Irish Americans.
Irish Americans.
What is an Irish-American (formally spelled with a hyphen, and thus Theodore Roosevelt's "hyphenated American" put down)?
Good question.
Most Irish Americans don't know they're Irish. Where I grew up (by odd circumstance)
was on the Appalachians borderlands, where Catholics were rare or, if found,
German or Italian. (Not many of either of those, to be sure). But a great many
of the people had red hair, drank whiskey, fist-fought at the drop of a pin,
and told wondrous stories. They were the Ulster Scots, of course.
Ulster Scots, with a good mix of non-Ulster Scot Irish, too (I knew Casey's and so on with Irish-names who were as Protestant as John Knox).
"The Peopling of Ireland" is a complex tale, We don't know even when the Celtic language arrived, or where from. It has been there so long, however, as J.R.R. Tolkien once noted, as to have done most of it's evolution there. Unlike English, which was a mostly evolved language when it came to Prydain (Britannia, Britain, Alba, as the big island in the archipelago is known; the Welsh call England Lloegyr, the lost territories).
And if you travel about The West in Ireland, you'll note -- if you've traveled in Spain -- how many of them look like Spaniards or
Portuguese. Once, in Donegal at the great Irish course in Gleann Colm Cille, a drought was on, and the whole area turned brown. It looked exactly like Galicia. And it made the black-haired locals look all the more Iberian. All that because Ireland, Brittany, and Galicia/Portugal are "Atlantic Europe", and you can see on a globe (a flat map won't do it) how close they are to each other.
But as for the Irish Americans, in the sense of what I'd call the "city Irish," who were, originally, mostly Catholic, it's easy to disparage then. I've been disgusted with them far more often than not. I well remember an Irish priest of my acquaintance, an old man, Irish-born, you understand, berating a guy dressed in a pathetically outrageous Irish leprechaun costume (this was years ago) at the Dublin (Ohio) Irish Festival.
But as a blogger One Peter Five wrote, "The Irish should be Catholic, not Irish, the latter being." as the blogger wrote: "...largely a filth culture which emphasizes wicked practices such as drunkenness, immodest dancing, and a permissiveness to blatant paganism under the guise of 'culture', because it's 'Irish'. "
Assume for a moment that is mostly true, and alas, it too often is, on both sides of the Atlantic. But I would stress where we got that miserable culture of drink,
dance, and the devil. Take dancing for example; Traditional dancing in Ireland
was group dancing, and when one danced, one danced with the whole village, in
essence. Who invented modern dance? A person gyrating in sexually suggestive
gyrations, alone, in a mass of other zombies doin' the same, all to
"music" so loud it would deafen a basalt rock?
The Irish embraced "rock and roll" but they didn't
invent it.
We got that foreign, outside culture from the Outside, and
the Church in Ireland, the 19th century Church, now,
facilitated that, all in order to remove from the Irish their own culture and
language, all in order to make them "West Brits". And it was THAT Church that drilled into us the Three Unbreakable
Commandments: Pray. Pay, and Obey. It was that Church, a materialistic one, a promoter
of "prosperity" and "modernism" before even the Protestant Germans got around to inventing "Modernism" in the 1860s (the Tübingen School of theology) that laid us
low and removed our defenses and ancient cultural immunity against foreign
contagion.
And, friends, is it now a wonder at all that their
"spiritual descendants" of Vatican II and that Ilk (both in Ireland
and the largely Irish-derived American Catholic Church) left us with this mess of an abortion regime coming to Ireland?
“So in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
With our own feathers, not by others' hands,
Are we now smitten.”
―Aeschylus
RC
