It seems to have been raining for weeks - no, forever - in New York City. "Real Irish weather," drenched New Yorkers remark when they locate the accent. "Must make you feel at home." But an Irish person doesn't need record-breaking rainfall to feel at home in New York these days. As the city marks its centenary, it is looking greener than ever, in a cultural as well as a horticultural sense. The Irish came here over a century ago, but only now - scooping up armfuls of Tony awards and literary prizes - have they really arrived. "It's hip to be Irish," the New York Times recently announced - again - and even those who winced at the idea could not disagree.
The current infatuation may have been sparked by Riverdance and fuelled by Angela's Ashes, but a sublimely different production marked its consummation. It took over 50 years for theatre professionals and journalists to present their first Tony award for direction to a woman. When they did so earlier this month, that award went to Garry Hynes of the Druid theatre company for her staging of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane. The play was also tipped to win the best play award, but lost to Art, a comedy about Parisian men whose friendship suffers when they disagree over a Minimalist painting. You can see why McDonagh might seem like light relief. The Irish play also won Tony awards for best actress, best featured actor and best featured actress.
The road to such success on Broadway had, of course, been well-paved. Years after its successful run here, Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa remains the standard for many New Yorkers assessing the city's latest Irish theatrical offering.
More recently, in February 1997, Donal McCann's performance in Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom had the usually reserved theatre critics scrabbling for superlatives as they shamed audiences into admiring a play that many theatre-goers found inaccessible, even incomprehensible. "He can come here anytime and do anything he likes," Newsday's theatre critic, Aileen Jacobson, concluded of McCann.
Irish writers could hardly be blamed for expecting a similar reception in a city that leads the world in literary fashion, if not substance. After all, hadn't Angela's Ashes sold four million copies worldwide, spent 90 weeks at or near the top of the bestseller list and won Frank McCourt a Pulitzer Prize? And hadn't a book called How The Irish Saved Civilisation, written admittedly by an Irish-American, become another New York Times bestseller? Weren't people queueing for tickets to Seamus Heaney and Roddy Doyle readings?
"I think there's always been a very deep current of affection for the Irish in American culture," Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilisation recently remarked, "but Ireland was too oppressed and bedraggled and concerned with its own troubles and inferiority complex to take advantage of it."
Now that oppression, bedragglement and introspection has become a selling point, particularly in the increasingly popular genre of literary memoir. "She tells of the terror of being a young woman in an Ireland without contraception," Publishers' Weekly wrote of Nuala O'Faolain's highly successful memoir Are You Somebody? which quickly entered the bestseller list here and caught the imagination of readers primed by McCourt's nightmarish recollections. Her book has been warmly reviewed and 75,000 copies were sold in a remarkably short period. Ethnicity is not, however, a guarantee of success. Seamus Deane's novel Reading In The Dark was praised by New York critics last year but eclipsed by the McCourt memoir while Anne Haverty's novel One Day As A Tiger was largely ignored despite rapturous reviews in Newsday and The Boston Globe. Even Malachy McCourt's A Monk Swim- ming, for which Hyperion paid a $600,000 advance, is sinking under the weight of bad reviews. ". . .what he thinks he is doing on his pages never becomes particularly clear," Paul Gray recently wrote of the younger McCourt who has thanked his brother for "opening the golden door".
Back on New York's streets, the craving for anything Celtic produces some odd alignments. On Second Avenue near 49th Street, for example, flanked by two Chinese restaurants, Thady Con's advertises itself as the city's first Irish village theme bar.
Opened three years ago by O'Sullivans from Cork and Healys from Leitrim, the bar has a bicycle leaning against the wall, hobnail boots on the hearth and serious set dancers. "It is as if you have been transported to a corner of rural Ireland," Dan Barry wrote of Thady Con's in the New York Times, "one frozen in the distant and sanitised past." In a less nostalgic tradition, the long established Sin E Cafe in the East Village continues to attract celebrity walk-ins while An Beal Bocht in the Bronx provides a similarly fashionable venue at the other end of the city.
Irish neighbourhood bars, with their gigantic televisions and Bobby Sands posters, still exist in Irish-American enclaves on Long Island, Queens and throughout the five boroughs, but the new generation of Irish cafes and bars serves the market not t he parish. "The Catholic Church was the total centre of Irish life here," novelist Peter Quinn remarked in the New York Times, "But it has lost that position and that space is now being filled by this great cultural energy."
That energy was particularly evident last week at the Guinness Fleadh on Randalls Island in New York, where performers like Los Lobos and Patti Smith shared the stage with Sinead O'Connor, Mary Black and others. Billed as "the Ultimate Irish Music And Culture Festival," the huge, eclectic gathering demonstrated that there is infinite room under the ever-expanding green umbrella. The only entry qualification seems to be enthusiasm and marketability.
"Sheer bloody genius," Seamus Heaney quipped when asked to account for the recent success of the Irish. If some observers detected a note of irritation in the poet's reply, it was because they knew how he felt. There is a growing sense, particularly among some Irish writers in New York City, that it has all become a little too easy. "We have to remember the writers who really had to struggle," novelist Colum McCann recently remarked, "like John McGahern, Edna O'Brien. Writers who wrote to break their hearts, not just to get the next advance." It is ironic that this increasingly vocal concern about the state of the Irish soul is regarded in this materialistic city as the surest proof of its authenticity.