Sir, – I note with interest Prof Kevin Whelan’s comments (Front Page, July 19th) on our “old-fashioned and condescending” approach to Irish-America.
As a visiting academic in contact with Irish-American circles in the 1970s and 1980s, I was struck by the resentment felt by the descendants of the post-Famine Irish towards the ill-concealed supercilious and patronising approach of visitors from Ireland. We were disdainful of their perceived paddywhackery and biliously green leprechaunism ( what an ironical turnabout there has been here!). We sneered at their "stage-Irish" songs like Mother Machree and When Irish Eyes, and deplored their ignorance of the Ó Riada revival. We scorned their simplistic view of Irish history and berated them for their support for the Provos.
Yet our attitudes reflected our insularity rather than our sophistication. The distinguished musicologist Mick Moloney has uncovered for us a whole unguessed-at culture of popular song developed by post- Famine emigrants in response to the challenges of their New World urban experience. Politically, many Irish- Americans were certainly supportive of the ” armed struggle” (I often engaged them in robust debate) but the fussy concerns of Dublin governments were often misplaced.
When I watched St Patrick’s Day parades in New York or south Boston in those years, it was obvious that, for local Irish-Americans, giving a place to IRA representatives was very much secondary to asserting their own American identity against other comers.
At any rate, I would have thought that the changes of recent decades would have brought enlightenment all round in Irish/Irish-American relations. Regrettably, it would appear from Kevin Whelan’s comments, that this is not so. – Yours, etc,
JOHN A MURPHY,
Rosebank,
Douglas Road,
Cork.