I originally wrote this on Facebook on March 17, 2017. As Facebook grows less stable, I’m migrating it here for posterity. I reshare it every year on St. Patrick’s Day and it has never grown irrelevant.
St. Patrick’s Day is bigger in America than in Ireland. It would have to be. It was the dirt poor Irish, fleeing the Famine and the cruelty of British landlords, who needed something to remind them of their heritage. You don’t need reminding that you’re Irish in Ireland, or at least not on Paddy’s day.
No one would abandon their home and board a boat for a hostile land, especially in the Nineteenth Century, were the conditions at home not worse. The Great Famine was a scar across Irish history. A million people died, and a million more departed. The population of Ireland has never fully recovered. Ireland lives on as much as an idea in the minds of Hibernians as an actual geography.
At the beginning of the Gorta Mór, the Irish were still exporting millions of tons of food, shipping grain to England while potatoes rotted in the ground. They did this because English landlords held near total control over their tenants’ lands, and because the Corn Laws made it prohibitively expensive to import grain. It took petitions to Parliament and the Queen to secure any meager relief, and that too late to save a million lives.
All famine is political. Blight is natural, drought is natural. But there’s no people on Earth so heedless that they’d stay in a blighted land unless they couldn’t leave – unless they’d been impoverished by generations of exploitation, unless they were surrounded by soldiers, unless the law demanded they waste and starve.
The Irish in America are survivors of history. We have the opportunity to use our experience at the hands of the British Empire to temper our compassion. Today, hundreds of thousands of refugees flee North Africa in the wake of wars that great empires started. Today, famine afflicts war-torn countries like Yemen, bombed remorselessly by the Obama and Trump administrations, where 7 million are at risk of starvation. The Americans who sneer at “sanctuary cities” today are heirs to the same nativist tradition that posted “No Irish Need Apply” a hundred years ago – unless, shamefully, they’re Irish themselves.
Today is a day for the Irish, especially in Boston, to celebrate and bond. But when you lift your pint of Guinness tonight, remember that we’re descended from people who survived the predation of a great empire, who risked their lives and fortunes to reach a land ready to reject them, who labored and fought and lasted. Remember that we are refugees. Every person in flight is our cousin.
Slainte.