In The Bostonian, Larry Donnelly traces his journey from a Catholic Irish neighbourhood outside Boston to Ireland, where he has settled and become a well-known commentator on American politics. There are countless books that explore the Irish immigrant experience to America; this is the rare one that concerns emigration in the opposite direction. Donnelly is a cogent analyst and a good storyteller. The Bostonian’s combination of political commentary with memoir works because he lives and breathes politics.
Donnelly comes from a family with deep roots in Democratic politics. His uncle, Brian Donnelly, was a long-serving congressman best known in Ireland for his leading role in introducing the “Donnelly visa” enabling more Irish people to legally emigrate to the United States. The Bostonian’s author calls for further measures to promote emigration from Ireland to the US and vice versa in order to sustain what he calls a “sacred” relationship between the two countries.
Rebelled
As an adolescent, Donnelly rebelled against his family’s politics by becoming a right-wing Republican. But after graduating university he came back to the fold. Donnelly sees himself as continuing a family tradition of a particular strand of Democratic politics that articulates the bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary Americans, while disdaining “liberals elitists who always assume they know best and make policy accordingly”.
Donnelly’s “decidedly centrist” outlook prizes moderation and compromise over ideological purity. Unsurprisingly, in Ireland the party Donnelly finds most congenial is Fianna Fáil. Especially during the last few years of Trumpism he counts himself lucky to live in a country where political discourse is “relatively civil” and politicians “behave like adults”.
The Bostonian has little to say about the obvious failures of “sensible” centrist politics, not least of which is the ongoing destruction of our planet. But towards the end of the book Donnelly veers sharply leftward when considering the difficult economic situation facing young Americans who graduate from universities with massive debt and uncertain job prospects.
Here, he rightly diagnoses the main problem in the US as an “epidemic of inequality” that will require “bold, outside the box, perhaps anti-capitalist thinking and consequent action”. It is a telling and encouraging sign of the times that a professed centrist can end a book sounding like Bernie Sanders.
Daniel Geary is associate professor of American history at Trinity College Dublin
