US president Donald Trump is not noted for his fidelity to the facts or to fact-checking, but he promised to investigate a claim that more than half of all Medal of Honor recipients were Irish or of Irish descent.
He was evidently startled when he recited the figure from a prepared script during the shamrock bowl ceremony in Washington DC last week.
“It is an extraordinary fact – an ‘awfully good statistic’. How is that possible?” he asked.
How indeed?
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The claim is that of the 3,515 Medals of Honor awarded by the US up to 2009, a total of 2,018, or 57.4 per cent, have gone to Irish-Americans. Other sources put the percentage of such recipients at 58 per cent.
The source of the original statistic has been attributed to Irish Veterans, an organisation set up in Ireland and the US to commemorate and support past and present Irish veterans of military conflicts.
In a report in the Tampa Bay Times in 2019, the figure was cited by “Patrick McDermot of Irish Veterans Post 2, created in Tampa in 2017″. The newspaper report said research was funded by the Irish Government – but the Government has funded no such research.
Irish Veterans co-founder Declan Hughes said the figure did not come from them. “I read a transcript of his [Mr Trump’s] comments and it sounded to me like he was repeating what a staffer told him and he riffed off it while surrounded by all things Irish... To be fair to him, he rowed himself back by saying he found it hard to believe, which I did too,” he said.
“Irish and Irish-American medals combined are quite remarkable, but I don’t believe in a 58 per cent share-out – as the president doesn’t either.”
Whatever the actual figure, the number of Irish-born or Irish-American winners of the Medal of Honor is disproportionately high, given that those who identify as Irish-American are about 10 per cent of the US population.
The Medal of Honor was first introduced during the American Civil War of 1861-1865, though its first recipient retrospectively was the Roscommon-born doctor Bernard Irwin for bravery during the Apache Indian wars of 1861 when he rescued 60 US army soldiers who had been surrounded.
The first Irishman in the American Civil War to be awarded the Medal of Honor was Corporal Owen McGough, who was born in Co Monaghan in 1829. McGough won his at the Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the conflict, in 1861, though he did not receive his medal until 1897.
At least 258 Irish-born soldiers have won the Medal of Honor since its inception. Of those, 148 won them during the civil war – 14 in one day when the Union Navy raided the Confederate port of Mobile, Alabama, in 1864.
Ireland was third after New York and Pennsylvania as the location where the most Medal of Honor recipients during the civil war were born.
Given that 180,000 Irishmen served with the Union in the conflict, the high number of Irish Medal of Honor recipients is not a surprise, said Damien Shiels, ahistorian of Irish involvement in the American Civil War.
He said the list of Irish-born recipients was being added to all the time as more research was done. For instance, Michael Ahern from Cork was awarded the Medal of Honor before he even set foot in the US.
He joined up with the USS Kearsarge in Queenstown, now Cobh, Co Cork, in 1863 and won the award for showing coolness under fire when the ship sank a Confederate vessel off Cherbourg, France. He was originally listed as French in his Medal of Honor citation.
Irish emigration to the US continued en masse throughout the 20th century and many joined the US armed services. During the Spanish-American War of 1898 Mayo-born Michael Gibbons showed incredible bravery in cutting underwater cables to Cuba while under fire.
Unlike most other Medal of Honor recipients, he returned to Ireland. He died in Co Mayo in 1933. Another Mayo man, US Marine Philip Gaughan, won the Medal of Honor in the same action.
Perhaps the most accomplished Irish-American recipient of the Medal of Honor was William Joseph ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who had Cork and Down roots. He was the only American serviceperson to win all four top US honours for bravery: the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal and the National Security Medal.
He won the Medal of Honor during the first World War in October 1918 at the age of 35 when he organised his men in an assault on a heavily fortified German position and was shot in the legs.
During the second World War he became the founder and first head of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He rose to the rank of major-general during that conflict and later served on the prosecution team at postwar Nuremberg trials of prominent Nazis.
One of the most noted Irish-American recipient of the Medal of Honor was Audie Murphy, who has been described as the most decorated American soldier of the second World War, winning 33 medals. The son of Irish-American sharecroppers in Texas, Murphy went into Hollywood after the war, even playing himself in a film. He died in plane crash in 1971 at the age of 45.
The latest Irish-American recipient of the Medal of Honor was Lt Michael P Murphy, a Navy Seal who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. He died while searching for a Taliban leader in the mountains.
The Irish and Irish-American winners of the Medal of Honor were the subject of an exhibition in Kinsale, Co Cork, in 2018.
Dr Sheils said the precise figure of Irish-Americans was still in dispute. There is “no question... that an enormous number have been awarded to people of Irish descent, though in my own work on the Medal of Honor I tend to classify ‘Irish’ as people born in Ireland or to Irish emigrant parents”.
Why, though, are the Irish so disproportionately represented? “In my view there are a number of reasons for the scale of Irish American recipients. During the Civil War, when most awards were earned, the Irish and Germans were by far the two largest immigrant groups, with around 250,000 Irish-born men or children of Irish immigrants serving the Union,” he said.
“Beyond that conflict, the Irish had carried their tradition of military service as a form of employment with them from Ireland, so they served in the post-Civil War US military in extremely large numbers even when it was an unpopular career for ‘native’ born Americans.
“By the 20th century, the scale of mid 19th century Irish emigration became the telling factor as there was an increasing population of second and third generation Irish-American descendants by the time of the World Wars.”
