHOTO: ALTERNATIVE ON MV / YOUTUBE
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Feckin’ brilliant. We joined the stream of concertgoers leaving the park. As one of our friends tried to flag down a cab, I mustered my courage and pulled Colin aside. “Do you have a girlfriend?” “No,” he said, a smile in his voice. “That’s good,” I said, and kissed him.
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imerick, when I did end up visiting a few months after meeting Colin, was bigger, busier, and much less quaint than I’d PHOTOS: IS LAND RECO imagined. Colin took me to a pub in town. RDS We walked past a fast food place on O’Connell Street, the main drag, called Supermac’s. A burly the most picturesque place in Ireland. man stood inside the door. “Is that a bouncer?” I Not the friendliest or most charming. But strangers asked. “You have bouncers in your fast food on the bus will compliment your baby; passers-by restaurants?” I was from the Bronx and thought will help you lug the baby’s stroller up the stairs to I was streetwise, but had never been in a the bank. The longer I lived in the city, the more I McDonald’s with a bouncer. understood why the natives were so proud of the Colin shrugged. “Yeah, for when the nightclubs band that was formed there. Everyone knew somelet out.” one who went to school at Laurel Hill with Dolores. Later, I read that Dolores O’Riordan and the n Sunday, I checked the news app on my band’s manager had met up outside Supermac’s phone. Dolores O’Riordan, dead at 46. shortly before she joined The Cranberries. Such an Forty-six? A year younger than I am, a year older ordinary place. I imagined her, a slight figure than Colin. In Finsbury Park that day, she was standing on the corner of O’Connell Street, soon only 22 years old. Obituaries report that her talent to be a megastar, but for the moment just a shy bore not only accolades but also demands, expecLimerick girl with an astounding voice that could tations, and critiques. At one point she struggled veer from a tender croon to a full-throated wail with an eating disorder. She worked and toured and back again. constantly. At the pinnacle of her fame, in the or two years, Colin and I traveled back and space of time during which I gave birth to two forth to see each other, depending on where children, she had three. Back pain prevented her either of us was currently working. Edinburgh, from performing for stretches of time. With the Frankfurt, Limerick, Southend-on-Sea, New York. passing of the 1990s, The Cranberries receded The Cranberries’ third album, To the Faithful from view. I hope she preferred it that way. Departed, was released in April 1996. O’Riordan’s These days, when my daughter attends music voice was everywhere you went. The album had a festivals, she takes photos of herself and her harsher, darker sound, but I loved “Salvation,” friends, and posts videos of her favorite bands’ about drug abuse, and “When You’re Gone,” an performances. The photos enable her to review the ode to a lover. In May of that year, I moved from experience in all its detail at the touch of a button. New York to Ireland so Colin and I could finally But I wonder if something is lost when the past is be near each other, and have a normal relationship. so easily proven, when evidence is always in hand. I envisioned us camping out at music festivals like Does a song on the radio carry the same enchantthe Fleadh, maybe taking a ferry for a weekend in ment? “Linger” will always spur memories of France. watching O’Riordan sing from a wheelchair, her But three weeks after relocating to Ireland, I powerful, beautiful voice a frame around me and took a pregnancy test. It came back positive. Colin the young man for whom I would move to Ireland, and I moved into a small flat on Davis Street, near with whom I would build a life. I don’t know what the Limerick train station. We had little money for I was wearing, can’t scroll through photos of my music festivals. Almost every day, I walked down younger self. I don’t mind. Blurry memories are O’Connell Street past Supermac’s. Limerick wasn’t no less sweet than sharp ones. IA
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LEFT: Dolores O’Riordan in March 2012. TOP: O’Riordan performs with The Cranberries at Woodstock ’94. ABOVE: The Cranberries first three chart-topping albums: Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (1993), No Need to Argue (1994), and To The Faithful Departed (1996). OPPOSITE BELOW: Cecilia and Colin in Dublin, Fall 1994.
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hibernia | events n Wednesday, December 13, Irish America magazine celebrated the 32nd annual Irish America Business 100 Awards with a dinner at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan. Bill McDermott, CEO of the global software giant SAP, delivered the keynote speech, recalling the first time he saw the inside of the club in the early 1990s: “I think about being in this room in the great city of New York, my favorite city, the city I was born in, the city I love with all my heart and soul,” he said. “I’ll never forget coming into this building for the first time to sell them a Xerox copy machine when I was 21 years old. And I was like, ‘Man, this must the kind of place you get to when you really make it, when you’re on top of the world.’ Can you imagine how I feel tonight?” McDermott, a third-generation blue-collar Irish American with roots in Roscommon whose father was a Con Edison cable splicer, received the House of Waterford Crystal Keynote Speaker Award. – A.F.
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1 Keynote Speaker Bill McDermott receives the House of Waterford Crystal Keynote Speaker Award from founding publisher Niall O'Dowd and cofounder and editor-in-chief Patricia Harty. 2 Bill McDermott delivers the keynote address. 3 Grainne McNamara, Ciara Breslin, honoree Ann Kelleher, and Caitlyn Hanlon-Correia, daughter of honoree Paul Hanlon. 4 Honoree Tamara McCleary with her mother Bonnie Schilling. 5 Irish tenor Ciaran Sheehan. 6 Honoree Martin Daly with guests. 7 Honorees James Delaney and Donald Colleran (right) with guests. 8 SAP Honorees Kevin McManus (left), Ted Sullivan (second left), and Andrew O'Flaherty (right) with guests. 9 Bill McDermott with Irish UN Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason. 10 Patricia Harty presents honoree Kate Kelly Smith with the House of Waterford Crystal Shamrock honoree award. 11 Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications for SAP, introduces Bill McDermott. 12 Honoree Kate Barton of EY with Patricia Harty. 13 Honoree Finnegan Patrick Kelly with Rosemary Rogers and Devon Kelly. 14 Consul General of Ireland to New York Ciaran Madden. 15 Honoree Ronan Dunne of Verizon Wireless. 16 Honoree Shane Naughton receives a raffle prize of Möet Champagne. 17 Honoree Kieran McGrath of CA Tech. 18 Honoree Ryan Olohan of Google Health. 19 Irish tenor Richard Troxell.
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hibernia | quote unquote “As a pilot in the @USNavy, I was trained to deliver nuclear weapons. EVERYTHING we did with these weapons was deadly serious. No jokes, no threats, no mistakes. Every soldier, sailor, airman and marine gets that.”
– Astronaut Mark Kelly responding to President Donald Trump’s assertion that his nuclear button is bigger than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s. Twitter, January 2.
“It’s a very demanding job and it’s a very intense place to work under any president – and this president added an element of excitement to it.” Mark Kelly with his wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2016.
“Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish Catholic union family, Catholic schools… Bannon venerated old-fashioned pols… And he hated modern politicians; they lacked, in addition to political talents, authenticity and soul.” – Michael Wolff writing of Steve Bannon in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt / January 2018), his incendiary account of the first six months of the inner workings of the Trump administration.
“Whenever [Lorne] would ask me what do I want or what do I feel strongly about, I would always say, ‘I really want to use my own accent as much as possible and I want there to be at least one Irish sketch in there.’”
– Saoirse Ronan on working with producer Lorne Michaels for her appearance as host of Saturday Night Live last December. IndieWire, December 9.
– Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, whose paternal ancestors emigrated from County Cork, speaking on Ireland’s Late Late Show with Ryan Turbidy, January 12.
“Now, maybe it’s my Irish Catholic upbringing, but you never want to [be perceived as] too greedy. Or maybe it’s just that as women, that’s our problem; a guy wouldn’t have any problem asking for $600,000 an episode. And as women, we’re like, ‘Oh, can I ask for that? Is that OK?’ I’d call Shonda and say, ‘Am I being greedy?’ But [Creative Artists’ Agency] compiled a list of stats for me, and Grey’s has generated nearly $3 billion for Disney. When your face and your voice have been part of something that’s generated $3 billion for one of the biggest corporations in the world, you start to feel like, ‘OK, maybe I do deserve a piece of this.’”
– Grey’s Anatomy actress Ellen Pompeo, who recently signed a deal with ABC that will earn her $20 million per year, making her the highest-paid television actor in the world. Hollywood Reporter, January 17.
“It’s really indiscriminate. ICE, in their aggressive tactics of detention, are going after the Irish as much as they’re going after any other nationality.”
– Ronnie Millar, director of the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston. Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (known by it’s acronym ICE) deported 34 undocumented Irish, an increase of 8 over 2016. There are an estimated 50,000 undocumented Irish living in the U.S. NPR, January 22.
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Why The Dream Will Never Die Joe Kennedy:
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Congressman Joe Kennedy is carrying on his family’s legacy in politics and making a name for himself as a champion of the underdog. Could he be a future President? By Niall O’Dowd
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in 2009), on message, and clean living (friends swear he orders milk in bars). But above all, he feels rounded, together, and genuinely interested. Our interview took place in his congressional office in Washington, D.C. While waiting, a slew of visitors made their way into his room. All came out smiling broadly. The Kennedy touch lives on. I just wanted to start off with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals legislation. You have been very passionate and outspoken about that. What do you think will be the ultimate reality?
I think we all know the right answer. We can see it in our own family stories – my family came here in coffin ships. One of the political highlights for me every year is the annual St. Patrick’s Day Friends of Ireland luncheon hosted by the Speaker of the House. Here we are in the U.S., in the U.S. Capitol, with the Irish Taoiseach, and the President of the United States – whoever he may be – and often times the VicePresident, and the leaders of Congress. To look around the room and to see how an Irish community has evolved in America is astounding. That is how it plays out for all ethnic groups. So we know what the right thing to do is when you have people who are fleeing destitution and destruction and despair. We know what it means as Americans to
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE OFFICE OF CONGRESSMAN JOE KENNEDY
ongressman Joseph Patrick Kennedy III wears his illustrious family tradition lightly. When you are the latest big hope of the most famous political family in America you might well be weighed down by the responsibility. It has certainly happened to some in his extended family. Joe, as the Democratic representative from the Massachusetts Fourth District prefers, seems different though. There’s a bounce in his step, a gleam in his eye, warmth in his handshake. He loves this job and is not cowed by who in the family came before beyond acknowledging their legacy: RFK was his grandfather; JFK and Ted his great uncles; his father, Joe Kennedy II, served in the U.S. House of Representatives for Massachusetts from 1987 to 1999. It doesn’t come more legacy-driven than that. A comparison with Donald Trump is inevitable – both are descended from parents with family fortunes – yet the difference is staggering. The noblesse oblige of the Kennedy family is to give back and acknowledge your debt to those who came before and fight for the little guy. For Trump, it appears to be the acquisition of more and more in some dervish dance of showing and telling the world every day how great he is. One would love to see an election between them, no matter how unlikely that may be in 2020. Still, there is no doubt a run for the White House will beckon Joe some day. At 37 he is young enough and good enough. He is smart (he graduated from Stanford University and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School
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ABOVE: Congressman Kennedy speaks at the U.S. Capitol building. LEFT: Speaking at an American Health Care Act rally in May 2017. BOTTOM LEFT: A visit to the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan last October. TOP RIGHT: Reading to children at a community center in Washington, D.C. in June 2017.
live up to the values in the words enshrined at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and we know what happens when we don’t. We must not forget the story of the St. Louis, when hundreds of Jewish families fleeing WWII were denied entry to the U.S. and were later killed by the Nazis. I’ve just seen the exhibition at the Holocaust Museum. So we know what will be written about the decision on DACA 15, 20, 50 years from now. It is not a question as to what is right or wrong. The right answer is clear. Kids, young children, were brought here by their families who were, again, doing what my family did – the exact thing that my family did – fleeing hunger and poverty and persecution. Are we going to say, “Your future doesn’t matter much, you don’t count?” It seems to be a recurring theme though. We never seem to learn a lesson. The same sentiments are being used 150 years later.
We are always looking at a very human story, and our successes and our failures, times we have fallen short – interning Japanese Americans in WWII. But I continue to be inspired by those words in our nation’s founding documents, “to form a more perfect Union,” recognizing that you are not always going to get it right, but you kept striving forward.
It’s heartbreaking.
Yes. It is heartbreaking that we have to do this now. But you have people ready to do it and we know what
needs to happen. The question is whether our government steps up to make it happen. What is so heartbreaking is that while there still is strong bipartisan support for programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Republicans have chosen to use healthcare for kids as a bargaining chip for something else. My uncle, over the course of his career in the Senate and his quests to extend healthcare and make that a right for every American, used to say, “Look, there are some things that we are going to fight about, but we should be able to recognize the fact that government healthcare for kids is just not one of them. You agree with it, we agree with it, everyone agrees with it, so let’s make that happen.” Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Orrin Hatch reached across the aisle and made it happen. For years – decades in fact – it was not partisan because people recognized the fact that if you are going to have a fight about something, taking it out on poor kids and healthcare isn’t the place to do it. It is just morally not the right way to go about your business as a government. What is heartbreaking about this is that Republican leadership has decided that they are willing to wage that fight and hold healthcare as a hostage, saying “We are not going to fully defund it, but we are also going to string it along to not fully reauthorize it either for 100-plus days.” The fact that you would choose to do that, the fact that you would also choose to say, “Well, we can fund part of this, but we are going to have to cut other parts of funding in order to make it happen because we just can’t afford it,” while we pass a $1.5 trillion tax bill. And then we say we don’t have money.
You can’t actually look me in the eye and say we don’t have the money. It’s enraging when you hear all these fiscal conservatives saying, “Look, we just don’t have the money, and we don’t have money to expend housing and healthcare and basic needs…” You just gave away $1.5 trillion and your argument is that we just can’t afford it, but we will extend those other benefits as they expire years down the road, which means we are not talking about $1.5 trillion, we are talking about $2 trillion and now you are struggling over a couple of billion? It’s insane! You have become very agitated and pretty public about this in contrast to how you are often perceived as a relatively low-visibility guy on some of these issues. What changed?
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BELOW: Joe and Lauren with their children, James Matthew, who was born just before Christmas last year, and Eleanor, who just turned two.
32 million people a year ago, and if they were, I would have spoken about it then, too. President Obama wasn’t about taking healthcare from people. He was trying to extend it and he did. The biggest change since I got here is the House of Representatives. The Republican-majority House passed bills that I took issue with, but they knew and I knew that they weren’t going to go anywhere with the Democratic president. Now they have actually got a chance. Now, you have a Republican president who not only is trying to govern from, perhaps, a Republican or conservative ideology – although I might take an issue with that characterization as well – but is unwilling or unable to actually engage in any aspect of bipartisanship. That is something I haven’t seen since I have been in office, but I am also unfamiliar with anyone ever having seen it. All the conversations I overheard or participated in around my family when I was a kid were about how to move things along.
Where does it go and where does it end up?
I don’t know. Why do you think, as the President of the United States and the head of the government, that you have to favor some over the others? What do you think your uncles or your grandfather would make of this guy?
I made the decision not to speculate on what folks would say when they are not here. But I think if you look at the values that members of my family stood for, they would be fighting this very hard. I have chuckled at the number of comparisons that I have seen made between President Trump’s tax plan and the one put forth by President Kennedy. Look at the marginal tax rates. Look at President Kennedy’s words on the Soviet Union and Cuban Missile Crisis and what he said about the Alliance for Progress. Look at what he did for civil rights. Look at what he did for the Marshall Plan engagement. Look at what he did by inspiring one generation. He recognized that we are going to be in the international global debate about communism versus capitalism; we need to leverage other countries and relationships to build this network up. Do you worry that people are too confident that Trump will be easily defeated in 2020?
Yes. I would challenge anybody who thinks that they can predict what is going to happen in November of 2020. The fact is, nobody knows anything. What I do know is that a debate about the vision and values that define this country and what it means to be American, what it means to be a member of our community here, as a nation, what it means to be, still, the sole superpower leader of the free world, will take place. Does the American public believe that Trump will continue to be a better steward of the values that have defined the United States as against the Democratic alternative? That is a choice, and it is ultimately up to Democrats to be able to articulate their vision. That has nothing to do with Donald Trump. We know who he is. We know what he is going to stand for. We know how he is going to behave. We know how he is going to act and how he is going to govern. OPPOSITE, TOP to BOTTOM: Congressman Joe Kennedy III with his dad, former Congressman Joe Kennedy II. With his great uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, in 2006. With Vice President Joe Biden and Taoiseach Enda Kenny on St. Patrick’s Day, 2016.
Sure, you had disagreements on ideology, but you find a way. That is why this administration’s major policies, whether it’s healthcare or the budget or taxes, is so worrisome. In order for somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. In order for a tax bill for these red states to benefit, we have to punish blue states like New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, or California. In order to extend healthcare to states that didn’t take the Medicaid expansion by a political choice, we have to punish states that actually did. In order to cut a fiscal budget of made-up numbers, we have to stick it to the real poor. You had these conservative ideologists in the Republican party pre-Donald Trump who were for an open market and strong-arm defense, but there wasn’t a deliberate, “Let’s punish Massachusetts to benefit Arizona or Arkansas.” That is what we are seeing now.
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People are asking if you are going to run.
I wouldn’t make grand plans on that; I wouldn’t hold your breath. I think the focus for anybody participating in this debate at the moment has to be, literally, what can you get through and what can you do today to make sure that the values we hold dear, the responsibilities of government – that the government continues to meet those responsibilities, and that we continue to look out for each other every single day – that you fight for those things. I am up for reelection this year, and my focus is on making the case to my constituents back in the Fourth District of Massachusetts that I have been honored to serve them and I would like to continue to serve them. If I am fortunate enough to be able to do that, I will continue to make a case as to what Democratic values and visions are for domestic and foreign policy, what it means to be responsible citizens of this country, to
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hopefully help us win back the House of Representatives and, if possible, the U.S. Senate as well in 2020. If we are able to win one of those houses of government back, it does change the dynamic of debate for the last two years of Donald Trump’s first term. What do you think happened to this country? An African American was elected president, and eight years later, we end up basically electing a racist? Do you think Trump is a racist?
I struggle to come up with any other definition for what he has said, for the words that he used. Do you think he is clever like a fox or is he just stupid?
I am not going to get into his mind. It is not for me to do. A lot has been written and said about that election in 2016. I think Secretary Clinton would have made a great president. She had extraordinary strengths and some challenges as a candidate. What I think we have to recognize is that for parts of this country, people were struggling in the ways that a lot of people didn’t recognize and, to [Trump’s] credit, he spoke to that. He went to places where people didn’t think he needed to go and crowds showed up. People listened to him. He spoke at their level. He saw people. And yes, he said and did and engaged in some things that I think are absolutely abhorrent and contrary to the values of this country that we have to recognize. But while the country is doing well economically at the moment, and yes, we set record after record, and yes, unemployment is almost four percent, there are an awful a lot of places across the country that are struggling. Essentially, you have to frame that election as a shock to the system – one in which an awful lot of folks said, “Hey, the system is not working for me.” And that is not just the post-industrial communities in the Midwest. Donald Trump got a million votes in Massachusetts. Am I going to sit there and say that every voter who voted for Donald Trump is a racist? No, because they are not. I do think that means soul-searching for a lot of us, because there are awful a lot of folks who voted for him and didn’t vote for our candidate who we thought they would. We are not going to win them back unless we say we’ve got to do a better job listening and responding. Do you think there is the opportunity to pick up the House majority?
I hope to be able to do everything I can. At the moment, I do think that the House of Representatives is in play, and if I can be helpful in winning some of those seats back, I certainly would like to be. You and your dad are the first father and son we have featured on our covers. What did you learn from him?
Oh really? I think one of the biggest lessons I have taken from
my dad is the fact that people need to be treated equally. In this job, it is extraordinary that you get to meet world leaders and that you could also talk to almost anybody walking on the other side of the street, somebody sitting in the bar, somebody on the bus stop, somebody in the homeless shelter. If you are going to do this well, you treat every single person the same, because people are people. Did he encourage you to run because it is a tough game?
I get that question a lot. My family, mom and dad, my brother, too, advised me not to. My brother had helped run Senator Obama’s primary campaign, so he has been around, and he helped in my uncle’s last campaign in 2006, which I helped cochair after I returned from the Peace Corps. I remember my father very clearly saying, “Political life is really hard, and there are long days, demanding days, and there are days that are not going to go so well, and you are going to have to get up the next day and do it all over again.” He said, “The only thing that gets you through it is an abundant desire to actually want to do the job. And if you want to do it, then great, I will encourage you and help you do that, but you have to be really certain that this is what you want to do. If you are doing this out of some misguided sense of family obligation, you are going to get destroyed.” How closely do you follow events in Ireland?
I follow them pretty closely.
Have you met the new Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar?
I haven’t. I hear he is very impressive. I’d love to meet him at some point. I haven’t traveled internationally since we started our family, although I was in Ireland in August 2014. My wife and I were there for 10 days or so and had a wonderful time. I had been in Ireland before, but it was the first time I got to spend a fair amount of time there. I didn’t want to make it as an official political visit, because I wanted see Ireland as a tourist. We rented a car and spent a couple of days in Dublin and then drove around. Some had suggested that I go to the family farm and the owner now, a fifth cousin I think, said, “How many of you are here?” And I said, “It is just me and my wife” and he said, “Come on up here!” So we went. Obviously, for me to be able to walk around the place that generations of my family called home and spend some time going through Cork and Kerry and Galway and Dublin – it was outstandingly beautiful, and people were kind and outgoing and engaging. Does it bother you when you see Irish Americans who forget that struggle and say Donald Trump is right?
I think at some point all of us have to acknowledge and understand our own histories. If there is one consistency, it is this human vulnerability and it’s these cycles where we blame others. And at some point, almost everybody else gets blamed for something. I remember my dad telling me stories about when he was a FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 31
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young kid and he was out playing with his older sister, and my great-grandmother Rose called him inside and he thought he had done something wrong, but she just brought him into the back of the house and pulled out a folder and took out all these clippings about Ireland. My dad told me that story so I, too, would never forget where we came from and the struggles others before had to go through so that we can enjoy a better life. I think the Irish have this extraordinary story of perseverance, of resilience, of struggle, of faith, and it is ultimately a very good story. It is an inspiring story, but it is a struggle. I found great strength and great resilience, but also great empathy and sympathy in that story, because the Irish are one of the few nationalities at the moment that can actually give voice to some of the predicaments we see playing out across our country. They can talk about what happens after you persevere and get through it. The fact is, you can find an Irish bar in any corner of the country. I was in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, and everywhere I went there were Irish. I studied abroad in Spain for a semester in college and we American students gathered one evening just to be together and went to the Irish pub. They are everywhere.
The Irish are everywhere because they had to leave. We do build communities very, very well. I think that strength, that perseverance, that resilience, that suffering, gives a profound sense of empathy and community because you got through those hard times because of community, because of family and faith. So tell me, do you really think there is a chance Trump will get reelected?
Yes, absolutely there is a chance. I think that anybody who says there is not is not paying the attention to the past year and a half. I think that I, and many others, had underestimated candidate Donald Trump. And I think a large part of our country continues to underestimate him in terms of his ability to dominate the news cycle and appeal to some portion of our country and win votes. Can I make an argument that he is going to be very tough in 2020? Yes. Could I also make an argument that our country is going to be in such dire circumstances three years from now that he is going to be presiding over our lives in a way that we haven’t seen in decades? Democrats will be doing our country a great disservice if we wait to allow that choice to be set by Donald Trump. The question ultimately posed to the American electorate is: is Donald Trump qualified now for reelection? And by then saying, “You have now seen and heard what a four-year Trump administration is. You know what four more years of his government is going to be. Here is an alternative and this is what we believe is a better pathway to be the leaders of free world and better stewards of our people.” That is on the Democratic party to come up with that articulation of values and vision. I am not waiting for the current leaders of our party – House, Senate, others – to try to come up with our message that I think we all know. I think it is on every single Democrat who is elected at every single level to try to come up with a message that you think resonates with your constituents. I think that it is undeniable that essentially what Donald Trump spoke to was, by large, a segment of our society that for a generation or two, a generation ago, was able to have a comfortable pathway to middle-class lifestyle. We know that the engagement the United States had in and after WWII has been our role model, but we have not invested in infrastructure and education clearly as well, or as much as we needed to, as a means to preserve it. 32 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
The international system the United States set up, yes, accrues to our benefit. But that system has pulled billions of people out of poverty. That is an extraordinary success story. And internationally, despite the violence we see and terrorism, we are actually seeing historical lows in the amount of violent deaths around the globe. The consequence of that – as more of these folks are coming out of poverty – is that their countries have some marked level of stability, and they have economic development that you didn’t have before. So you have got a massive amount of competition for jobs and schools and colleges and universities that didn’t previously exist for the U.S. This is what Trump pointed to and what Brexit pointed to – it was scapegoating foreign trade deals and internationalism and immigrants and other things that drive a wedge. Could the foreign trade deal have played a part in it? Yes, absolutely. Did the multilateralism played a part in it? Sure. The question ultimately is: does some of that accrue more to our benefit than the cost? Yes. Is there a cost to it? Yes. The idea that this administration is going to solve the subsidies China has by waging a trade war over solar panels or steel is crazy. And we saw that day after Brexit that some of the folks who pushed it admitted they lied – saying billions saved would go into healthcare. So the alternative the Brexit champions put forth actually doesn’t deliver on the promises made. And now the Brexit voters, like those here who voted for Trump, understand what those consequences are, because we didn’t quite fully understand it before. The consequence the United States has to recognize is actually getting a clear articulation of domestic and foreign policy from this administration saying, “You don’t want to engage in these systems? Fine. What is your alternative and what does that look like?” If you say you are against multilateral engagement, fine. But how do you expect to actually continue to build up an international system that is dominated by transparent democracy, human rights, individualism, and capitalism at a time when the greatest international threat coming on in the future is going to be state enterprises supported by the Chinese government – enterprises that will have the ability to move capital around to support those businesses and industries that are strategic to them? That, at its heart, is a question of the benefit of a communist party over an individual. They don’t treat the rights of individuals in the way that is inherent in the U.S. Constitution. A fundamental question is: do you think the United States is going to be best able to promote our values on our own, or is it better to create an architecture of international alliances that are able to continue to push that narrative based on those values and vision? And clearly it is the latter, and we need to get that message out. Thirty years from now, your new son, James Matthew, comes here and says, “Dad, I want to be a politician.” What do you tell him?
As of now, I would tell him that it is an extraordinary honor to serve, that it is a serious responsibility, that you have to make sure that you are ready for it and that your family is. This job is extraordinary and unforgiving and puts an extraordinary burden on families. So you have to be willing and your family has to be willing to actually step up with you. But regardless of what I would tell him about being a politician, I would say that the legacy of what I believe my family most stands for is that we have been extraordinarily blessed. Your responsibility with those blessings is to try to make sure that you make a contribution back to your country and your planet, and you can do that in a number of different ways. It doesn’t have to be through work in the office. Congressman Joe Kennedy, thank you.
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Saint Brigid
Gaels
The Mary of the
A nun, abbess, and founder of several monasteries, Brigid of Kildare was a woman who defied authority, possessed great strength of will and determination, and whose cheerful giving of food and shelter to any passing traveler laid the foundation for Ireland’s legendary hospitality. By Rosemary Rogers
S
aints are everywhere, like enzymes, gravity, or the CIA – invisible, yes, but hard at work on your behalf no matter whether you’re Catholic or even Christian. This assemblage of visionary spinsters, ex-cons, levitating monks, beautiful-blondvirgin-martyrs, poets, and vampire killers hail from every nation in the world and have many devoted followers. But if you happen to be Irish, you may discover that saints have taken up permanent residence in your unconscious and embedded in your DNA. Who else but the Irish share the saints’ penchant for conflating paranormal activity with prayer or fusing facts with myths? Ironically, Ireland, the “Isle of Saints and Scholars,” did not have a new saint from the 1225 canonization of Saint Lawrence O’Toole until 1975, when Blessed Oliver Plunkett, waiting in the wings for 300 years (and he was drawn and quartered too!) got the official nod. In those intervening 750 no-saints-for-Ireland years, Irish Catholics were persecuted and martyred for their faith and along the way, starved to death. It’s a mysterious snub, especially since the early saints traipsed all over Europe, converting millions. And the most radiant of all Irish saints was Saint Brigid, the “Mary of the Gaels.” Sometime around 432, Saint Patrick (who gets all the press and parades) drove the snakes out of Ireland, a dubious feat since there hadn’t been snakes there since the Ice Age. But it was a powerful story, one he wisely used to illustrate his dispatching promiscuous pagans from the land. In another savvy move, the early Church “Christianized” Celtic deities, transitioning them into saints
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by retrofitting their biographies to include Christian attributes. Both Brigid and her Celtic namesake, Brigit, were associated with fire and, notwithstanding the saint’s virginity, fertility. Both were gifted in art, magic, poetry, and healing and enjoyed the same Feast Day, February 1. And so began Christian Ireland. The fledgling Church followed the Roman civic structures and replaced tuaths with monasteries as the central units of administration. Since Ireland had no cities, monasteries were the population centers, places of secular and religious study. The monastic structure worked, thanks to the great abbots and one abbess who founded and led the first monasteries. They were now the new rulers, the new druids: Saint Columcille, Patrick’s successor with a quick fuse, Saint Cieran, Saint Colman MacDuagh, Saint Brendan (who still found time in the year 500 to discover America), Saint Jarlath, Saint Kevin (more on him later) and one wild Irish woman, Saint Brigid of Kildare. It was those Irish monasteries that changed the course of Western history. After the fall of Rome in 476, barbarians ravaged Europe and its citizens, burning all books and art. Silent scribes, in silent monasteries on that isolated isle up north, grabbed every book they could find and took on the painstaking task of copying them all. As Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilization, “Without the Irish monks, who singlehandedly re-founded European civilization…the world that came after them would be an entirely different world, a world without books.” Brigid’s story begins in the middle of fifth-century Ireland, where inquisitive angels were peeking into the cottage of a slave woman in childbirth, per-
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PHOTO: CELTIC MYSTERIES
Brigid of Ireland, also spelled Brigit or Bridget, and called Bride, Irish Bríd, and Brigid of Kildare. Her feast day is on February 1st.
haps in the company of Saint Patrick, there to baptize the newborn. The mother, Brocseach, was a sometime concubine of her owner, a pagan chieftain named Dubtach, the son of the extravagantly-named Conn of the Hundred Battles who doubtless passed his fighting spirit on to his granddaughter. Children of slaves in fifth-century Ireland, much like children of slaves in 19th-century America, were immediately separated from their mothers, and Brocseach was sold off to a rival chieftain. Still, Brigid grew bright and beautiful, attributes that overcame her ignoble birth and made her a favorite in her father’s household. Everyone admired her kindness and charity while awed by her acts of magic. But her real power was the strength of her will, determination, and open defiance of authority. She was in constant rebellion against her father, even raiding his larder to feed the poor and giving away his jeweled sword to, of all people, the local leper. Dubtach knew the young beauty would be a prize bride and pointedly ignored her vow of perpetual chastity. He presented her with two suitors, one a king and the other a poet – in short, one rich and the other, arty. She flatly turned both down and was forced to make a most fervent prayer. She asked God to make her ugly, the better to focus on her destiny. Her prayers were answered when, the following morning, she awoke to discover she was the fifth-century version of the Elephant Man. The suitors hastily withdrew, but once consecrated a nun, Brigid, as the saying goes, got her looks back. She now began her mission, first taking the veil,
and once again aggressive angels appeared, this time to shove the priest aside and place the veil on her head. Then Brigid, with seven like-minded young friends, formed Ireland’s first religious community of women. Before Brigid, girls who took holy vows could only retreat to the family cottage and just… pray. But Brigid and her sisters did more than pray – they built, especially after the saint, using some sly magic involving her cloak, duped a local king out of 12 square miles of early real estate. Under an oak, the sacred tree of the druids and on the site of a Celtic shrine, Brigid founded her monastery at Kildare (Irish: Cill Dara, “church of the oak.”) It was a “double monastery,” allowing both monks and nuns; she also accepted poets, artists, farmers, and craftsmen. Brigid’s monastery at Kildare was a happy place, a stark contrast to the Abbey of Glendalough, a reflection of its odd founder, Saint Kevin. Kevin prayed, standing, arms extended, a stance he maintained for seven years and, in winter, he recited his prayers, naked, in a freezing lake. It could be claimed that Brigid laid down the foundation for Ireland’s legendary hospitality. Travelers and vagabonds, sick or well, Christian or not, flocked to Kildare knowing the inclusive Abbess would invite them to eat, drink, and stay as long as needed. She was all about largesse and compassion, as evidenced by her most famous poem: I should like a great lake of finest ale for the King of kings. I should like a table of the choicest food for the family of heaven. Let the ale be made from FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 35
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the fruits of faith and the food be forgiving love. I should welcome the poor to my feast, for they are God’s children. I should welcome the sick to my feast, for they are God’s joy. She only left Kildare to chariot through Ireland supervising the building of churches, schools, and convents, the latter to assure women received an education, something unheard of at that time. An artist herself, she established a school of art most famously responsible for the Book of Kildare, which was destroyed by Cromwell but described as “more gorgeously illuminated” than the Book of Kells. Despite all her accomplishments, her legend grew because of her many miracles, so resonant with Irish mysticism: she taught a fox to dance, tamed a wild boar, hung her damp cloak (that cloak again!) on a sunbeam to dry, obliging the sunbeam to remain all night. In her later years, her powers took on almost Christ-like proportions – she could multiply food, exorcise demons with a casual sign of the cross, and calm storms. Proving she was someone you’d like to have a beer with, Brigid, fond of the brew herself, could produce bottomless barrels and turn both milk and water into ale. Once, while curing lepers, she learned there was nothing to drink and used her own bathwater to stand the entire colony to a pint. Brigid was so revered in her lifetime that Saint Mel ordained her a bishop, although some (cranky) scholars may dispute this. What is not disputed is
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PHOT: DAVID SHANKBONE / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
New York City’s “Save St. Brigid” rally on August 24, 2006. Later that day a judge stayed demolition of the historic St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church on New York’s Lower East Side. In 2008 an “unexpected but very welcome gift” of $20 million from an anonymous donor to the archdiocese saved the church. Built in 1848 by shipwrights to accommodate the thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing starvation, the church was designed by 25year-old Patrick Keely, an Irish immigrant from Thurles, County Tipperary, who carved the five-pinnacle reredos, organ case, and wooden altar himself. Keely went on to design many Catholic churches including the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame and Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
Saint Bridget
that she said mass, heard confessions and ordained clergy. And, yes, she was finally, after a long search, reunited with her long-suffering mother who had remained a slave all those years. The illustrious Brigid bought her mother’s freedom and took her to live with her in Kildare. Brigid died in 524 and her cult quickly spread as her manuscripts were translated into French, English, and German and countless churches were named after her. She was buried in Downpatrick, County Down, with the two other major saints of Ireland, Patrick and Columcille. In the 17th century, British troops looted her grave, but Irish knights managed to deliver her head to Portugal while her busy cloak still survives in Belgium. As befitting a woman as generous as Brigid, she has an extraordinary number of patronages: Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, newborns, healers, milkmaids, milkmen, poets, blacksmiths, boatmen, fugitives, nuns, printing pressers, barnyard animals, children whose parents are not married, seamen, and poultry raisers. While explaining Christ’s death to a dying pagan, she wove a cross from the rushes strewn about his floor. Today, anyone with any sense, Catholic or not, Christian or not, Irish or not, can place them in their houses to ward off evil. It works and so do Brigid’s medals, available at the Franciscan Sister’s Gift Shop: (845) 424-3809 or giftshop@graymoor.org. IA Bríd agus Muire dhuit!
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The Rise of Wexford’s Lee Chin and his Athletic Prowess Setanta’s Successor:
How the son of an Malaysian immigrant rose to stardom within Ireland’s top sports divisions. By Dave Lewis
L
ee Chin could quite possibly be the modern successor to Setanta (the given name of the Irish mythological figure Cú Chulainn). His athletic prowess in hurling, soccer, and Gaelic football has been made legend in Ireland and, in February, will become Ireland’s newest mythological export as Chin and Wexford’s illustrious manager, Davy Fitzgerald, come to New York to spread the gospel of Wexford hurling. Chin’s father, Voon For Chin, emigrated from Malaysia to Ireland in the 1990s. Ireland then wasn’t the multicultural country it is known as today, which, according to Lee, led to some difficult times for his father and, later on, in his own life as well. Chin grew up like any other child in Ireland, playing Gaelic games and soccer around his neighborhood. He developed a voracious appetite for sport and cites three players as major influences on his nononsense style of play: Larry O’Gorman, Darragh Ryan, and his biggest sporting hero, Kilkenny’s Tommy Walsh. Watching the passion and determination these men had for their games inspired Chin to be the best he could be in his three preferred sports: soccer, Gaelic football, and especially hurling. This special love for hurling led him to join his school team and he eventually became a dual player in 2009, joining the Faythe Harriers for hurling and Sarsfields for Gaelic football. That year was a pivotal one for Chin, marking the beginning of his semi-professional club career and his first appearance in the Interprovincial Hurling Championship. Two years later, he played for the Wexford Bohemians, a soccer team that played in Ireland’s First Division and would transfer to Wexford FC in the same year. This would not be the last time Lee would make a splash in soccer. As his hurling skills progressed, Chin was touted as one of the best rising hurlers in the country and was soon selected to play for Wexford at the under21 level in both hurling and Gaelic football. Though obviously a great achievement for any player with ambitions to become a senior county star, Chin’s early experience in the league saw him targeted because of his racial background.
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In 2012, during a Gaelic football match with a fellow Wexford club, the Duffry Rovers, Chin was racially abused by two players. Though this wasn’t the first time, he believed it should be the last time. The Wexford Competitions Control Committee, the governing body for all intra-county sports, issued both players eight-week bans after referee Brendan Martin made sure it knew of this mistreatment of the rising star. Diarmuid Devereux, chairman of the Wexford Gaelic Athletic Association, came out strongly against the comments: “Lee Chin is a Wexford man, born in Wexford, educated in Wexford. He is one of our stars of the future. Hopefully, many more will follow his lead and example.” Chin, though shocked and extremely saddened by the incident, looked to the future of Ireland’s population that come from foreign lands, as he wants those children to enjoy the Gaelic games that have brought him so much joy and success: “I am speaking out about this to try and make sure younger G.A.A. players don’t have to face this.” A year later he and the rest of the “Yellow Bellies,” as Wexford athletes are known, won the Leinster Championship, beating Kilkenny by a goal. While 2013 led the rising star and Wexford to win its first under-21 Leinster final in 11 years, it also led Chin to a trip to the United States. Chin, alongside several all-star hurlers, made the journey to what many call the collegiate hub of Irish America – the University of Notre Dame. This trip was to promote a new, Americanized version of Ireland’s warrior sport called Super 11s. The game, recently created by the Gaelic Players Association, would be played with a baseball instead of a sliotar (a slightly smaller ball with raised stitching), consist of four quarters rather than two halves, and radically change the scoring system by discontinuing the use of upright posts and corresponding field goal points, instead awarding variable points – based on a scorer’s field position – only when the ball passes through the traditional guarded goal.
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PHOTO: SAM BARNES / SPORTSFILE
While Chin enjoyed playing at Notre Dame, he explained his unease about the new format when I asked him about it recently. “I wouldn’t 100 percent agree with it, but I think they were trying to keep that American way about a certain game we’re trying to introduce, with 75 percent of this being still Irish. If we just showed our game in the purest form with no changes, it would’ve captured Americans even more because hurling in its purest form just can’t be beaten, it’s the best game in the world. If they had stuck to the purest form of the sport, there would have been more fluency and more momentum to the games in Fenway that have been recently played.” That trip prepared Chin for the next three years of intense competition as he would go on to impress both hurling and soccer fans in 2016 and 2017, as well as make another transatlantic trek – this time to Canada. But first, soccer. In 2015, a local soccer club called the Wexford Youths won the Premier Division, but due to injury and a loss of players, they were in a fight for their lives as they desperately wanted to stay within the top division. So in they called Lee Chin, the county’s best all-around athlete, to join their ranks in an amateur position in September 2016, just until
the hurling season started. A month later, the Youths were in a two-game playoff against Drogheda United that would determine if they would remain in the premier league or be relegated to the second division. Chin made his presence known in the first game, sending home a masterfully-taken volley to ensure the Youths a 2-0 lead going into the second match. But before the final match, Chin’s first sporting love called him for another purpose – the G.A.A./G.P.A. All-Star Awards. Chin was nominated for his previous year’s efforts for Wexford and was determined to attend no matter what, even if it meant missing the Youths’ final game, likely making his triumphant volley his swan song for soccer, which he no longer plans to pursue. But when one locker room door closes, another opens, and in 2017 Chin was brought to a new sport altogether – ice hockey. As part of Allied Irish Banks television program The Toughest Trade, a show where the top players of the Gaelic games trade places for a week with the top players of other international professional sports like baseball, soccer, and American football. Chin believes he was selected for the hockey section of the program because of the difficult technical nature of the game. “I think it was going to be the most technically dif-
January 18, 2018: Wexford hurler Lee Chin attends the launch of the G.A.A. Player Conference at Croke Park in Dublin.
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Swapping his boots for a pair of ice skates, Lee Chin prepares to join the Vancouver Canucks for the AIB documentary series The Toughest Trade.
While Chin’s performance on the ice was not the best, his best performance was still to come in 2017. In June, Chin led the senior Wexford hurling team as he went on to score six points against the mighty Cats of Kilkenny in the Leinster Hurling Championship’s semi-final, which brought the team to its first Leinster hurling final in nine years. This year, Chin and Wexford have already won their first piece of hardware, beating Kilkenny again in a thrilling final in which both teams were even at the end of extra time with a score of 1-24 to 1-24. This led to the first ever shootout in the modern history of the sport. Wexford came out on top, scoring three out of the five shots taken. This undoubtedly portends well for Chin and the 2018 inter-county season, but before that can begin, Chin will take one more trip to this side of the Atlantic. This month, Wexford’s star and famed bainisteoir (manager) Davy Fitzgerald are coming to the socalled “Exile County” – New York PHOTO: RAMSEY CARDY / SPORTSFILE City – to look for support from ficult sport to do. And considering that I dabbled in Wexford fans for this upcoming season and create a lot of sports in the past, I might adapt to hockey sustainable fundraising partnerships with Wexford pretty quickly.” Of course, Chin would take the diaspora and for the greater G.A.A. community chance to go to Canada and play hockey, as not only within the New York metro area. Chin and Fitzgerald was he a fan of the show itself, he relished the new will hold training sessions for the youth of the Rockchallenge. He was sent to the Vancouver Canucks to land G.A.A., just north of the city, and the Shannon train and was given the daunting assignment of scorGaels, based in Queens. ing a goal at the end of the week in an exhibition While Chin has been to the U.S. before, he looks match with the Canucks’ alumni team. forward to taking new meetings and interacting with Chin had only one ice skating lesson before going the New York Irish community, especially the youngto Vancouver and he was noticeably shaky as he took sters who love hurling: a couple spills on the hard ice. After his first skating “I’m just looking forward to meeting new people. lesson, he was forced into the fire, training with This is one of the advantages of the G.A.A., that I highly skilled players who had signed NHL concan go to New York and meet another Irish commutracts. The whole thing made Chin feel a bit overnity, another Irish connection, to other G.A.A. clubs whelmed. After some specialized training sessions on the other side of the world and see what hurling from coaches and some legendary former NHL stars, has done for them while they’re living here. Chin was getting better and better each session. “I love the state, and can’t wait to see what kind of When the hour finally came for Chin’s game-day setup Rockland and Shannon Gaels have and do all debut at the Rogers Arena, he was as ready as he’d we can to help.” ever be. He had a good performance for a novice, Chin’s passion for hurling and incredible discipline despite falling the first time he touched the puck. At have led him to unimaginable heights from his humthe end of the day, he had six shots on goal, two of ble beginnings as the son of an immigrant who had which hit the post, but no points scored. Even though no idea about the ancient Gaelic game of hurling to he didn’t accomplish his mission, he did find a new becoming one of the best players in the country. His appreciation for hockey and the city of Vancouver. love of the game and determination to support similar “It was a fantastic experience to be in a professional dedication to the sport in others shows how energizing setup among a huge organization like the Vancouver one player can be. We can certainly continue to expect IA Canucks and I’m very grateful for the opportunity.” great things from him, on and off the pitch.
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An
Irish Artist’s
C
American Odyssey William James Hinchey traveled throughout America’s Southwest frontier and Missouri capturing images of life, the ravishes of war, and beyond. By Jack Morgan
ormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian (1985) depicts the rough, perilous place that was the American Southwest of the 1840s and ’50s. One of the earliest close-up views of the California-Arizona desert of the period is provided by Thomas W. Sweeny’s diary of his time as a U.S. Army lieutenant assigned with his few men to the Gila-Colorado River area from 1849 to 1853. The diaries and drawings of another Irishman, the artist William James Hinchey, also provide significant glimpses of an area of the American frontier of the 1850s, one farther north from the border: Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the historic trail leading there. Over time, Hinchey would provide valuable images of life in St. Louis and southeastern Missouri through the Civil War and beyond, and in 1996 the National Frontier Trails Museum in Independence, Missouri, featured an exhibit titled “Scenes from the Road to Santa Fe: Sketches by William James Hinchey.” Introducing a Hinchey exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum in 1991, the museum’s assistant curator, Lynn Springer, noted that although Hinchey is famous for only one painting, his ten sketchbooks and extensive diaries provide an exceptional historical record. His St. Louis scenes, she said, “are not only works of art in themselves but they are historical documents from a period for which we have relatively little visual evidence.”i The notable Hinchey painting to which Springer referred, now housed at the St. Louis Art Museum,
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IMAGE COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI
is his iconic image of the 1874 dedication of the Eads Bridge, the 19th century American architectural and engineering marvel spanning the Mississippi River from the Illinois shore to St. Louis. Hinchey came to find himself in the American West by a circuitous route. Though his future would lie in America, his first travels were in the direction one might expect of an Irish artist – to Paris, by way of London, for a period of study and sketching at the Louvre. His father had encouraged William’s artistic bent from its earliest manifestations. At eight, the boy had already sold his first work and by 12 was determined to be a portrait painter. “As a boy I was very successful in making pencil sketches of members of my family and friends,” Hinchey noted. “By the time I was 16 I was painting portraits in pastel and oil of many persons who came to me for that purpose; and I received good pay for my work.” His father, Paul Hinchey, was in charge of the public buildings in Dublin. This exposed the boy to “a large force of mechanics, painters, carpenters, stonemasons, etc.” Among these artisans was a Mr. Egnore, who specialized in applying gold leaf to ornaments, frames, and various interior decorations of buildings, a skill William found appealing and at which he soon became competent. Indeed, he would always be something of the enterprising artisan/ artist, taking what work presented itself, including at times mere sign painting, and advertising himself as a portraitist very much for hire. By the late 1840s, when Hinchey was ready to matriculate at Trinity College in Dublin, he had earned enough from portraiture to cover half his academic expenses and had cultivated skills that would
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later recommend him for work in Spanish mission restoration in the American southwest. In 1850, when he was 20 and in England, he encountered Sir Isaac Pitman, creator of the Pitman shorthand system. Hinchey became fascinated with the method and was soon adept at it. This would result in his diaries in shorthand, which he kept diligently for 16 years of his life, covering his journey to New Mexico and continuing through the Civil War. They were not transcribed, though, until his son Stephen – having been taught Pitman by his father – did so in the 1950s; the only two manuscript copies belong to the State Historical Society of Missouri and the St. Louis Art Museum.ii Hinchey’s ultimate departure from Ireland for England and the continent was not entirely his own idea; his Irish nationalist convictions and activities had rendered him persona non grata in Dublin. Based on what he recounted to his son, the activity that got him in trouble appears to have been partly political and partly a matter of youthful rowdiness. William ran with a boisterous gang of young men who roamed Dublin streets breaking the occasional window in a government building and being generally “rather loud in their denunciation of English control of Ireland.” The British government eventually began to keep a file on the group and, on an occasion when the boys had taken to the country and engaged in some land reform agitation on behalf of Irish tenant farmers, they were arrested and charged with conspiring against the Crown. Hinchey’s father, probably thanks to his government position, got word of the prosecution about to be launched against William and his cohorts and urged his son to flee Ireland right away. William did so, but his Irish nationalist convictions would endure – he would name one of his sons Robert Emmett Hinchey. The Dublin family into which Hinchey was born in 1829 was a mixed one religiously. His mother, Mary Doyle Hinchey, was a devout Catholic. His father, an equally devout Protestant and grandson of an Episcopal rector in Limerick, wed Mary while harboring the idea that she would ultimately convert his way. She had similar illusions about her husband becoming Catholic, and the result was eight children double-baptized and taken secretly to mass without their father’s knowledge. Indeed, it was a Catholic connection that would prompt Hinchey to take the critical step of leaving Paris and striking out for Santa Fe and the Spanish missions. Hinchey had met Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the Catholic Bishop of the Santa Fe diocese, in Paris in 1854. Lamy was sufficiently impressed with Hinchey’s artistic skills to offer him a papal contract to go to the New Mexican Territory, which the United States had acquired six years earlier, to work in mission restoration, inventorying artifacts, and as an artist in residence. Lamy, on whom Willa Cather based the character Bishop Latour in her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), had already spent some ten years
in Ohio and Kentucky when Pius IX appointed him to the Santa Fe bishopric. Hinchey was not disinclined to undertake the adventure: “I had read much and dreamed of the glory of America.... It was not hard to persuade me into leaving for a year my position in Paris to indulge in such an excursion. The contrast between the Pinnacle of Art and refinement and the world of untamed savagery of the western wilds, far from daunting me, became the very charm of the
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ATHENAEUM
enterprise.” He departed France on the cross-channel trip on July 30, 1854, in the company of the bishop and seven priests, bound for America by way of England. On August 2, 1854, the Bishop’s party departed Britain aboard the U.S. ship Union. Though he planned to return to Paris, Hinchey’s American odyssey would be more consequential than he anticipated and would define his career and personal life until his death in St. Louis at 64, almost 40 years later.
H
ABOVE: “Self Portrait” by William James Hinchey, c. 1859. Pastel on linen. Private collection. OPPOSITE: A sketch of Arcadia, Missouri, 1886. Pencil on paper.
inchey’s diary entries regarding the Atlantic passage indicate his gregarious character. There is much circulating and meeting with people and entries such as: “This evening very fine. Singing and talking on board. Recited some of FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 43
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PHOTO: ST. LOUIS ART MUSEUM
[Thomas Moore’s] Lalla Rookh for Mr. Rernend; on deck alone until one a.m.” Following a 14-day sea voyage, Hinchey and the party arrived in New York and, after a brief stay, set out by train for Cincinnati. The travel accommodations in the U.S. at the time were crude, the railroads still rudimentary, and the journey was a far cry from the comfort of the Atlantic passage: “Having been traveling all the preceding night and this day we are still on the road, tearing, puffing, belching, and throwing fire, on we go, smothered with dust and ashes; occasionally stopping to snatch up a hasty meal by the way; and then hurrying to the train; again there to be jostled and tumbled for a few hundred miles more,” Hinchey wrote in his journal. The company arrived in St. Louis on September 4, 1854, and Hinchey records stepping from the riverboat “very weary.” They had been defrauded of their food for breakfast on the Justice, he noted – a “dirty, stinking, little rat trap of a boat” – and there was to be no rest to speak of at St. Louis, merely a transfer of baggage to the Missouri River boat Polar Star bound for Independence, a departure point for the western trails, including the one to Santa Fe. The Polar Star proved “a very superior boat in every way,” its accommodations and comforts first-class and a great relief from the miseries of the Justice. Independence was the farthest point westward on the Missouri River that steamboats could travel, and Hinchey describes a 44 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
bustling, and sometimes hectic embarkation hub as western-bound parties hired guides and purchased horses, mules, wagons, food supplies, guns, and tents for the frontier, or found wagon trains to join. Besides illnesses, there were frequent injuries among pioneers less than familiar with guns and dealing with unfamiliar, newly-purchased animals. Recalcitrant horses, steers, and balky mules ran loose and would have to be repeatedly rounded up. Among other hardships, travelers soon discovered that tents and wagon covers would afford virtually no protection from the fierce rainstorms of the mid-continent. Later, on the trail, however, Hinchey would note with wonder how people could adapt to this difficulty – in the middle of the night, in a tremendous rainstorm, lightening would illuminate the camp momentarily and reveal people sleeping soundly in the soaking downpour. On October 3, 1854, the Santa Fe-bound caravan set out on the rough road that would take them southwest across Kansas to the New Mexico Territory. They progressed to the Cimarron River through what Hinchey describes in his diary as “wretchedly bleak country,” – something reflected in his bleak, minimalist trail sketches. By November 10, they were at Fort Union – a military site where a doctor was available – 110 miles from their destination: “A great deal of snow all along, the train getting stuck several times in snow and mud. Breakfast in snow surrounded by hills covered with snow....”
On the 16th they came to Pecos, a tiny trail town on the approach to the capital. Exploring about a mile from their camp, Hinchey and another man entered an old building that proved to be an abandoned friary or monastery: “Small apartment which must have served as a vestry stood between the western branch and the head of the cross... Where the grand altar must have stood there was a large space in the plastering, much in the form of a gothic window extending from roof to floor. Some fireplaces in the corners of the little rooms told how cozy the inmates must have felt at a cheerful wood fire when the wintry winds had howled through the snowy mountains some doleful Indian tale.”
I
t was November 18 when the wagon train reached the dreary adobe settlement that was Santa Fe in winter 1854. Despite the snow, the town had prepared its version of a gala welcome for the bishop’s return after a year’s absence – a military band marched and an honorary dinner was held. Hinchey found the town singularly unprepossessing, however: “All was new but nothing pleasing... Had not the whole affair been so novel to me I should have been as much disgusted as I am now as I write this a week later.” His mood was not helped by the death of Abbé Vaur, one of the party who had come all the way from France only to die on the night of his first day in Santa Fe. Hinchey’s diary entry suggests he felt the
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Abbé had been less than well-attended: “Dead without the sacraments! In a bishop’s house. A month sick, and snoring priests about him when he breathed his last!” The former mining town of Santa Fe was not extensive in its expanse, and Hinchey, an habitual walker, had soon been around what there was of it – nothing left to do besides his church repairs, he remarks, but “to contemplate the great variety of characters in this small metropolis.” (Among them included frontiersman Kit Carson and the infamous Doña Tules, Santa Fe’s wealthy courtesan and gambling queen.) Adding yet further to Hinchey’s disappointment, however, he discovered that the adobe church walls in the area were not receptive to paint, which made executing frescoes nearly impossible. He became increasingly aware of the plight of impoverished Mexicans in the town, now some seven years since the war. He records stopping by Owens’ Store and witnessing Mexicans without currency coming in to sell their last possessions. The store owner attended a little girl who “pledges a fine massive gold earring with a shield shape stone for five pounds of sugar. Such is business in this capital.” A few days later in the city’s main plaza he saw a Mexican man drop a coin and an Anglo carpenter snatch it before its owner could. The Mexican held out his hands and insisted it be returned, but the American slashed the out-stretched hands bloody with a saw he was carrying. This was too much for Hinchey’s 19thcentury Irish sensibilities to tolerate, and he wrote a letter of protest to the Santa Fe Gazette describing what he had seen. His letter, published in the Gazette of February 24, 1855, concluded, “Are they to be treated as brutes unworthy of the least consideration... by their conquerors? ” A diary entry on January 23, 1855 reads, “This evening I talked publically of my intention to return to the States by the first train,” and by the next day he noted he had made arrangements with the bishop for departure with the train of Vicar Joseph P. Machebeuf (future Bishop of Denver). On February 28, 1855, after three months in Santa Fe, Hinchey departed on horseback as a member of the vicar’s wagon train headed north and east. He was back on the trail, again sketching as he went. At journey’s end, approaching Independence, he wrote, “When I came in sight of it, it seemed to me as though the houses were all illuminated from within, so did they shine in my eyes after the miserable huts of Santa Fe.” Contrary to his intention to continue on back to Europe, Hinchey, then 25, had soon made numerous friends in Independence and its environs, and he stayed on for a little over a year. Within a few days of his arrival, in fact, on April 12, he notes: “Placed an advertisement in newspaper as portrait painter.” His diary entries during this time indicate his ability to acquire large and small artistic commissions along with more mundane jobs such as painting store signs: “Today I worked on the sign for the Italian Confectionary store.” A January 1856 entry reads: “Finished the Hibernian Benevolent banner.” He was an habitual attendee at, and sometimes participant in,
Lyceum lectures and debates, and it was in Independence that he became enamored with another popular feature of contemporary Americana – the preaching of itinerant evangelists, especially that of the Methodist W.M. Prottsman. On July 26, 1855 he noted, “I went to Camp meeting and joined the [Methodist] Church!” He continued his eclectic church attendance, however, noting here and there attendance at Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Mormon, and other services, and noted in February 1856, “Heard about town that I was called a Catholic.” In Independence he became infatuated with a young lady – Pensy Musgrove, from Lexington, Missouri, whom he encountered with her family at a fair in October 1855, and walked about with. He “was enchanted by her manners,” he wrote. The next day: “walked with her over the bluffs and was enraptured by her conversation... took her to church and home again. Felt myself falling in love. Left soon and suddenly, as the father came home and found us alone.” The romance did not thrive, despite Hinchey’s best efforts, and Miss Musgrove became engaged to a man she had been seeing before Hinchey came on the scene. On May 30, 1856, having heard of her impending marriage, he departed crestfallen: “paid my hotel bill, and then at night went aboard the F. X. Bray, and next morning early left for St. Louis.”
S
t. Louis was then a city in which a traveling Irishman might feel somewhat at home. Its first newspaper, the Missouri Gazette, had been founded by Joseph Charless, an Irish immigrant, in 1808. Another immigrant, John Mullanphy, was the city’s first millionaire, and his son Bryan the city’s mayor from 1846 to ’47. When Anthony Trollope arrived in St. Louis a few years after Hinchey, he would comment on the city’s abundant Irish and German populations: “If I were to form an opinion of the language I heard in the streets of the town,” he observed, “I should say that nearly every man was either an Irishman or a German.”iii In addition, St. Louis’s Catholic archbishop, Peter Richard Kenrick, was, like Hinchey, a Dubliner, and Hinchey would do a posthumous portrait of Kenrick’s brother Francis, the Bishop of Baltimore, some years later at the archbishop’s request. Portraiture remained Hinchey’s specialty and the means whereby he made his way financially, eventually supporting a family that by 1875 would include six children. The eminent St. Louis portraitist at the
ABOVE: Portrait of Elizabeth Barada Orten. OPPOSITE: Hinchey’s painting of the Eads Bridge opening celebrations on July 4, 1874 in St. Louis. The bridge was one of the first long bridges to spann the Mississippi River and the longest steel bridge in the world.
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western bank. Making matters especially volatile in St. Louis as war approached, Missouri was home to a population split as to Union allegiance, and the governor, Claiborne Jackson, was a politician of ardent Southern sympathies with the power and inclination to muster and command a state guard outside Washington’s control. Thus hostilities broke out in St. Louis while the war clouds were still building over northern Virginia and Washington. Three months after Hinchey’s “great talk of war” diary notation, and a few weeks after Bull Run, the bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent up to that time occurred at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, Missouri. Just before the outbreak of war in St. Louis, Hinchey sketched the encampment of the secessionist State Guard set up in Lindell Grove west of town. He was present as well for the confrontation at the camp on May 10, 1861, when federal troops captured the encampment of the governor’s guard, following which there was a riot in which 30 civilians were shot. The years of what Edmund Wilson would later call “patriotic gore” had commenced, and Hinchey, having been present at the war’s St. Louis debut, would follow and chronicle the Missouri war throughout its duration. After the Union Army gained the upper hand in the state, the hostilities moved into a new phase, one more in the guerrilla mode and consequently of an unpredictable, restive, and capricious character, as Confederates would resort to raids into the state from across its southeast border. The atmosphere evoked in Hinchey’s diaries and other writing is the Missouri of martial law, rumors, and impromptu clashes as the major Civil War actions shifted to other theaters. The prosperous Holloman farm in Arcadia was assaulted by military troops. “Now commenced a series of troublesome days and watchful nights,” he wrote on August 25, 1861, “which seemed to promise no good end. Soldiers pilfer, steal, rob, insult and threaten.” His wife Lucinda’s father had been opposed to secession, Hinchey noted, but was considered a southern sympathizer since two of his sons were in the Confederate Army. Another diary entry in the same period noted that “the soldiers of both the Northern and the Southern armies have plundered the farms of every item of food which they could lay hands upon day and IMAGE COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI
time was Manuel de Franca, however, ally sketch. He accepted the teaching job in whose acquaintance Hinchey made right August of 1856 and remained at the school after arriving in the city. De Franca was a for a year, during which a romance develmajor artist with a classical portrait prac- oped with one of his students, Lucinda Jane tice, its clientele drawn from the city’s aris- Holloman. The Hollomans were a promitocracy, while Hinchey attracted more nent family in Arcadia; Lucinda’s father was middle-class customers – his work was the presiding judge of Iron County and later comparatively inexpensive, often making a state legislator. The couple married in Auuse of photographs and daguerreotypes. gust of 1857 and moved to the picturesque “De Franca’s friendship and patronage un- port town of Alton, Illinois, just upriver doubtedly helped the young artist establish from St. Louis on the Mississippi, which himself,” and, Springer notes, “it was not would allow William to commute to his St. long before Hinchey had developed ac- Louis studio. quaintances that led to... commissions.”iv Sketches and diary notes from this period He became part of a St. Louis artistic com- reveal his frequent travels from Alton to St. munity that included George Caleb Bingham, known for his paintings of the frontier. The city must have seemed a comparatively sophisticated and promising municipality after his taste of the Santa Fe Trail and even Independence. The Missouri iron country, which would decline in importance after the turn of the century due to the discovery of richer deposits in the Lake Superior range, was burgeoning in the 1850s, notably in the Arcadia Valley, the region running south out of St. Louis some 80 miles to Iron Mountain and Pilot Knob, the area that would eventually capture Hinchey’s imagination and be his ground as artist from the age of 30 onward. He would become, in effect, a Missouri regionalist painter and an invaluable recorder, in visual and written terms, of the area’s life over more than three decades, including the darkly eventful years of the Civil War during which his war sketches and dispatches would appear in Harpers Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, and the New York Illustrated. ABOVE: Sketch of an Hinchey’s introduction unknown man, c. 1885. Louis and down into Iron County to the Arcadia Valley Pencil on paper. and back. came after a period of OPPOSITE TOP: “Great talk of war,” is his diary Hinchey’s obituary rooming in St. Louis at from 1893, published in entry penned at St. Louis on April the Planter’s Hotel. He the St. Louis Globe16, 1861, by which time he and his there met Jerome C. Democrat. wife had resumed living in ArcaBOTTOM: Berryman, a Methodist OPPOSITE dia. His war reference is not to a reHinchey’s gravestone at preacher and rector of an City Cemetery in De mote menace – southeast Missouri academy in Arcadia, who Soto, Missouri. bordered the emerging Confederoffered him a position as acy and flanked the strategic Misan instructor in art and French, and recom- sissippi River. The river was an immensely mended the southeast Missouri area for its important waterway itself and additionally landscapes. so for the numerous other major tributaries The small town held the architecturally that flowed into it. St. Louis afforded an inimpressive co-educational Methodist acad- valuable command of the river and its traffic emy and an Ursuline convent as well, both and was home to a major federal arsenal of which locations Hinchey would eventu- complex occupying 56 acres on the river’s
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night. One of the Holloman family sons was wounded near Potosi, Missouri in early September of the war’s first year, only three days after leaving home. He died, Hinchey recorded, “two days after his sister Mary and I were allowed to get to him.” Taking full advantage of his Irish (British) citizenship and his journalistic employment, Hinchey secured letters of passage from Army officials permitting him to move about the eastern half of the state. As a neutral, artist, and journalist, he was generally well-treated, he notes, and able to post sketches and written reports to national journals. Ever the entrepreneur, he recognized the modest opportunity conditions provided: “Today I adopted a plan of painting low-priced pictures in oil on paper for soldiers, particularly those just entering the service.” By January of 1862, he had set up a studio in the parlor of his Arcadia home and continued his enterprise of painting oil portraits of soldiers on duty in the area, but by March he was recording that the portrait business was rather slack and the soldiers out of money. Weariness with the conflict may have set in by this point as well, the romanticism in uniformed portraits beginning to lose some of its original glamour. By May, at the recommendation of Army officers, he undertook a trip to Washington, D.C. to see about portrait demand in the capital. Avoiding the areas of strife that a direct journey through the Border States would have entailed, he traveled north from St. Louis to Chicago by train, then to Ft. Wayne, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and finally the capital. “The first incident I saw was two men fighting,” he recorded on his arrival in Washington, D.C. on May 15, 1862. He remained there for almost three months, at lodgings on Ninth St., until August 7, painting portraits and going about the city. He made it a point early on, on May 23, to attend a performance of Dion Boucicault’s extremely popular Irish melodrama The Colleen Bawn at the Grove Theatre. Later in his stay he met an old Dublin school-fellow, Michael O’Shaughnessy, with whom he went to hear the singing at St. Aloysius’ Church. But in the Washington area the wear of the war was evident by this time: “Saw a good many wounded soldiers returning from the battlefields after their unsuccessful attack on Richmond,” he recorded on June 4. In Baltimore on August 7, he noted, “great consternation, and crowds running away to Canada to escape draft.” On his return to Missouri in August, conditions had not changed, and continued martial law wore on the population. Stopping at De Soto, near St. Louis, Hinchey found “the neighborhood as much excited as ever by the contentions of the natives and the armed Dutch [German] home guards. Raids of retaliation almost every night.” On May 28, 1863 he wrote, “The country is in a miserably wretched state. The people at the mercy of petty officers and thieving soldiers. And no prospect of improvement.” His notes move between the local war perspective and the national one: “The Southern Army of Virginia has entrenched and fortified itself at Fredericksburg.... The Irish brigade attempted to storm the heights, but was terribly slaughtered, and the whole Northern
army is driven back across the Rappahannock.” So things went through the war years until 1864, when he gave up his diary-keeping, his final entry being August 6, 1864. (In the epilogue to his transcription of his father’s diary, Hinchey’s son mentions his father’s illness in that year, which could be related to the diary cessation.) After the war, the family, then including four children, moved to Carondelet and later to De Soto, both St. Louis suburbs, and Hinchey maintained a studio at Fifth and Olive streets in the city, from this point on living a quiet life compared to his adventurous younger years. 1874, however, saw great excitement in St. Louis as the Eads Bridge gracefully spanning the Mississippi River was
completed – a technological wonder of the century and to this day a St. Louis landmark. The bridge’s dedication on the fourth of July, opening with a 100gun salute, was spectacular. General William Tecumseh Sherman drove the last spike, and a parade fourteen miles long wound through the city. At dusk an enormous firework display burst forth. Hinchey painted the image of record of the event – a view from mid-river, the riverboats lined up facing the bridge, a blaze of light in the night sky. On September 7, 1893, the 64-year-old Hinchey fell from a St. Louis Railway car at Broadway and Poplar streets downtown. His legs were run over and his injuries so severe that an amputation of one leg was scheduled for the following day. A St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporter was present on September 9 when Hinchey was laid on the table in a City Hospital surgical room for the operation, and so were two of the artist’s sons whose faces the reporter described as “agonized.” As preparations were made to place the chloroform mask, Hinchey asked to say a few words, noting he might never get up from that table, which in effect he would not – he died within a few days of the surgery. He said he wished to thank Mr. Gladstone for his efforts on behalf of Irish Home Rule. “He is a noble man,” Hinchey affirmed, but added that Ireland’s freedom would have to be gained by Irishmen themselves. “I feel she will be free,” he IA said, “I know she will be free.”iv
NOTES i Lynn E. Springer, The Rediscovered Work of William J. Hinchey (St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum, 1974). Introduced by Katherine Hinchey Cochran, the artist’s granddaughter. ii The present article is drawn from the Missouri Historical Society manuscript. iii Anthony Trollope, North America, Vol.2 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986) 81-82. iv Springer, 14. v St. Louis GlobeDemocrat. September 9, 1893.
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The Irish Airman’s Grave, From Padua to Kiltartan:
J
Yeats’s Tower, and Lady Gregory’s Autograph Tree By Philip Kokotailo
RIGHT: Major Robert Gregory. BELOW: The grave of Major Robert Gregory.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
anuary 23, 2018, marked the 100th anniversary of the death in Italy of Ireland’s most famous aviator, Major Robert Gregory. His grave stands in a quiet corner of Padua’s elaborate Cimitero Maggiore in a wellmaintained section distinguished by its symmetry and simplicity. Twenty-five Commonwealth casualties of World War I are buried in this section, their white tablet headstones set in two rows. From behind, a white stone cross reaches 15 feet up, with a metal sword set on its front and those all-too familiar words, “Their Name Liveth Forevermore,” carved into its base. A box hedge surrounds the plot, and a row of mature thuja trees stands opposite, shading a bench where visitors can reflect on the consequences of the Great War or pay their respects to those interred here. Gregory’s grave stands at the far right of the first row. The balanced order of the plot reminded me of the balanced order in “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” the poem in which William Butler Yeats gave lasting voice to Robert Gregory. Symmetrically divided into two equal parts by its two periods, the halves are themselves divided into two stanza-like quarters, each four lines long, each rhyming a-b-a-b, and each containing numerous antitheses. All work together to celebrate the “lonely impulse of delight,” the moment of balanced stillness that ends the poem. I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. Soon after I recited this poem at Gregory’s grave, I heard above me the sound of a single-engine propeller plane, as if to remind me
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of what flight used to be. Gregory’s grave used to be different, too. It was originally marked by a wooden Celtic cross. Now, on the white headstone, the circle of that cross has evolved into the round crest of the Royal Flying Corps, with a crown at its top and the wings of an eagle breaking its circumference engraving: “Per ardua ad astra” (Through struggles to the stars). The Roman arms of the Celtic cross remain. Below them appear the words: Only Child of Late Rt. Hon. Sir W.H. Gregory K.C.M.G. Of Coole Park Co. Galway No mention is made of Gregory’s mother. Yet without her influence, Robert would be unknown today and two elegiac masterpieces by a Nobel laureate would not exist. Throughout her life, Lady Gregory credited Yeats with inspiring her to become a creative writer and giving her both a “means of expression” and “faith in myself.” She did not hesitate to inspire Yeats, in turn, to memorialize her son. When she informed him of Robert’s death, she urged:
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economic and political circumstances of the time (with land agitation and the struggle for Home Rule), this was no easy task. Coole was not a wealthy estate. While Lady Gregory had to pay off debts, government measures required her to sell off lands to her tenants, thus reducing her income by half within 15 years. The Gregory lands included a 16th century Norman tower-house or castle keep, which had first caught the romantic imagination of William Butler Yeats in the last years of the 19th century. By then he had begun to spend his summers at Coole, initially collaborating with Lady Gregory on a collection of Irish folklore and fairy tales, then developing with her the idea of a GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION, national theatre, which would eventually LIBRARY OF CONGRESS become the Abbey, in Dublin. Yeats described his find as “the old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited TOP: Thoor Ballylee Tower. by a farmer and his wife, and a cottage where their daughter and son-in-law live, and a little mill with an ABOVE: Lady Augusta old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows Gregory in an undated photograph. upon a little river and great stepping stones.” In 1915, Lady Gregory suggested that he buy the tower, since the tenants now wanted just the land. Yeats feared it would prove too impractical for a 50-year-old bachelor. A year later, the abandoned tower having passed into the hands of the Congested Districts Board, Yeats nevertheless began negotiating to buy it. Another year later, confident that his intention to marry would soon be fulfilled, he purchased the tower (now in heavy disrepair), along with its attached cottage and a surrounding acre of land, for the price of only £35. The cost of restoring it would prove to be considerably more. A roof had to be added, floors rebuilt, windows and frames replaced, and the cottage exFEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 49
PHOTO COURTESY LADY GREGORY YEATS HERITAGE TRAIL
“write something down that we may keep.” Lady Gregory was born Isabella Augusta Persse on March 15, 1852 at Roxborough House, seat of the wealthy and staunchly Protestant Persse family. The 12th of 16 children, she demonstrated from an early age not only an independent frame of mind, which soon enabled her to overcome the biases of her Ascendancy-class background, but also a practical sense of ambition, which eventually put her at the center of Ireland’s 20th-century literary revival. In childhood, Augusta showed an interest in romantic literature, particularly in the stories of mythical Irish heroes told by a nationalist nurse serving her unionist family. In her 20s, she gained invaluable experience managing Roxborough House and the estate for her brothers, 25 miles southeast of Galway, near the parish of Kiltartan. By the age of 27, however, Augusta’s prospects for marriage were dimming. Then she met Sir William Gregory, whose estate at Coole stood only six miles away. A widower, 35 years her senior, he had recently retired from his position as Governor of Ceylon, previously having served twice in the British House of Commons, first as Conservative M.P. for Dublin and then on a liberal-conservative platform for County Galway. Knighted in 1875 (thus the K.C.M.G. on his son’s headstone – Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George), the politically imperialist Sir William was attracted to Augusta’s literary interests as well as to her management skills. They were married in 1880, and the following year their only child, Robert, was born. Throughout the 12 years of their marriage, the couple spent most of their time in London or abroad. After Sir William’s death in March 1892, however, Lady Gregory began to spend more time at Coole, which her husband’s will had left her to manage in trust for Robert, until he turned 21. In the challenging
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panded. Having married Georgie Hyde-Lees during the interim (in October 1917), Yeats and his nowpregnant wife moved into the cottage in September 1918, while the tower continued to be restored. This would be, intermittently, the family’s summer home for the next 10 years. To announce their acquisition, Yeats reproduced as a postcard Robert Gregory’s drawing of the tower and its landscape. To approach “Thoor Ballylee” today (as Yeats renamed it in 1922) is to enter not only the scene that Robert drew, but also the setting that Yeats presented in his 12-stanza elegy, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory:” For all things the delighted eye now sees Were loved by him; the old storm-broken trees That cast their shadows upon road and bridge; The tower set on the stream’s edge; The ford where drinking cattle make a stir Nightly, and startled by that sound The water-hen must change her ground; He might have been your heartiest welcomer. Entering through the thatched cottage, I am struck first by a sharp smell from the fireplace just inside: “a fire of turf in th’ancient tower” invoking the third line of “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” Here I meet Rena McAllen, who manages Thoor Ballylee (with a small team of volunteers and one paid employee) for about 4,000 visitors each season, from June through September. Soon after she welcomes me with a cup of tea brewed in the cottage’s kitchen, I realize that her local knowledge matches her energetic hospitality. Born and raised only a mile away, Rena guides me PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE THOOR BALLYLEE VISITORS CENTRE
TOP LEFT: Winding stair inside the Thoor Ballylee Castle in County Galway. TOP RIGHT: W.B. Yeats in New York City, 1920. ABOVE: Robert Gregory’s drawing of the Thoor Ballylee tower, c. 1917.
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PHOTO: GEORGE GRANTHAM BAIN COLLECTION LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
through Thoor Ballylee with as many references to its history during her lifetime as during Yeats’s residence. Not to be missed is the 12-minute video written by the late Yeats scholar, Augustine Martin. Featuring archival footage, it sets Thoor Ballylee in historical context, reaching not only back to the Norman invasion of Ireland, but also out to the political troubles during Yeats’s time here. Still, the highlight of Rena’s tour is the tower itself, particularly its “narrow winding stair.” While “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” includes the first references to both in Yeats’s poetry, The Tower (published in 1928) would become the title of what is generally considered his greatest volume of poems, followed by The Winding Stair (published in 1933). Embedded in a wall seven-feet thick, the circular stair connects the tower’s four floors, each with a single room and a window overlooking the river. While the ground floor served as the family’s dining room, Yeats also wrote on its “great trestle table,” which his wife Georgie kept covered with wildflowers. In a letter to his father, Yeats called this the “pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and round arched door leading to the thatched hall.” The second floor, featuring a hooded fireplace and vaulted ceiling, served as the family’s living room, the third floor as Yeats’ and his wife’s bedroom. The fourth floor, the “strangers’ room” (where the couple may have intended to hold séances, in line with their occult interests) was never finished. A vent in the wall
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now houses 24 lesser horseshoe bats (a protected species, with only 600 remaining in Ireland). Similarly, a slit window off the winding stair contains a rook’s nest, reminding visitors of “The Stare’s Nest by My Window,” the penultimate section in Yeats’s “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” A final steep flight of stairs from the strangers’ room leads to the battlements, where Yeats would occasionally retire into the shadow of the large chimney, to escape horse-flies. The walls throughout the tower remain unadorned, as they were in Yeats’s time, because the dampness sweating through the limestone would have damaged anything hung there. Reproductions of the original – furniture have been appropriately placed – the bed, the trestle table, a writing desk, a dozen three-legged chairs—and great brass candlesticks still flank the fireplace. Its hood has once again been painted black and gold, the surrounding walls deep blue. Together, the rich colors and heavy furniture enhance the medieval aspect of the tower’s stern simplicity. “It’s deliberately kept simple,” says Rena, identifying what she values most about the tower. Quoting “Blood and the Moon,” she explains: “I just love the fact that so little at Thoor Ballylee has changed, that you can still climb ‘this winding, gyring, grinding treadmill of a stair’ that Yeats walked up.” Thoor Ballylee figures prominently in, and hovers symbolically over, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” But what about Gregory himself, who doesn’t enter until the sixth stanza, as “my dear friend’s dear son”? In the next three stanzas, Yeats repeats the line, “Soldier, scholar, horseman he,” ultimately following it with, “As ’twere all life’s epitome.” Gregory was indeed a scholar, having attended Harrow School per family tradition, from 1895 to 1899, before matriculating at New College, Oxford University. Gregory was a horseman, too, an intrepid point-to-point jockey famous locally for adventures mentioned in the eighth stanza of Yeats’s elegy: “At Mooneen he had leaped a place / So perilous that half the astonished meet / Had shut their eyes; and where was it / He rode a race without a bit?” About the “Soldier,” however, Yeats has little to say, though Gregory embraced that role early in the Great War. At age 36 (and with three young children) he was officially too old to fly, but he would nevertheless win membership in the French Legion d’Honneur as well as the English Military Cross. Still, Yeats resisted even Lady Gregory’s “suggested eloquence about aero planes ‘& the blue Italian sky.’” Instead, he chose to portray Robert primarily as an artist. We dreamed that a great painter had been born To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn, To that stern colour and that delicate line That are our secret discipline Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might. Gregory was an accomplished painter, too. By 1902 he had left Oxford to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where he met the fellow art student he would marry, Margaret Parry. The two then lived much of the time in Paris, or traveled abroad, in order
to paint. Yeats admired Robert’s work so much that he asked him to design sets both for his mother’s plays and for his own at the Abbey Theatre. There was, however, considerable tension between the two men. Robert grew ever more resentful of the long periods of time that Yeats spent at Coole as Lady Gregory’s guest, where he occupied the master’s bedroom and had come to expect service. Though Robert had inherited the estate when he came of age in 1902, his father’s will had granted Lady Gregory residence throughout her lifetime. As for Yeats, he found Robert Gregory aimless and unreliable, showing little interest in the management of Coole and often failing to meet deadlines for his theatre sets. None of this personal tension makes its way into “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” The poem’s chief tension consists instead of the opposed demands that the active life and the contemplative life present for any artist, Yeats as well as Gregory.
Ultimately, Gregory devoted himself to a military cause, Yeats to a poet’s “secret discipline.” Looking back over Robert’s short life, Yeats eulogizes him as a fire of “dried straw,” commenting: “and if we turn about / the bare chimney is gone black out / Because the work had finished in that flare.” The work would go for another twenty years for Yeats, until his own death at age 73. Lady Gregory suggested to him that for Robert, this poem would become “his monument – all that remains.” For Yeats, on the other hand, Thoor Ballylee would become (in his own words) “a fitting monument and symbol,” with all the wealth of reference that a great symbol provides: the artist in isolation, the mystery of romance, the resonance of history, the tradition of a cultured aristocracy, and, more personally, the proximity of that friend, Lady Gregory, “who has been to me for nearly forty years my strength and my conscience.” Three-quarters of the way from Thoor Ballylee to
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Kiltartan Gregory Museum, Galway.
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Coole Park lies Kiltartan Cross, the crossroads identified as Robert Gregory’s “country” in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Here stands the attractive Kiltartan Gregory Museum, built as a two-room schoolhouse in 1892 at the behest of Sir William Gregory and designed by the architect Frank Persse, Lady Gregory’s brother. Beautifully restored in the mid1990s, its grey limestone walls with red-brick trim and open arcade now preserve both a historic classroom and a collection of artifacts associated with Lady Gregory. Of particular note is an illuminated address, hand-painted on parchment, in which the Gregory tenants welcome Robert as their future landlord on the occasion of his 21st birthday. Lady Gregory later wrote about this “gathering of cousins,” with “the big feast PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR and dance of the tenants.” ReTOP: The Autograph flecting on the tumultuous 30 years that followed, she Tree (a purple-leaved poignantly added (near the end of her life): “But the beech) in the walled days of landed gentry have passed. It is better so. Yet garden at Coole Park, I wish some one of our own blood would after my Co. Galway. The tree has initials carved into death care enough for what has been a home for so the trunk, including for long, to keep it open.” The collection at Gregory example George Kiltartan Museum also contains photographs of what Bernard Shaw. she never saw: Coole House being pulled down in ABOVE: Yeats's writing 1942, for building materials, its contents having been desk inside the Thoor auctioned off in 1932, shortly after her death. Ballylee Castle. Only the vestiges of the Gregory estate now remain. In accordance with the two-sentence will that Robert wrote in the train on his way to war, “everything I have” passed to his wife at his death. Margaret’s efforts to sell Coole began within just a few years, but they did not reach a conclusion until 1927, when the house and its surrounding land of seven woods were purchased by the Forestry Commission. The sale gave Lady Gregory the right to live 52 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
there until her death, at the cost of £100 per year. Today, the demesne comprises a thousand acres of woods, river, turloughs (dry lakes), and bare limestone in the Coole / Garryland Nature Reserve. Trails provide access to the landscape that inspired not only Lady Gregory, Robert Gregory, and W. B. Yeats, but also his brother, the painter Jack B. Yeats. Here, too, visited the painter Augustus John and so many writers in the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century: George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Synge, George Russell (Æ), George Moore, Douglas Hyde, and Sean O’Casey. What were the stables and barn have now been converted into a visitor center. Be sure to purchase here Colin Smythe’s excellent A Guide to Coole Park. In addition to its informative text, it contains reproductions of paintings and drawings by Robert Gregory, Margaret Gregory, and Jack B. Yeats, as well as photographs of Lady Gregory, her house and estate, and her many literary visitors. Also, be sure to watch here the equally excellent 30-minute video, Lady Gregory of Coole, which surveys her life, relationships, and accomplishments. Still, the highlight of the visitor center is its permanent exhibit, based on the charming memoir Me & Nu, written by Lady Gregory’s granddaughter, Anne, about the time that she and her sister, Catherine, (nicknamed Nu) spent as children at Coole. The exhibit presents the rooms of the house (nursery, library, drawing room) from the children’s point of view. Especially interesting is the audiovisual material: footage from Abbey Theatre productions, a film clip of George Bernard Shaw commenting on Coole, and a recording of Yeats in “his humming voice” reciting his poem “For Anne Gregory,” in which he celebrates her “yellow hair.” Outside, finally, in the walled garden stands a great copper beech known as the Autograph Tree. In 1898, Lady Gregory began a tradition by inviting Yeats to carve his initials into it. Thirty years later, she would remember: “And on the great stem, smooth as parchment... many a friend who stayed here has carved the letters of his name.” So too did her son. His are now aging into illegibility on the living tree, in a way that the “carven stone” of his grave in Padua’s Cimitero Maggiore never will. This time, however, his mother is rightly acknowledged, instead of his father. Lady Gregory carved her own A.G. into the “parchment” of the copper beech right above Robert’s W.R.G., which is carved just above Yeats’s W.B.Y. Here, we should pause to recite not “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” or “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” but rather the conclusion to “Coole Park, 1929,” in which Yeats anticipated the results of his “most true” friend’s death: Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand When all those rooms and passages are gone, When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound And saplings root among the broken stone, And dedicate – eyes bent upon the ground, Back turned upon the brightness of the sun And all the sensuality of the shade – A moment’s memory to that laurelled head. IA
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Shipping Up to Boston Tara Sullivan:
Tara Sullivan talks about her life in sports, Irish dance, and the memorable people along her road to becoming the Boston Globe’s newest sports writer. By Kristin McGowan
F
or twenty years Tara Sullivan covered sports for the Record, the largest of New Jersey’s newspapers. She’s covered everything from high school to the pros, bringing her readers into the lives of the athletes and the heart of the games. Whether it’s playfully quizzing Eli Manning on his back-up quarterbacks, profiling Chris Hogan, a North Jersey native now wide receiver for the New England Patriots, or opening up to her readers with personal columns about her brother’s service overseas as a Navy physician and how sports provided an emotional bridge – the people have always been front and center. “I’ve been lucky to be at Super Bowls, World Series, the U.S. Open, the Masters, you know, a lot of dramatic sports events, so obviously the privilege of just being there is not lost on me, but it’s the people that I’ve written about that have stayed with me.” So how does a Bruce Springsteen-loving Jersey Girl leave her beloved Yankees and Giants to cover the rival Red Sox and Patriots for the Boston Globe? “We don’t cover the sport, we cover the people,” says Tara of her move to Boston. “Being in Boston means not having the same institutional knowledge that I have in North Jersey, but it won’t be unfamiliar,” Sullivan says of her move. “People are the people, right? Whatever team, whatever sport.” Sullivan, the youngest of four, was raised on New York sports – her Dad held season tickets to the Giants and her brother was a huge Yankees fan. An “insane Yankee fan” herself, Tara watched every game and “collected baseball cards like a maniac.” In high school she wrote the Yankees line-up on her schoolbook covers and filled photo albums with newspaper clippings. In college, Tara turned her passion for sports into writing, becoming the sports editor of Rutgers University’s the Daily Targum. After graduation, she
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enjoyed stints at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News before landing her dream job at the Record, the newspaper she grew up reading “back to front,” to take in the sports news first. Although she loved sports from the time she could crawl, the athletic preparation and competitive skills that earned her ten varsity letters in high school did not come from a childhood on the soccer field. It came on the dance floor. “I was literally going to Irish dance classes in diapers and started dancing myself at four or five.” Tara’s mother emigrated from County Limerick, and settled in the Bronx with her father, whose family was from Milltown Malbay in County Sligo. “My mom was looking for ways to keep us connected to the Irish culture, and a neighbor in the apartment building told her about this new Irish dance school that was opening in Inwood, so she gathered up us four kids and we were one of the first families to join the school the year it opened.” The school was the Early-McLoughlin School of Irish Dance, founded by Patsy Early McLoughlin. It celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Tara had found her second home, taking to dance right away. It was in her blood. Her mother’s sister, Nuala Slater Downes, was on a World Champion figure team for the Ui Ruairc School in Limerick. Tara learned quickly, successfully competed at the highest levels, and grew up within a family of fellow dancers. “Some of my closest friends in the world came through the McLoughlin school,” Tara tells me. Eventually the Sullivan family moved to New Jersey, but her mother would drive Tara and her sister into the city once a week. They stayed with the school as it, too, moved to northern New Jersey. “I would go to soccer practice after school and then to dancing at night. I loved going. The community has been the most welcoming and loving and supportive and so it’s what I always return to and rely on. I credit a lot of that directly to Patsy. That’s the culture she built. It’s hard to even describe what Patsy means in my life, you know, everything from like a second mom to a best friend to a colleague and everything – she’s just always been there.” Tara became one of the certified Irish dance instructors at the McLoughlin School, with her own daughter, Keira, as a student. “I love teaching. When you see a kid just not being
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LEFT: Former Giants defensive tackle Keith Hamilton with Tara Sullivan.
LEFT: The Sullivan family: husband Walt, son Kevin, daughter Keira, and Tara.
able to do a certain move and then being able to – that’s as satisfying as breaking a big story! I mean, it’s fantastic. And for me, it’s been so much fun. Patsy runs everything so fantastically I just show up and help the kids learn what they need to learn.” Tara bridged her professional world to her dancing community, and in doing so, showed her students that even the greatest still strive to learn more and push themselves. “I loved pulling from all the worlds I’m in. Why compartmentalize, right? I mean, these kids know that if I’m not there on a certain Tuesday, it’s because I might be at a baseball game or something. Having competed at an international level myself in Irish dance does help inform my understanding of the intense competitiveness of professional sports and wanting to do well. Journalism itself is a competitive field. You want to get the scoop. I do think they’re all intertwined.” At class one September evening in the basement of St. Mary’s school, just prior to her move to Boston, Tara began practice by sharing Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s humble response to coach Ben McAdoo’s criticism of him; “I enjoy being coached, if I screw something up, let me know.” While covering Rory McIlroy for the 2011 Masters, Tara found herself shut out of the locker room after the final round by a guard unfamiliar with the rules. “Sort of an easy assumption to make because of what Augusta National was going through, you know, regarding its all-male membership. It was unfortunate, but what I often take from it is just how my industry, my colleagues, rose up in my defense. That shows the progress from twenty-five years ago when people thought, you shouldn’t get in there to there being outrage because I didn’t get in. People understood that that should have happened.”
It was a powerful moment – and a humorous one, too, back with her dance family in New Jersey. “I remember when I first came back from the Masters we were still in the old church down the street on Washington Avenue in Bergenfield. Through the front door there was a double door into the practice area and George’s dad had put a sign up there barring me from the practice room. It was hilarious.” Moving to Boston means leaving Patsy, her fellow teachers, and her students behind, but with Boston’s own strong Irish roots, the Irish dance community there is as vibrant as it is in the New York metro area. It’s also the end of an era with Sullivan girls dancing for Patsy. “It is so strange to even think about taking my daughter Keira somewhere else – I’m still trying to get my head around that. The beauty of Irish dancing though, is that those connections never go away. They’re too strong for that.” While New Jersey’s loss is definitely Boston’s gain, if anyone can bridge these two powerhouses of sports, it’s Tara. She may even bring the rival fans together. “Two things about my personality that have always been there are Irish dancing and being a sports fan. They molded me, you know? They’re not activities anymore. They’re part of who I am.” During the 2017 address to the high school athletes being honored at the NorthJersey.com Sports Awards, Tara reminisced on her own high school sports experiences… and seems to have taken her own advice: “One finish line does not a destination make. Life is full of finish lines, so keep going after them. The journey is what truly makes you, not the accomplishment. Don’t end up like the guys Bruce Springsteen sings about in ‘Glory Days.’ Build more glory days IA in your future.”
ABOVE: Sullivan with New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning. FAR LEFT: Friends Deirdre O'Sullivan and Tara Sullivan. Deirdre also became a dance teacher.
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roots |
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by James G. Ryan
The Kennedys
TOP: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. ABOVE: Kathleen Kennedy.
he name Kennedy or O’Kennedy is derived from the Gaelic O’Cinneide, which is itself derived from the original Gaelic form cean eidig meaning, “ugly head,” or, more generously, “helmet head.” This was the name by which the father of Brian Boru was known (the Irish have always had a high tolerance for less-than-complimentary anatomical nicknames). The surname first appears as Ó Cinnéide in the early 11th century, and refers specifically to the line of Dunchad, one of Cean Eidig’s sons and a brother of Brian Boru. Boru was perhaps the most famous Irish High King and was responsible for the defeat of the Norse and Danish Viking forces in Ireland at the Battle of the Clontarf in 1014 The initial anglicized version, O’Kennedy, is rarely seen today, though the name often appears as Kennedy, Kenedy, Kanady, Canedy, and Cennetig, among others. Fittingly, the clan coat of arms features three helmets, an obvious tribute to the kinder translation of the name (pictured left). Like the O’Briens, who are directly descended from Brian Boru, the O’Kennedys were originally settled in County Clare, in the area around Killaloe on the banks of the river Shannon. However, the ruling O’Briens and their allies the McNamaras gradually drove them into Tipperary, to the territory then known as Ormond. Following the Norman invasion, the many written deeds between the O’Kennedys and the Norman Butlers who were “awarded” the O’Kennedy’s Ormond territory demonstrate that the clan was a force to be reckoned with. For several centuries, the O’Kennedys fiercely resisted attempts by the Butler Earls of Ormond to subjugate them. Eventually, in the 16th and 17th centuries, O’Kennedys and Butlers were rebel allies, joint landholders in North Tipperary, and even marriage partners. Today, Tulluan Castle, near Nenagh, County Tipperary, serves as a reminder of their once powerful influence in the region. In the Jacobite wars of the late 17th century, the Kennedys were part of the Irish army that fought for the Catholic King James. Among these were Lieutenant John Kennedy and Kennedy McKennedy of Colonel Francis Carroll’s Dragoons. Many Kennedys were among those outlawed in 1691 as a result of their activities in this war. The Jacobite wars and earlier Cromwellian campaign further reduced the Kennedy fortunes and status. Thus, many of the family emigrated to France and Spain, where they joined the continental armies, in particular their Irish Brigades. Bryan Kennedy was a soldier in Bulke-
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ley’s Brigade who was killed at Maastricht in 1747, while Lieutenant Charles Kennedy was part of the famous Dillon’s regiment. The name was changed to Quenedy in Spain. In America, the name is immortalized in public service by the most famous of all Kennedy clans, which produced the first Irish Catholic president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His contributions, as well as those of his brother, Senator and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy, who has been called the most effective member of the Senate in United States history, are never forgotten. Known as the Lion of the Senate, Ted’s legacy of bringing aid to the marginalized, including the elderly and the disabled, lives on, as do his decades of commitment to the Democratic Party and public service. Eunice Kennedy Shriver was the founder of the precursor to the Special Olympics and assisted in the spread of the Special Olympics, while her sister Jean Kennedy Smith founded Very Special Arts, which works in tandem with the Special Olympics. Jean served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland and played a crucial role in the Northern Ireland peace process. Eunice’s daughter, Maria Shriver, is an awardwinning journalist, author, and former First Lady of California. The descendants of these three most famous Kennedys have not abandoned the passion for public service that their fathers clearly possessed. Patrick J. Kennedy, son of Ted, served as the Representative for Rhode Island from 1995 to 2011. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served as lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. Our cover story, Joe Kennedy III, grandson of Robert, currently serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, is following in his father’s footsteps as well – Joe Kennedy II served the state from 1987 to 1999. In the arts, Kathleen Kennedy is one of the movie industry’s most successful and talented producers, most recently responsible for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. William Kennedy is a writer whose novel Ironweed won the Pulitzer Prize and a host of other literary awards. Jimmy Kennedy was a songwriter who wrote such classics as “Red Sails in the Sunset.” He retired to live in County Wicklow. An American activist and author from Florida, Stetson Kennedy, is most famous for his books in which he exposed the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. Finally, there is Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, appointed in 1988 by Ronald Regan, who is most recently best known for his majority opinion on Obergefell v. Hodges, which granted marriage IA equality in the U.S.
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book review |
A Plunge Through Time and Mores Rosemary Rogers reviews Jennifer Egan’s new novel Manhattan Beach.
n Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan makes a radical deThe fortunes of the Kerrigan family improve once Eddie is parture in style, language, and structure from her previin Dexter’s employ, but two years after the fateful day at Manous novel, the post-modern and Pulitzer Prize-winning hattan Beach, Eddie just… disappears. Anna at first can’t accept A Visit from the Goon Squad. This latest work, labeled his absence, “The truth had arrived gradually, like nightfall: a “historic fiction” and set between 1934 and 1946, tells recognition, when she caught herself awaiting his return, that of a Brooklyn Irish American family – the Kerrigans – she’d waited days, then weeks, then months…” But she never and in particular their youngest daughter, Anna. stops searching for him, a quest that ultimately leads her back The book manages to be both a page-turner and Anna’s comto Dexter Styles. ing-of-age story, told against the backdrop of the Great DepresThe book quickly moves to 1942. Anna is 19, supporting her sion, Brooklyn tenements, Manhattan nightlife, and World War mother and sister, working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an inspecII. There’s water, water everywhere as tor of parts destined for battleships. It’s a tedious job, but on her Egan gives us a unique perspective of New break she watches deep-sea divers go unYork – it’s the city seen as a harbor town, derwater to repair ships in the harbor. as a port, and as an island surrounded by She instantly knows this is what she was the sea with a shoreline that mesmerizes, meant to do. The job also introduces her “an electric mix of attraction and dread.” to a “fast” girlfriend, Nell, who brings her The cast of characters includes gangto a glamorous Manhattan nightclub sters, showgirls gone to fat, dockworkers, which just happens to be owned by the elite of society and variations of Rosie Dexter, now quasi-legit, and the two meet the Riveter. The novel borrows so much again. cinematic imagery that at times it feels Anna’s determination to be a diver faces less like reading a book and more like resistance by military authorities – “no job watching an old movie starring a fedorafor a woman” – but when it becomes evitopped Jimmy Cagney or featuring dent the war has exhausted the supply of Ginger Rogers as the plucky heroine qualified men, she now puts on the twowith moxie all over the place. hundred-pound diving “dress.” Anna goes Anna and her family live in Depresinto the deep, a world like a dream, one that sion poverty and the spectre of brings her “to a purely tactile realm that Hoovervilles hover over them as seemed to exist outside the rest of life.” Eddie, the family patriarch, barely (In the interest of research, the similarly ekes out a living as a bagman for a determined Jennifer Egan, did the same waterfront racketeer. The situation is thing – she was encased in two hundred made more tragic as another daughter, pounds of canvas and vulcanized rubber, Lydia, is severely handicapped and with a copper helmet weighing down her her medical care unaffordable and nonhead. She had also, by her own admission, existent. Desperate, Eddie seeks a job from a high- Manhattan Beach is become a “Maritime Nerd.”) level, Gatsby-esque mobster, Dexter Styles, whose published by Scribner On Anna’s dives, she repairs ships of unimaginname is a phony as it sounds. Dexter, who elimi- (October 2017 / 448 able size, World War II battleships, and trawls the nates pesky employees without a twinge of con- pp. / $28) bottom of New York Harbor, a “landscape of lost science, cuts a handsome figure in bespoke suits objects.” In one of the final and most powerful and, perversely, is not unlike Eddie – a churchgoer and family scenes of the book, Anna goes underwater searching for her lost man devoted to his daughter. father, looking to find the answer to his vanishing and uncover The novel begins, fittingly, in Manhattan Beach, a wealthy enthe secrets in her past. clave east of Coney Island, the site of Dexter’s mansion and It’s easy to forget the book is told in the third person since Egan Eddie’s upcoming job “interview.” Anna and Eddie are driving is such a masterful writer, bringing us right into the minds of her in a (borrowed) car, engaging in loving father-daughter banter characters, forcing us to invest in them emotionally. She’s seambut have no idea they are on a journey to the underworld in every lessly weaves massive themes – the ascendancy of the U.S. after sense of the word. With her self-possession, Anna, not yet 12, World War II, the changing role of women, capitalism (in the New impresses Dexter, as does Eddie’s easy nature and intelligence. York aristocracy and the mob), and, most poignantly, the relationHe’s hired. From that day on, the lives and secrets of Anna, Eddie, ship between fathers and daughters – with images of wartime fashand Dexter conflict, separate, and converge, driving the narrative ions, detective novels, radio serials, and movie stars. No wonder IA of the book. she was in 2011’s Irish America’s Top 100! FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 57
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Motherfoclóir
column| @theirishfor
Darach Ó Séaghdha, has been putting the fun back into the Irish language by translating words into English in a humorous, thoughtprovoking way and deftly using Twitter to expand his audience. He now continues the exercise in a new book, Motherfoclóir, in which he also reflects on the role the Irish language played in his own life. By Sharon Ní Chonchúir
T
he people of Ireland have a strange relationship with the Irish language. It’s our so-called native tongue, yet many of us struggle to speak it. Generations have complained about having to study it at school, yet once we become parents, a growing number of us now choose to send our children to all-Irish speaking schools known as gaelscoileanna. Darach Ó Séaghdha is the author of Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language, a book which tells the story of his own complicated history with Irish. Those of you with Twitter accounts may already have encountered Darach. He is the man behind @theirishfor, an account that has 26,000 followers and counting. In this account, Darach takes old and new words in the Irish language (foclóir is the Irish word for dictionary) and translates them into English in thought-provoking and often funny ways. Take the following tweet for example: “Grámhsóg is a criminally underused word; it means ‘a grinning, pert girl.’ Everybody knows one.” Or: “The Irish name for sea anemone is cíoch charraige. This translates literally as ‘rock boob.’” In case you think his book consists of more of this, it does, but there’s more – a lot more. As well as introducing you to Irish words that shine a light on Irish life and the Irish way of thinking, this book is also a reflection on the role that the Irish language has played in Darach’s life. He grew up in a household in the middle-class Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham. Irish was spoken in the house but not to the children. “My parents spoke Irish between themselves when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about,” laughs Darach. His father was a linguist who spoke Irish, English,
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French, Spanish, Latin, Japanese, and German as well as a smattering of Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Flemish, and Greek. However, Darach didn’t inherit his father’s flair for languages, especially in relation to Irish. “I wasn’t great at Irish and I was teased about my long unpronounceable Irish name so I rejected the language for a while,” he says. “I suppose you do that with many things that your parents are interested in.” He was in his mid-30s by the time he took an interest again. “I was about to start my own family, which started me thinking about passing on some Irish to them,” says Darach. “My dad got ill at that time too and I wanted to understand what made him tick. I realized that the time had come to dip my toe back into the language.” Because he works full time as a civil servant, Darach didn’t have time to attend formal classes. Instead he started watching TG4 (the Irish language television channel) and following Irish-speaking accounts on Twitter. He installed the Duolingo language-learning app on his phone, read Irishlanguage publications (such as the online magazine Nós) and practiced speaking his cúpla focal (or few words of Irish) whenever he could. Darach may have inherited more of his father’s interest in languages than he realizes, because he was soon struck by the uniqueness of words and phrases in Irish. He found some poetic and others odd and funny. He started to share his favorite words and phrases on Twitter and this marked the beginning of @theirishfor. That was in January 2015 and people soon began to respond to his daily postings. “Not just Irish people,” says Darach. “I have followers from all over the world. Some are Irish. Some are descended from Irish people and some just like to encounter interesting words from other languages.”
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Some of Darach’s tweets attracted more attention than others. “On Saint Patrick’s Day this year, President Trump quoted an Irish proverb that wasn’t Irish at all so I tweeted to tell him so,” says Darach. “It was an off-the-cuff remark in comparison to many of the tweets that I make but it was featured in the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and the Guardian.” Other popular tweets have included a series on classic 1990s album titles translated into Irish, such as Ná Bac Leis for Nirvana’s Nevermind. “People loved this and so many responded with suggestions of their own,” says Darach. “Even though people may not have much Irish, from my experience on Twitter, they seem to enjoy having the opportunity to play with the words and phrases that they do have.” Essentially, this is what Darach does with his Twitter account and it’s also what he has done in his new book. He isn’t a fluent Irish speaker, nor does he portray himself as one. Instead, he’s someone who has discovered that the Irish language has a whole lot more to offer than he realized when he was learning it at school. His book begins with his childhood and covers words that anyone who was educated in Ireland will remember from school. These include words like madra (dog), múinteoir (teacher, pronounced moon-tore) and milseáin (sweets, pronounced mill-shaw-in). He tells of his secondary school days which involved trips to the Gaeltacht (the parts of Ireland where Irish is still spoken as the main language) and struggles with the módh coinníollach (the conditional tense which is notoriously difficult for English speakers to master). There are sections on Irish names, the diversity of insults in Irish, Irish proverbs, modern-day Irish words, and much more. There are words that I love such as beochaoineadh, which translates as a living lament. Essentially, it means a lament for someone who has not died but gone away, probably forever. It makes me think of the Irish wakes that were held for people who emigrated long ago. There are words that make me laugh such as a bromaire. This translates as someone who farts a lot or is a self-important boaster. And then there are poetic words such as corrchoigilt and ruidles. Corrchoigilt translates as the strange-colored glow you see in embers or a person full of mischief while ruidles refers to the qualities that are unique to a person, the traits that make them truly themselves. Darach uses these words as starting points for stories about his own life and in doing so manages
to bring Irish to life too. “People are always saying that it’s a dead language but it’s far from it,” he says. “From the Gaeltacht to gaelscoileanna and the interactions I have with people every day on Twitter, I see and hear the language in so much of my life.” Darach’s dad died in May 2015 but he did witness the success of his son’s Twitter account before he died. “He saw his prodigal son return to the fold of Irish,” says Darach. Darach now has a young daughter of his own, 18month-old Lasairíona (a poetic metaphor for inspiration which literally translates as “flame of wine”). He hopes she will grow up to speak some Irish and to develop a love of the language. In the meantime, Darach plans to continue with his Twitter account and he has recently started a Motherfoclóir podcast. “I barely scraped the surface with the book and there is so much more to explore, which is what I plan to do with the podcast,” he says. “There is so much amazing stuff happening in Irish and I would like to IA bring it to as wide an audience as possible.”
Darach Ó Séaghdha, the author of Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language.
Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language is published by Head of Zeus (September 2017 / 240 pp. / £10.99) FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 59
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Shamrocks and SalSa Jerry Cox spent a lifetime ministering to California’s Mexican immigrants, and found similarities between Irish and Mexican cultures. By Mark R. day
CREDIT: REBEKAH COX ROCHA
S
hortly after Jerry Cox was ordained a priest in San Francisco in 1950, the Irish American visited his relatives in Skibbereen, County Cork. That’s when great aunt Elizabeth Casey told him: “Welcome home, Father Jerry!” Noticing he was puzzled, she leaned forward and added, “Well, Jerry, this is where you’re from.” In his forthcoming memoir, Shamrocks and Salsa (Xulon Press, Spring 2018), Cox traces his Irish ancestry and relates it to his passion for working with Mexican immigrants. He refers to what the noted Chicano poet, author, and educator Tomás Rivera called the “collective unconscious” of oppressed people: the Great Hunger and “No Irish Need Apply” for the Irish, and overt racism and ever-present threats of deportation for Mexicans. Gerald F. Cox, known to all as Jerry, was born May 25, 1925, in Oakland, California, the second oldest of seven siblings that included triplets. When he was 14 he entered St. Joseph’s Seminary in nearby Mountain View, continuing at St. Patrick’s in Menlo Park, just to the west, until his ordination in 1950. His first assignment at St. Mary’s Church in the working class neighborhood of West Oakland was the beginning of his lifelong love affair with the Mexican community. “St. Mary’s was my introduction to Mexican Catholics. I often shared with my parishioners the similarities of the Irish and Mexican cultures – the big families, the fiestas, the raucous wakes, music, and parties, and a shared history of oppression. “For us Irish Americans, it was England. We were taught to hate the Brits, but never told why,” Cox says with a chuckle. “For Mexicans it was the brutality of the Spanish conquest and later the loss of half their land to the U.S. after the war of 1847-1848.
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“This was the theme that ran through my pastoral work. It led me to work closely with Mexican American leaders and such movements as the United Farm Workers for many decades. I grew to understand and love the Mexican culture and people, to travel often to Mexico and later to share these experiences with my wife Kathy and my two daughters, Rebekah and Maryanne.”
FaMily RootS
Cox’s experience with the Mexicans led him to a deeper appreciation of his own Irish roots and his family’s long history in California. Michel Coakley, Cox’s maternal grandfather, arrived in Oakland from Skibbereen in the late 1880s. He and his brother James established Coakley’s Meat Market to cater to higher income neighborhoods in Oakland and Piedmont. John Cox, Jerry’s paternal grandfather, emigrated from Carrick on Shannon in County Leitrim. Records from Ellis Island indicated that he arrived with one dollar in his pocket and somehow made it to California on the transcontinental railroad. An uncle described John Cox, an Oakland police officer, as “one tough son of a bitch.” The story is that a local grocer used to leave bags of food for local patrolmen. “One day my grandfather caught another cop picking up his bag. A fistfight broke out. When the police chief reviewed candidates for promotions, he asked, ‘Who is this guy Cox?’ Someone said it was the one who had a fight with Clancy. “Who won?” asked the chief. “Cox,” said the aide. “Then Cox will be the sergeant,” remarked the chief. John Cox kept the job for 15 years until he entered the funeral business. Jerry’s father John, the mortician ex-cop, was a quiet and introverted man, but gifted with a great sense of humor. “We called my mother ‘Big Loretta.’ She was a typical hard-working Catholic Irish mother, always cooking, washing and serving. Her biggest thrill was having a son who was a priest.”
GRaduate SChool and Beyond After five years at St. Mary’s in Oakland, Cox’s superiors sent him to graduate studies in social work at Catholic University in Washington D.C. Later he
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PHOTOS: NATALIA KOP ELMAN
worked at several Catholic social service agencies and was made a monsignor. After a stint as chancellor of the Santa Rosa Diocese back in California, Cox founded the Resurrection Center, a Latino Catholic church in West Santa Rosa that doubled as a social service center. Throughout his priestly career, Cox maintained close contact with Chicano leaders, marching and boycotting with the farm workers and partnering with numerous grass roots organizations. “Jerry was one of the first to recognize the explosive growth and significance of the Mexican community in our midst,” said Herman Gallegos, a veteran civil rights organizer who has worked with Cox since the 1950s. “It was reassuring to have a Roman collar appear at our meetings,” said Gallegos. The struggle ended up well for the Irish as it will for Mexican Americans, but having these friendships goes a long way.” Cox’s ministry was part of a strong tradition. It reached back to the famous labor priest, Galwayman Peter Yorke (1864-1925), well known for his staunch defense of San Francisco Irish dock workers – to the archdiocesan Mission Band, four priests who defended the rights of Mexican braceros, contract workers, in the 1950s.
JERRY’S “HEART ATTACK”
Sister Kathleen Snyder, a member of the Belgiumbased Daughters of Mary and Joseph, was Jerry’s assistant at the Resurrection Center. “We certainly were attracted to each other, said Cox, “and I began to seriously question my life as a priest.” He explains the driving force behind his decision: “I was in love with Kathleen and I anticipated the kind of life we would have together.” Recently, while doing a standup comedy routine (yes, standup) at a local restaurant in nearby Boonville, Cox quipped, “People ask me why I left the priesthood, and I tell them I had a heart attack. Her name is Kathy and she’s sitting right over there.” The audience cheered and clapped. Cox obtained a dispensation from the Vatican in 1973, marrying Snyder a year later. They moved to the Bay Area where Jerry worked with Catholic
Charities in San Francisco, and Kathy pursued a degree in public health. “In the space of two years,” said Cox, “we became the proud parents of two daughters, Rebekah and Mary Anne.” Asked about the reactions to his leaving the priesthood, Cox responded, “My classmates abandoned me, but most people accepted my decision. My local pastor even urged me to dispense ashes on Ash Wednesday and to preach homilies.” The Coxes moved to rural Anderson Valley in Mendocino County in 1983 where they founded several nonprofit organizations. That included the Anderson Valley Housing Association that offered shelter to migrants and other families. Jerry’s last job was as a counselor for Latino youths at the Anderson Valley High School. He retired in 2004. “Our daughters Rebekah and Mary Ann are now in their early 40s,” he says. “Rebekah is the principal of the Cesar Chavez Language Academy in Santa Rosa. Mary Ann is a wellness counselor and nutritionist in Ukiah,” 60 miles to the north. But Jerry Cox rarely ends a conversation without a joke. Did I hear the one about the priest who found a dead jackass in front of his rectory? “Well, Father O’Malley called the police and the officer on duty tried to be cute. He said, ‘Well now Father, it was always my impression that you people always took care of the last rites.’ O’Malley replied, ‘That’s true, but here at St. Malachy’s we are obliged to notify the next of kin.’” IA Drum roll. Fade out. Ed. Jerry Cox, who was interviewed late last year for this article, died January 26 at his home in Boonville, California, surrounded by his family. Mark R. Day, a former Franciscan priest, is the author of Forty Acres: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers and the producer / director of the award-winning documentary The San Patricios, about the Irish Soldiers in Mexico. He can be reached at mday700@yahoo.com.
TOP LEFT: Jerry Cox. TOP: Jerry and his wife Kathy. ABOVE: Rebekah Cox Rocha with students at the Cesar Chavez Language Academy in Santa Rosa. FAR LEFT: Jerry Cox and siblings in a 1937 photo. Standing, left to right: Loretta, Patricia (Tisha), Jerry, Mary Elizabeth (Geegee). Seated in wagon, left to right: Johnny, Jane, and Jimmy.
FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 61
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Flipping Over
Pancake Tuesday By Edythe Preet
O
nce the winter holiday feasting frenzy ends, hundreds of ads bombard us with ways to lose weight. There is certainly a time to count calories, but then there is Fat Tuesday. Dieters beware. The two will never go together any better than oil and water. As the final day before Lent, Fat Tuesday has for almost two-thousand years been cause to consume highcalorie, high-cholesterol rich food. When Christianity was new, the faithful observed a “black fast” from Good Friday to Easter. No one ate anything at all. As time passed, people’s piety waned and church leaders sought a way to restore their devotion. Late in the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great extended the pre-Easter fast to 40 days, excluding Sundays. It was the year’s most solemn period. Believers were directed to repent
PHOTO: IRISHFIRESIDE.COM
ABOVE: Irish women participate in a Shrove Tuesday pancake race, c. 1955. TOP RIGHT: Choirboys and girls try their luck with a modern pancake race. The tradition is practiced throughout the British Isles.
their sins and purify themselves in mind and body to prepare for Easter, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The initial day of the long fast has always been a Wednesday. To evidence its significance, persons who had committed grievous sin or scandal were given public penance. They arrived at church barefoot, wearing sackcloth, and the bishop marked their foreheads with ashes, a visible display of con-
62 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
trition. For 40 days these penitents lived apart from their families, doing good works and praying for forgiveness. They were forbidden to wear shoes, bathe, converse with others or sleep in a bed. In the 11th century, this day of atonement was officially titled Ash Wednesday. Pope Gregory also mandated the Lenten food restrictions: “We abstain from flesh meat and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, [and] eggs.” Fasting laws were so strict that the forbidden foods could not even be stored inside one’s house! For more than a thousand years, his ruling was rigidly followed throughout Christendom. On Ash Wednesday, the fasting and austerity would begin, but the evening preceding it was a time for feasting and making merry. Piety aside, there was a practical aspect to the eating binge brought on by the Pope’s dictum. Foods that were banned during Lent had to be used up or they would spoil. The very last day before Ash Wednesday became known as Fat Tuesday and many nations developed traditions of serving exceptionally rich ritual foods then. In Germany, fried Fastnacht doughnuts were filled with jam and dusted with sugar. Norwegians ate frosted Fastelavnsboller muffins stuffed with whipped cream. Greeks ate cheese phyllo pies called tyropita and in Italy, it was so important to eat pork that people ripped down their doors and sold them just to obtain it! Russia’s Fat Tuesday was the most decadent: everyone ate copious amounts of small blini – pancakes drenched in melted butter and topped with sour cream and caviar! In Ireland, the last day before Lent is known as Shrove Tuesday for the custom of confessing one’s sins so as to approach Lent with proper contriteness. In days past, once the church bells began ringing everyone stopped what they were doing and ran off to be shriven. Then, washed clean of sin, the penitents returned home for the traditional Irish Fat Tuesday indulgence – pancakes! Mind you, Irish Shrove Tuesday pancakes are nothing like the doughy circles swimming in maple syrup one would find at IHOP or McDonald’s. The Normans, who conquered Britain in 1066. and subsequently settled in Ireland as well, introduced the islanders to French foodways, including thin pancake-like crepes. Made from a simple milk-eggsflour-butter batter, fried quickly in a hot buttered pan, and drizzled with butter, honey and lemon,
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sláinte | good cheer
RECIPES PHOTO: RUSSKY LONDON
Pancake Tuesday Pancakes
these Norman treats were much tastier than the heavier local version, and people gobbled them up in such vast quantities that Shrove Tuesday became known simply as Pancake Tuesday. Cooking the pancake was a tricky business. After the bottom had turned golden brown, the pancake was flipped to cook on the other side. This may sound simple, but proper flipping required tossing the pancake into the air and catching it in the pan before it hit the ground! The flipper’s skill was, of course, measured by how high the pancake flew. As with other religious celebrations, over the years Pancake Tuesday acquired its own assortment of traditions. “Shroving” was a custom in which children performed favorite songs or recited poetry in exchange for food or money. A less innocent custom was “Lent crocking” in which children traveled house to house asking for pancakes. If none were forthcoming, they threw broken crockery at the door! The day spawned a few superstitions as well. One reverent belief claimed that the first three cooked pancakes were sacred and represented the Holy Trinity. Each one was marked with a cross, sprinkled with salt to ward off evil spirits, and then set aside to bless the home. Even the pancake recipe had liturgical significance and represented the four pillars of Christian faith: eggs for creation, flour as the mainstay of the human diet, salt for wholesomeness, and milk for purity. Another more worldly concept was of particular interest to a family’s unmarried daughters. Since marriages were not allowed to be performed during Lent, matchmakers tried mightily to get the young ladies who sought their service engaged to suitable young men before Ash Wednesday. Girls who lucked out tried to increase the possibility of getting married within the year by flipping their household’s first pancake. If their flips were perfect, their chances were good; if their pancakes landed on the ground instead of in the pan it was unlikely that the girls would find husbands any time soon. While women usually prepared all the family meals, flipping pancakes was not an exclusively female performance. It was, and still is, a fun challenge for everyone attending to participate in, and a prize is sometimes awarded to the person who can
(personal recipe) 1 1 2 1 ⁄2 1 ⁄3 4
cup self-rising flour pinch of salt large eggs, lightly beaten cup whole milk cup water tablespoons butter, melted
Sift the flour and salt into a medium size mixing bowl and make a well in the center. Add the eggs, milk, and melted butter and whisk until well combined. Slowly add the water and continue to whisk until the batter is thin and free of lumps. Melt some butter in a non-stick frying pan over medium heat. When it bubbles, add a halfcup of batter to the pan. Lift the pan and tilt it until the batter has spread to the edges. Return the pan to the heat and let the pancake cook undisturbed. When the bottom is lightly toasted, flip the pancake (use a spatula or, if you’re feeling daring, flip the pancake in the air oldschool style) and cook until the second side turns a golden color. Sprinkle the pancake with granulated sugar, then roll it up like a cigar. Place the rolled pancake on a plate and put it in a warm oven (200º F). Continue making more pancakes the same way until all the batter has been used. Serve immediately. Provide your pancake eaters with lemon wedges to drizzle on their pancakes to their preferred tartness. Serves 4.
Self-rising Flour
(personal recipe)
Not all pantries stock self-rising flour, but it’s easy to make and keep on hand to use as needed. 2 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon salt 11⁄2 teaspoons baking powder (do NOT use baking soda)
Whisk everything together. Store in a sealed plastic container until ready to use. Keeps 4-6 months.
Serve pancakes with fruit for added flavor
PHOTO: PEXELS
flip the pancake the highest into the air and neatly catch it in the frying pan to finish cooking, In these modern times, the old customs and superstitions may have faded, but the appetite for Pancake Tuesday’s tasty treats is as strong as ever. On the day before Ash Wednesday, millions of pancakes will be sprinkled with sugar, rolled up, drizzled with lemon, and eaten with gusto, not only in Ireland, but in homes all around the globe wherever the descendants of Irish emigrants are found. And I’m betting your home will be one of them! IA Sláinte! FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 63
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crossword | ACROSS
1 Leaves, berries and flowers of this plant – very common to Ireland – can be used to make heart medicine (8) 5 See 9 down (4) 6 Abnormal gas swelling (5) 10 See 11 across (3) 11 (& 10 across, & 25 across) President-elect of Sinn Féin (4) 12 See 28 down (8) 13 Honey maker (3) 15 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, ______ (8) 17 One of many hits for 28 down (6) 18 Quiet or hush, in short (2) 19 Home to Ireland’s first president (10) 24 Home of Ben Bulben (5) 25 See 11 across (2,6) 26 Opposite of boastful (6) 27 The legendary Brian ______ (4) 29 (& 21 down) This young Irish actress is up for her third Oscar nomination at the age of 23 (7) 30 (& 14 down) Leader of Sinn Féin in the Northern Ireland Assembly (8)
by Darina Molloy
32 Mr. Wolff, author of Fire and Fury (7) 33 Maiden name of President Trump’s mother (2,4) 36 See 37 across (2,5) 37 (& 36 across) This Irish singer celebrated his 60th birthday recently, to the surprise of many (5)
DOWN
1 A laugh, in short (2) 2 Home village of Rosary Priest Fr. Patrick Peyton (8) 3 Pitch or toss (5) 4 Not far (4) 6 Humble fruit which may be a powerful antibiotic according to winner of this year’s BT Young Scientist contest (10) 7 Another big hit for 28 down (6) 8 Hometown of late Cranberries singer (8) 9 (& 5 across) Mayo-born politician, activist and medical doctor who, in 1919, co-founded the first hospital for infants in Ireland (8)
14 See 30 across (1,5) 16 Sailing vessel (4) 20 The _______: latest Liam Neeson film (8) 21 See 29 across (5) 22 Playwright Martin _______, also writer/director of 15 across (2,6) 23 This Roscommon town is the home of actress Maureen O’Sullivan (5) 26 G.A.A. game that’s growing in popularity in the U.S. (7)
Win a subscription to Irish America magazine Please send your completed crossword puzzle to Irish America, 875 Sixth Avenue, Suite 201, New York, NY 10001, to arrive no later than February 20, 2018. A winner will be drawn from among all correct entries. If there are no correct solutions, the prize will be awarded for the completed puzzle which comes closest in the opinion of our staff. Winner’s name will be published along with the solution in our next issue. Xerox copies accepted. Winner of the December / January crossword: Colin Green, Los Angeles, CA
64 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
27 This Irish saint’s feast day is celebrated on February 1 (6) 28 (& 12 across) Lead singer of The Cranberries, who died in January (7)
31 Nasty or average (4) 34 Exclamation (2) 35 Hugh Leonardpenned hit Broadway play of late 1970s and early ’80s (2)
December/January Solution
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last word |
by Kerry McElroy
U2, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, and
n autumn 2017, U2 released their 14th studio album, Irish Stand. The group showcases a powerful thread between Irish Songs of Experience. Critical reception on the album was and American politics via pro-immigrant and anti-xenophobic mixed – was it a superstar older rock band’s attempt at campaigns carried out in the last year in both Dublin and New political relevance, or a late-career classic infused with York City, while at times enlisting celebrities to raise the profile the urgency of Brexit, Trump, and a world thrown into of their cause. uncertainty? In December 2017, the band offered up a With both his initial speech and ongoing New York activist dynamic, uncomfortable performance as answer – giving Irish mobilization, Ó Ríordáin sits in a tradition of international Irish Americans much to contemplate in the current political age as to oratory stretching back not only to Connolly and 1916, but to 1848 what activism can look like in specifically Irish and Irish American and 1798. Similarly, Irish Stand’s position on standing up for civil contexts. rights and laborers on both sides of the Atlantic falls firmly within On December 2, the band performed their newly-released song the Connolly tradition – as the man famously honed much of his “American Soul” on Saturday Night Live. Having collaborated on social and activist organizing back in Ireland after living in the the album track with the socially conscious American hip-hop U.S. from 1903 to 1910. As a biographer wrote of Connolly, “He genius of the moment, Kendrick Lamar, they burst forth with a had gone away from Ireland a propagandist; he was returning a powerful activist performance that harkened back to their 1970s Dublin punk roots and took an unabashedly pro-immigrant stance. On this night, Bono sang live from New York of sanctuary and “refuge-Jesus” – pointedly doing so against an aggressive backdrop of Occupy imagery. At a time when eyebrows have been raised and think pieces penned as to why so many notably Irish American names have chosen to ally themselves at the highest levels of government and media, such a performance – in its lyrics, aesthetics, and urgency of message – stands to remind of an Irish American tradition that owes far more to a James Connolly than a Steve Bannon. The performance opened with Lamar’s voiceover intoning, in reference to both the Beatitudes and the ironies of the current political climate, “Blessed are the bullies, for one day they will have to stand up to themselves.” As the punk guitar riffs kicked in, there was commentary on violence and U2 performs their new leader of men.” Connolly is a reminder in our current institutional brutality in lyrics and images. At the single, “American Soul,” times that political and activist exchange between on Saturday Night Live stirring moment in which Bono sang, “It’s not a December 2. Ireland and the U.S. has always been, as Glucksman place / This is a dream the whole world owns,” Ireland House curator Daphne Dyer Wolf has put it, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s image appeared. The set ended with “fluid and interactive” – running both ways, with the politics and Bono atop the drum platform: red, white, and blue megaphone in personalities of both countries influencing one another. hand, the Statue of Liberty and the flag on the screen behind, U2, Ó Ríordáin, and the collaborators of Irish Stand also join a reiterating Lamar’s earlier words: long tradition, in typical Irish fashion, of the robust blurring of the “Blessed are the liars; the truth can be awkward. Blessed are lines between the creative arts and politics. One of the most the cast of Saturday Night Live.” famous Anglo-Irish citizens of the past century turned New York With this instantly memorable moment, the band validated and resident, John Lennon, cited Connolly’s philosophy and writings indeed joined the ranks of current American activism – and did so on his own solo work. In the paths from Connolly to Ó Ríordáin, by harkening back to the long historical tradition of the politically Lennon to U2, and Europe to America, we have a most powerful active and agitating Irish in America. The performance also added and courageous immigrant/comrade tradition – one that belies to a continuum of important Irish voices in the recent American more bellicose voices that have sometimes seemed loudest. When political turn of events that began with Irish senator Aodhán Ó the histories are written of this period, these will be counted as not Ríordáin. In late 2016, Ó Ríordáin came to international viral just visiting Irish, but as true American heroes and patriots. IA recognition for a courageous speech about the new American path Kerry McElroy is an Irish American freelance writer to a shell-shocked world. Since the speech, Ó Ríordáin has conand Ph.D. candidate living in Montreal. tinued this transatlantic activism via the grassroots organization FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018 IRISH AMERICA 65
PHOTO: U2 VEVO / YOUTUBE
The Irish Trying To Save America
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by Kit DeFever
Dad and J.F.K.
M
ABOVE: My parents on the sea wall near Hotel del Coronado. I was born in this hotel, surprising my mother. Claudette Colbert was staying there at the time and family lore has it that she helped with my delivery. BELOW LEFT: The operating theater on the U.S.S. Breton. Dad is the second from right. RIGHT: Dad and his buddy, Graham Gilmer.
y father Cyril DeFever grew up on a dairy farm near Detroit, Michigan. His parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Belgium. My mother, Marie Clancy, the daughter of an insurance man, was Irish. Her grandfather grew up on Turbot Island off Connemara. Her uncle Robert Clancy was a U.S. senator. Dad boxed as a young man (Joe Louis’s manager wanted to manage him). He won the Golden Gloves and got a boxing scholarship to Notre Dame. When he graduated, his mother said to him, “Cyril, you can either be a boxer or a doctor, which is it going to be?” Dad loved boxing, but he was truly a healer and wanted to become a surgeon more than a champion. He went to Wayne State Medical School in Detroit, and after graduation, internship, and residency, set up his own practice in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Dad, then 36, enlisted in the Navy and went on to become a lieutenant commander. He and my mother moved to the Navy base in Coronado, California. She painted battleships while Dad was serving in the Pacific on the U.S.S. Breton, an escort ship that operated with the Carrier Transport Squadron, Pacific Fleet.
Cyril “Kit” DeFever and his dad, Dr. Cyril DeFever.
Dad would be gone for long stretches and there was little communication back then. Mom said that painting the ships made her feel like she was doing her bit for the war effort. After the war, Dad resumed his medical practice in Grosse Pointe and was affiliated with the Mayo Clinic and the American College of Surgeons. He never spoke much about his war years, but when a Navy buddy, Graham Gilmer, came on a visit to Michigan from California, the talk at the dinner table turned to “Jack.” It was a few months after President Kennedy had been shot. My sister Mary and I were curious. Had dad met J.F.K.? Graham answered our questions with, “Didn’t your father tell you?” Dad had met J.F.K. It was the U.S.S. Breton that brought young Lieutenant Kennedy home from the war. It was after the PT-109 incident. (The patrol boat Kennedy was commanding had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer, and Kennedy, in a heroic effort, rescued his surviving crew). Dad was one of the doctors caring for Kennedy, who was physically exhausted. They two enjoyed many hours on the flight deck together. Kennedy was a great reader, as was my dad, so much of their talk revolved around books. There is not a day goes by that I don’t think of my parents. My mom, who passed away in 1986, never made it to Ireland, but I did. I first visited Turbot Island in the 1970s, and I felt instantly at home there. When I think of my dad, I think of all the questions I might have asked him. We talked about a lot of things, but he kept his war years to himself. I was with him when he passed away in 1988. – Kit DeFever
Please send photographs along with your name, address, phone number, and a brief description, to Patricia Harty at Irish America, 875 Sixth Avenue, Suite 201, New York, NY 10001. If photos are irreplaceable, then please send a good quality reproduction or e-mail the picture at 300 dpi resolution to submit@irishamerica.com. We will pay $65 for each submission that we select. 66 IRISH AMERICA FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018
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