From: "Jill Blee"
Organization: University of Ballarat
Subject: Through Irish Eyes Conference


Thank you to everyone who has sent an abstract for the Through Irish
Eyes Conference. We intend publishing the conference timetable, and
the abstracts of the papers to be given, in the next few weeks on our
website: http://www.ballarat.edu.au/bssh/asc/throughi.htm

Full details of the Conference Programme, together with booking
and accommodation information can also be obtained from our website.

For any additional information, please contact the Convenor
Jill Blee
School of Behavioural and Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Ballarat,
PO Box 663
Ballarat
Victoria 3353
Telephone: 0353 27 9710
Fax: 0353 27 9840
email: j.blee[at]ballarat.edu.au

From Patrick O'Sullivan



Forwarded from the H-Ethnic list...

------- Forwarded message follows -------
>The Emigrant Experience:
>The Scottish Diaspora
>
>The Scottish Studies Program Fall Conference, to be held at
>the Lifetime Learning Centre, University of Guelph, October 16th, 1999
>Itinerary
>
>Registration will begin at 9 AM, with coffee and tea provided. Sessions
>will commence at 10 AM in Room 1714 of the Lifelong Learning Centre.
>
>Session One, 10 AM -11.15 AM
>
>Imagined Communities
>
>Professor Michael Vance, St Mary's University, "Myth, Migration and the
>Making of Memory"
>
>Dr Michael Newton, Edinburgh University, "Gloomy Forests and Forests of
>Sugar: The Depiction of Nature in Scottish Gaelic Immigrant Poetry"
>
>Dr. Euan Hague, Staffordshire University, "Places of memory and memories
>of place - Landscapes, Memories and the Scottish Highlands"
>
>COFFEE BREAK
>
>Session Two, 11.45 - 1.00
>
>Emigrant Stories
>
>Dr Stephen Duguid, Simon Fraser University, "An Emigrant's Tale: From
>Islay to Argyle (NY), 1738-1765"
>
>Professor Jack Little, Simon Fraser University "From the Isle of Arran to
>Inverness Township: Highland Clearance and Canadian Settlement, 1828-31,"
>
>Michael Michie, York University, "Selling the Antipodes: the efforts of
>emigration boosters to send Scots to New Zealand, 1839-74."
>
>LUNCH
>
>Plenary Speaker, 2.00 - 3.00
>
>Professor Ned C Landsman, State University of New York, Stony Brook,
>"Mobility and Stability in Scottish Society and Culture"
>
>COFFEE
>
>Session Three 3.15 - 4.30
>
>Scots of the Diaspora
>
>Dr David McNab, Department of Native Studies, Trent University, "The Cree
>Nation and the Scottish Diaspora: Reflections on the Kennedy Family
>through Seven generations"
>
>Dr Fiona Black, University of South Florida, "Book Availability in Canada,
>1752-1820 and the Scottish Contribution"
>
>Dr Kathy Carter, High Point University, NC, "Scots-Irish and the
>Regulation'"
>
>Session Four, 4.30 - 5.15
>
>David Forsyth, National Museums of Scotland, "Collecting the Scottish
>Diaspora: Scotland and the World"
>
>RECEPTION (Wine & Cheese) at the University Club, 5th Floor,
>University Centre, 5.30 - 7.00
>
>
>Help support Scottish Studies in Canada. Join the Scottish Studies
>Foundation now (see next page) and be eligible for the reduced conference
>rate
>
>Pre-Registered
>$35 - General Public
>$25 - Scottish Studies Foundation and CASS members, seniors
>
>Includes the following:
>
>Coffee and tea
>Lunch - Catered sandwich buffet with turkey, ham, beef, Italian
>cold-cuts, lettuce, onions tomatoes, cheeses, 6 varieties of salad,
>beverage and desert
>Reception - 2 glasses of wine, cheese, vegetable and fruit platters
>
>Without Lunch and Reception
>$20 - General Public
>$15 (SSF,CASS and seniors)
>
>Students are admitted to the Sessions free of charge
>
>This conference was made possible through the generous support of
>the Scottish Studies Foundation
>
>
>Registration
>
>Seating is limited, so be sure to pre-register by contacting us by
>phone, fax or email no later than September 25th, 1999, and forwarding
>a cheque payable to Scottish Studies, University of Guelph, along with the
>following form, to:
>
>S. Moir, Scottish Studies, Dept of History, University of Guelph, Guelph,
>ON Canada N1G 2W1

From Patrick O'Sullivan


Right.

We have a tidy Ir-D list once again...

The Ir-D list might be interested in one tiny example of the sort of problem we
encounter, especially during the northern hemisphere's summer. Here is part of a
message we have received from the head of 'Instructional computing' at an esteemed
US university...

>Our mail administrator enabled a feature of the mailer to try and prevent mail
>loops from crashing the mail server and/or filling up the mail space.
>Essentially, it looks for a set amount of mail coming to a person in a
>short period of time and blocks subsequent mail if that happens.

>Initially this was set at 10 messages in 15 seconds (way too low), and was
>subsequently bumped up to 30 messages in 15 seconds. This also seems to be
>too low and has now gone up to 60 messages in 15 seconds. He will bump this
>up again if this doesn't work for people receiving list mail.

>If you would be so kind as to let me know if you continue to receive
>bounced mail, I'd be grateful. We would like things to run
>smoothly for everyone, and try to be courteous netizens.

>Thank you for your time.

Well, thank you, Mr. Instructional Computing. And at least this university was
courteous enough to offer an explanation, and take some action when the problem was
brought to its attention.

Now, back to work.

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan




- - "One Man's Hero" received its premiere at the West Belfast Festival.
The film, starring Tom Berenger, concerns a group of Irish soldiers
who defected to fight with the Mexicans during the American Mexican
War in 1846-1848. These soldiers later earned the title of "St
Patrick's Battalion". The film, well received in Ireland, will soon
receive its Mexican premiere when The Ireland Fund de Mexico will
present "Heroes o Traidores - El Battalion de San Patricio" ("One
Man's Hero" slightly renamed in Spanish) in Mexico City on September
14.

Forwarded with permission
From The Irish Emigrant Arts Review
Cathedral Building, Middle Street, Galway, Ireland.

Editor: Miriam Stewart

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan





"The Christian Brothers" by Ron Blair
Tempus Fugit (Australia)
Dir.: Maeliosa Stafford

This short one act play is a modern classic in Australia, where it was
first performed in 1975. "The Christian Brothers" marks Tempus Fugit's
first venture overseas and this production is directed by an Irishman.
"The Christian Brothers" is set in a school classroom in 1950s Sydney,
where, you've guessed it, a Christian Brother (Laurence Coy) is
attempting to teach class. However his ability to reminisce about old
pupils and his schooldays get in the way of his determination that each
boy should pass his exams. The Brother stands in front of a chalky
blackboard, while a crucifix above it is fixed at the audience. The
play alternates between the hilarious and, at times, the frightening.
Funny moments appear when the Brother finds some pictures of pin-up
girls in the boy's possession, and when he warns the boys on the
dangers of "..losing the faith". Of course, his warnings are backed up
with anecdotes of boys he once taught and what happened them once they
left. Unnerving moments appear when he loses patience with students
who are cheeky, or not as smart as the others. Laurence Coy turns in a
good performance, especially in his ability to create the presence of
other characters. You feel that the students are really there; that
this really is a 1950s classroom...

Forwarded with permission
From The Irish Emigrant Arts Review
Cathedral Building, Middle Street, Galway, Ireland.

Editor: Miriam Stewart

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan


Those who are interested in the very early period will find interesting
material in the online journal, Medieval Review - though it does not
seem to have been updated for a while...

http://www.hti.umich.edu/b/bmr/tmr.html

For example, I found there a really helpful review, by Jeremy Lowe, I of
Washington, of
Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths
of Medieval Ireland, Cornell UP & $ Courts Press, 1997.

Nagy is a good read, and it is good to see a literary theorist engage
with these texts - but he has produced a book in which it is easy to
lose one's way. Jeremy Lowe helpfully points out that a key term is not
defined until page 320. Skip forward, skip back.

Discussing this book with a colleague here, he remarked that although
St. Patrick converted the Irish, it was clear from Patrick's own
writings that he never really liked them...

P.O'S.
- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan



There is an article from the USA Today newspaper on America's changing
ethnic and racial composition at
http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovtue.htm

It is getting a lot of attention on the various discussion groups. Our
thanks to Ed O'Donnell for alerting us to this item.

For list members who have trouble accessing Web sites I have sent the
full text of the article to the Ir-D list. The full text follows this
email as a separate email.

P.O'S.
- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan


This is the full text of that much-discussed article from
http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovtue.htm

Blended races making true melting pot
By Maria Puente and Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY

In the future, lots of us will be like Mariah Carey. Or Soledad O'Brien.
Or Tiger Woods.

There's no guarantee we'll look that good, of course, or sing that well,
let alone be able to drive a golf ball 350 yards.

But in the next century more Americans are going to be black, white and
Hispanic, like singer Carey and TV news anchor O'Brien. Or black, white,
American Indian and Asian, like golfer Tiger Woods.

As a new millennium looms, America is set to become more a nation of
blended races and ethnic groups than it has ever been. Or at least
that's the picture that emerges from the population projections made for
the next century by the U.S. Census Bureau, by officials in individual
states and by demographers like Barry Edmonston of Portland State
University in Oregon and Jeff Passel of the Urban Institute, a
Washington, D.C., think tank.

Hispanic faces dominate the sidewalk along Broadway in Los Angeles (Bob
Riha Jr., USA TODAY).
By 2050, Passel and Edmonston's calculations suggest, the percentage of
the U.S. population that claims mixed ancestry - meaning some
combination of black, white, Hispanic and Asian - will likely triple, to
21%.

Within some groups the rates will be even higher. Among Asian Americans,
the percentage able to claim some other ancestry in addition to Asian is
expected to reach 36%; for Native Americans 89%; for whites 21%; for
blacks 14%; and for Hispanics 45%.

This means that millions more Americans will be of mixed racial and
ethnic background. "So, them are us and us is them," quips Harry Pachon,
president of the West Coast branch of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute,
a think tank in Claremont, Calif.

Furthermore, the Census Bureau says the Hispanic population is going to
be huge - about 17% of the total population by 2025, about 25% of the
total population by 2050 - fueled both by higher fertility rates among
Hispanics and continuing immigration from Latin America. Over the last
two decades, immigrants from Latin America have made up about 40% of the
total 19.4 million legal immigrants. Only three major metropolitan areas
have dominant or substantial Hispanic populations today - Miami, San
Antonio and Los Angeles. But, in the next century, the list will include
many more, including some in surprising places - such as Jersey City,
N.J., Yakima, Wash., and Orange County, Calif.

The growing number of Hispanics will help fuel the already soaring
intermarriage rate. Demographers say up to 30% of Hispanics and Asians
marry outside their race or ethnic group now. Passel says his
calculations suggest that up to 57% of third-generation Hispanics - the
grandchildren of immigrants - marry a non-Hispanic.

"Growing up on Long Island, there was never any question that we were
different," says O'Brien, 32, a rising NBC correspondent and MSNBC
anchor. Her mother is Cuban and black, and her father is Australian and
Irish. "When I get on the subway in New York today, most of the people
look like me - they're a mix of some kind."

In the future, more American communities are going to look like the New
York City subways.

"The United States is once again on the eve of large ethnic
transformations," says Passel. "This current phase (of change) has
already involved social and political disturbances, and raises new
questions about who are 'Americans.'"

Such transformations are not new, says Raul Yzaguirre, president of the
National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy and civil rights
organization. "It doesn't mean a fundamental change in America," he
says. "It's a natural part of our evolution as a nation."

Looking like Florida

The Census Bureau's computers are on the second floor of Federal Office
Building No. 3 in Suitland, Md. The machines collect and sift data,
analyze decades of trends in births, deaths and immigration, and then
project those trends into the future. Every couple of years they spit
out snapshots, somewhat fuzzy, of what the USA will look like
demographically in 10, 20, up to 50 years.

From these, demographers can get an idea of population growth, racial
and ethnic breakdown, the spread of age groups, even the places where
the most people will live.

Predicting demographic change is notoriously tricky - many have been
wrong before. "It's hard to get historical distance while you're in the
middle of demographic change," says Jorge del Pinal, a Census Bureau
demographer.

Next year's census is expected to provide loads of data on the nation's
current demographic picture, including the number of Americans who
consider themselves of mixed ancestry.

On the 2000 census form, Americans for the first time will be able to
pick more than one race and ethnic category to describe themselves. This
is the result of pressure from parents of biracial children who don't
want their kids to have to choose one part of their ancestry over
another. Current figures show that about 7% of the population could
claim multiple ancestry.

In any case, the results the Census Bureau computers are spitting out
these days may surprise, delight or even alarm many Americans. Here are
some of the projections:

The total population of the country is projected to grow to 335 million
by 2025, a 23% increase over the 1999 population.

The population will be less Caucasian: 62%, compared to 72% in 1999. The
growth rate of the white population will be only 6%, compared with much
higher rates for Asians, Hispanics and blacks.

The largest minority group by 2005 will be people of Hispanic origin,
who can be of any race. By 2025, there will be nearly 60 million
Hispanics, about 17% of the total population, compared to 30 million, or
11%, in 1999.

The black population will grow about 31%, but it will remain stable as a
percentage of the population: 13% in 2025 compared with 12% in 1999.

The fastest growth rate will be among people of Asian and Pacific Island
descent - 102%, from about 10 million people in 1999 to nearly 21
million in 2025. But they will remain a relatively small group as a
percentage of the total population, at about 6%.

Native Americans - American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts - will be the group
that changes the least as a percentage of the population: They will be
0.8% in 2025, compared to 0.7% in 1999.

The age distribution of the population will shift dramatically by 2025.
More people will be very young (21% increase in the number of people 14
or younger). Fewer people will be middle-aged (4% drop in the number of
people age 35 to 49). And more people will be very old (14% increase in
the number of people over 80 and a 315% increase in the number of people
100 or more).

"By 2020, the rest of the nation will look like Florida does now," says
Peter Morrison, consultant demographer for California's Rand Corp.

Age differences are even more marked when comparing different groups.
The median age of the white population in 2025 is projected to be 42.7
years; by contrast, the median age for the Hispanic population is
projected to be 29.4. Because there will be more Hispanics in 2025,
their relative youth will act as a counterweight to the aging of the
overall population.

The shift of population away from the Northeast and Midwest toward the
South and the West will accelerate. In 1995, 57% of the population lived
in the South and West; by 2025, 62% of Americans will live in those
regions.

These population shifts will be particularly obvious in individual
states. States such as New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Iowa
are projected to grow less than 10% each by 2025. States such as
Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Texas, Idaho and Florida are
projected to grow 45% or more each. California is projected to grow 56%,
the largest jump, to 49.2 million people. West Virginia will grow only
1%.

Florida will become No. 3 in population after California and Texas,
pushing New York to fourth place. Georgia will have more people than New
Jersey - almost 10 million - and North Carolina will be close behind.

Meanwhile, Americans can catch a glimpse of what the demographic future
might be like by studying California, where change is already obvious.
For instance, the shrinking of the white population is already
noticeable in California, where sometime next year whites will cease to
be the majority, slipping under 50% to become merely a plurality, says
state demographer Linda Gage.

This kind of change can be tracked in unusual ways. For example,
according to the Internet research firm Acxiom DataQuick , the top four
surnames among 1997 Los Angeles County homebuyers were Garcia,
Hernandez, Martinez, and Gonzales.

In fact, Hispanics will surpass non-Hispanic whites to become the single
largest ethnic group in California by 2030. By 2040, Latinos, as they
are usually called in California, will be nearly a majority in that
state, totaling 28 million out of a state population of 58.7 million.

The city of Los Angeles, population 3.5 million now, is currently more
than 50% Latino. In fact, after the 2000 census, "I would be surprised
if it's not over 60%," says Vivian Dosh of the Southern California
Association of Governments.

Meanwhile, the black population of Los Angeles County is expected to
decline in numbers. Even now, says Joe Hicks, executive director of the
Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, many blacks are moving out
of the city into distant Moreno Valley or Palmdale, or heading back to
the Deep South.

Even in Orange County, a traditional fortress of white conservatives,
Hispanics will become a plurality by 2030 and a near-majority by 2040,
according to state projections. In San Diego County, Hispanics will pass
whites by 2040 to take the plurality.

In northern California, where the Asian population is heavily
concentrated, more change is well under way. In Silicon Valley's Santa
Clara County, where Asians now outnumber Latinos as the biggest
minority, both these groups will climb fast.

By 2020, whites will be outnumbered by both Asian-Pacific Islanders and
Hispanics, with nobody having a majority at least through 2040.

Race, ethnic mixing

But the most intriguing demographic trend may be the accelerating rates
of race and ethnic mixing. It's a trend that varies from group to group.
For example, blacks are the least likely to marry outside their race,
while American Indians are the most likely to: about 60%, by various
estimates.

"The black-white line is the most difficult to cross," says Passel.
"About 10% of blacks are married to non-blacks, but that's up a huge
amount in the last 30 years, from 1% or 2%."

What effect will blended Americans have on the social, cultural and
political landscape? Suppose Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their
children assimilate in the same manner as Italian, Polish or Irish
immigrants in the past. Will most of the descendants of Hispanic
immigrants lose Spanish just as, say, Italian immigrants lost Italian?

According to several studies, that is already happening. Will people
identify as "Hispanic" or "Asian" if they are only part Hispanic or
Asian and speak only English? What will it mean to be "Hispanic" or
"Asian" in a world where significant portions of the population can
claim the label?

No one can answer these questions with any certainty. But all this
mixing suggests that the traditional definition of "assimilation into
the American mainstream" -- meaning to lose one's ethnic and racial
identity in the process of becoming more Anglo - may lose its meaning.

"Assimilation has always been more of a confluence of different factors,
and it's going to be more so in the future," says the Census Bureau's
del Pinal. "Just look at the influence of Hispanic immigrants on popular
culture now: Nachos have become one of the most popular food snacks.
People drink lime with their beer. Salsa is everywhere. The future is
going to be a big mixing of cultural influences like that."

The Irish example

There are always lessons from the past to remember, too: Once upon a
time in America, Irish immigrants were considered a separate, non-white
"race." Most Americans believed the Irish could never be assimilated,
would forever remain alien, poor, uneducated and criminal. Signs saying,
"No Irish Need Apply" were common. Few Americans regarded marriage to an
Irish immigrant with anything but horror.

Today, the Irish are considered indisputably white, solidly middle-
class, educated and upstanding, and so assimilated that no one thinks
twice about it.

In fact, so many people claimed to be Irish in the 1980 census that
demographers concluded the number could not be accounted for by
immigration and fertility. "Most of the growth of the Irish Americans
must have resulted from intermarriage and the children of intermarriage
choosing to claim Irish ancestry," says the Urban Institute's Passel.

In other words, now everybody's Irish because it doesn't matter anymore.

END
- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan



This item from soc.culture has been brought to our attention, and is
passed on without comment...

P.O'S.


EXTRACT BEGINS>>>


Subject: "Why I'm not proud to be Irish", by Mark Ryan

It's St Patrick's Day on 17 March. And from pubs to poets, Irishness is
in fashion. But unlike the Murphy's/Caffrey's/Kilkenny, Mark Ryan is
bitter

Why I am not proud to be Irish

Some months ago, walking through Les Halles in central Paris I came
across a beggar with a sign saying 'Aidez-moi pour manger et vivre'--
help me eat and live. I had almost passed when I noticed that at the
bottom he had written 'Je suis Irlandais'--I am Irish. My first
response was one of disgust that Paddywackery had reached such a global
level of intensity that even the beggars in Paris were now claiming to
be Irish. I have since been reliably informed of sightings of other
beggars in Paris carrying the same message.

At first those three words--'I am Irish'--had a doleful ring about them.
But as I reflected on the incident, the dolefulness was augmented by a
tone of haughtiness and pride bordering on superiority. 'It is because I
am Irish that I can take the liberty of scrounging from the rest of
you', could be at least one interpretation of the beggar's cryptic
message.

I was reminded of this incident some time later when reading of the
Albert Reynolds libel trial at the High Court in London. Reynolds was
the Irish Prime Minister credited with helping bring about an IRA
ceasefire in August 1994. He had brought a case against the Sunday Times
over a piece written at the time of his downfall in November 1994, which
described him as a 'gombeen man' (an Irish petty usurer). One particular
exchange between Reynolds and counsel for the defence stood out.
Questioned over subsidies to the beef industry, with which he had some
murky connections, Reynolds proudly replied that of the £100m Irish beef
trade with Iraq, the European Union had contributed £90m in subsidies.
It was hard to know which was the more astounding, the figures
themselves or the pride with which Reynolds revealed these figures to
the court. It is the same sense of pride or lack of shame that the
beggar displayed, though of course on a vaster scale.

This is the first reason I feel no pride in being Irish. Of the seven
deadly sins pride is the one which has lost all its transgressive power
as a result of overuse. We have gay pride, black pride and disabled
pride, and now we have Irish pride. To claim pride in any of these you
need not have done anything at all, in fact you could spend your whole
life in bed, or like the beggar, do something which most people would
consider shameful and still feel proud of yourself. The fact * that
simply being Irish is sufficient cause for pride makes it utterly
worthless.

However there is something peculiarly odious about Irish pride which
demands more than just abstention. The Irish have become something
special in the eyes of the world. Go to a city almost anywhere in the
world and you will find an Irish pub. Tell the citizen of San
Francisco, Tokyo or Timbuktu that you are Irish and you will be
immediately told how wonderful you are. There is no nation on the face
of the Earth so flattered and fawned upon as the Irish. This is why the
beggar in Paris could carry that sign, because Irish pride is indulged
in a way that black pride is not.

In one way the Irish today are like the new Uncle Toms whom everybody
loves because we are so harmless, endearing and ready to entertain.
However Uncle Tom was a figure of contempt, which the Irish are
certainly not. If anything we are envied and looked up to with genuine
reverence and respect. This is actually worse because it is such a
delusion. It is certainly no cause for pride.

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END OF EXTRACT
- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

Book Review by Donald MacRaild

A version of this review will appear in a future issue of ALBION, and appears here on
the Irish-Diaspora list through the courtesy of Donald MacRaild.


Frank Neal, Black 47: Britain and the Famine Irish (Basingstoke and New
York, Macmillan and St Martin's Press, 1998), ISBN 03333665953.

The Great Famine (1845-51) conjures up a host of bleak images: starving
infants, decaying corpses, the hard-headed calculus of political economists
and the politics of denial so prevalent under Russell's administration. The
phrase 'Black '47', which evokes the dark side of Irish history, has been
used in the title of numerous historical works in recent times. But it is
most bluntly recalled in a work of fiction: act 4 of George Bernard Shaw's
Man and Superman:

MALONE me father died of starvation in Ireland in the Black '47. Maybe
you've heard of it?
VIOLENT The Famine?
MALONE (with smouldering passion): No, the starvation, when a country is
full of food and exporting it, there can be no famine.

Shaw's words express the deeply political importance of the Famine, what Sir
Charles Trevelyan dubbed 'This Great Calamity'. The Famine simultaneously
symbolised and measured the distance between Ireland and Britain. It made
such a mockery of the notion that the Act of Union was a joining of equals
that nationalists never forgot it, and regularly summoned up its demon
images to meet their political ends. Even in Frank Neal's particular area
of research expertise, the migration of Irish people to Britain, this
political edge is no less sharp. In what is perhaps the finest and certainly
the most deeply-researched study of the Irish in Britain to date, Neal
demonstrates that what appear to be socio-economic processes can soon become
culturally and politically ingrained.

The fact that more people left Ireland in the decade after 1845 than during
the previous two-and-a-half centuries makes the Great Famine a pivotal
dimension of any history of the Irish Diaspora. The Famine exacerbated or
expanded new trends in migration, effectively ensuring that the idea of
leaving would become embedded within the minds, culture and life patterns of
all but the poorest elements of society. By the 1850s, emigration was
selecting apparently surplus population from all walks of life; only the
Gaelic-speaking west, where death rates had been highest during the Famine,
appears to have held on to its poorest population for another generation.
We know this culture of emigration had enormous effects upon Irish society,
but much less has been said about how it affected Britain.

Professor Neal demonstrates in the early chapters how reactions to Irish
settlement became increasingly negative as Carlyle's 'Condition of England'
crisis mounted. By the mid-1830s, this highly mobile labour force was the
subject of seemingly endless, and generally opprobrious, comments in the
press, poor law reports and government commissions, etc. The Irish were
effectively deployed as scapegoats for the state of the world into which
they migrated. Yet neither migration nor the social effects of
industrialisation had reached a natural end-point by the 1830s. As the
Famine sent a swelling volume of people into Britain's ports, antipathetic
views of these pauperised migrants went off the scale. More than
half-a-million Irish landed on Liverpool's waterfront in 1846 and 1847, but
the majority did not stay there. More than half went on to America while
others headed into Britain's urban heartland: Lancashire, west Yorkshire and
Tyneside.

One of the many strengths of this book is that it moves beyond the Liverpool
story to show conclusively that the Famine affected Britain society to the
core. Glasgow and South Wales are prominent parts of Neal's driving
narrative of struggle and survival. Even semi-rural backwaters-such as
Beverley in North Yorkshire and Barnard Castle in County Durham-witnessed a
sudden and sustained increase in the numbers of Irish falling on the mercy
of their parishes. The Famine was Ireland's national tragedy; but migration
patterns meant that the whole of Britain shared something of the experience.
Neal demonstrates quite clearly that, despite the antagonism that welled up
in the face of the Famine migrations, the British poor law authorities did
not abnegate their responsibilities to the incoming poor. The harsh regime
of the new poor law, and the dominance of a utilitarian vision of poverty,
ensured that while support for the Irish was far from generous, it was no
more spartan than that doled out to the British poor. Thousands were, of
course, sent back to Ireland from Liverpool, but this option was much less
realistic for poor law guardians further inland, and Neal argues that many
more Irish would have starved were it not for the tendency of local
authorities to administer outdoor relief.

Neal's Black '47 will go down as one the best studies to appear during the
long sesquicentenary of the Great Famine. Although this period has seen many
excellent studies - not least works by Christine Kinealy, Thomas Kennelly,
Cormac O Grada, Black 47 and Beyond (1999) and Peter Gray's masterpiece,
Famine, Land and Politics (1999) - none has broken new ground in quite the
same way as Neal's. Neal takes us beyond the 'high politics' dimension, into
dozens of local arenas, to show the extent of the famine migration, its
social and financial costs. On the local level, as far the ratepayers of
Glossop or the magistrates of Whitehaven were concerned, this was more to do
with the economics of migration than with the politics of the Union. Neal's
fine study deserves a wide readership.

University of Sunderland
DONALD M. MacRAILD

Book Review by Donald MacRaild

A version of this review will appear in a future issue of Irish Studies Review, and
appears here on the Irish-Diaspora list through the courtesy of Donald MacRaild.


Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local
Dimension (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1999), pp.320, ISBN 1 85182 403 0
39.50 (hb); ISBN 1 85182 444 8 17.50 (pb).

Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley have now edited a trilogy of essay
collections on the Irish in Britain. This first volume, The Irish in the
Victorian City (1985), presented the Irish as a victimised minority whose
only saving grace was the support of the Catholic Church. The second
volume, The Irish in Britain, 1815-1914 (1989), ranged more broadly and
proposed number of revisions to this perspective. The Irish in Victorian
Britain: The Local Dimension, too, moves beyond what had become the standard
responses of historians. We are still a long way from a definitive history
of the Irish in Britain, but Swift and Gilley's volumes provide a sensitive
indication of how the study of this subject has grown and matured. An
exhaustive bibliography emphasises the wider dynamic of which this volume is
but a part.

This collection emphasises the diversity of Irish migrants' experiences,
laying particular stress upon local and regional factors. Studies of
familiar centres of Irish settlement, such as Liverpool and London, are
interspersed with essays on less noted destinations such as south Wales,
north-east England and Birmingham. Small towns, such as Camborne in
Cornwall, Stafford and Hull also get an airing. The spirit of the volume is
emphasised most clearly in Paul O'Leary's study of three south Wales
towns - Cardiff, Newport and Merthyr - at the time of the Famine. He argues that
'the history of the Irish in mid-nineteenth-century Britain can be seen as a
patchwork of different experiences refracted through the prism of regional
economies.' O'Leary asserts that most studies of the Irish in Britain have
focused on towns, whereas he stresses the importance of regions.

Carl Chinn and Frank Neal consider the Irish in two (as yet)
under-researched places: the north-east of England (which Neal here compares
with the north-west) and Birmingham. Neal demonstrates the range of
different occupations of Irish migrants in the two regions, and, as with
many recent studies, describes the transitory nature of migrant settlements.
Chinn's richly-detailed study demonstrates the complex nature of Irish
household structure in Birmingham and explains the role played by work in
cementing the Irish community of Birmingham-the Irish there worked in more
than 760 different trades, although building work predominated. He also
shows how their community was internally stratified, not just
occupationally, but also geographically. While poorer migrants from western
Ireland occupied the archetypal accommodation in the worst areas of the city
centre, wealthier arrivals from Dublin chose more peripheral localities.

John Belchem's crisp essay on the middle-class Irish in Liverpool also
provides clear evidence of the diversity of the migrant experience. Belchem
indicates that there was more to Irish ethnicity in Liverpool than
deprivation and alienation. The city's large and complex Irish community,
like that in Birmingham, was internally stratified: it included Protestant
tradesmen and prosperous Catholics as well proletarian dockers. Irish
ethnic leaders-publicans, journalists, politicians, clerics and many
others-offered viable alternative networks for their fellow migrants.
Belchem reconsiders and rejects the notion of complete and unproblematic
assimilation, challenging the notion of 'ethnic fade'. But neither does he
propose a simplistic, impermeable, ethnic community, unchanged over time.

The question of assimilation is addressed headlong in several chapters, not
least in Mary Hickman's critical reflection on the historiography of the
Irish in Britain. Hickman proposes a new approach: she wishes to see
historians move away from a dominant assimilation/segregation dichotomy and
questions whether it is enough simply to add new empirical knowledge to the
body of existing works. For Hickman, the completion of further local studies
simply adds quantity (not quality) to what we already know. Hickman prefers
'state' and 'nation' to 'regional' and 'local', which makes her essay
something of a cuckoo in the next. Hickman's central belief (detailed in
her book, Religion, Class and Identity, 1994) is that the Irish were
(forcibly) incorporated into British society by the twin pressures of the
British state and the Catholic Church. To explicate the problems of the
assimilation/integration model, Hickman is fiercely critical of the work of
David Fitzpatrick and that of Alan O'Day. She questions O'Day's stress upon
the franchise as a measurement of ethnic political attachment. Fitzpatrick
is upbraided for using a defunct Marxist typology (community as an
observable reality) during his rejection of the idea of an Irish migrant
community. There is nothing wrong with engagement in healthy debate and I am
sure Fitzpatrick and O'Day would defend Hickman's right to disagree with
them. But it seems bizarre that Hickman should alight on just two examples
of what she believes is the key flaw in historical writings on this subject.
If the flaw is so serious, it must be widespread; and if it is widespread,
then surely discussion of a wider literature should have been undertaken?

John Herson also fails Hickman's assimilation/integration-versus-incorporation test.
Nevertheless, his chapter on Victorian Stafford's Irish population still offers a
sophisticated discussion of Irish assimilation. He ascribes no great role to
the state. He sees the Irish themselves as decision-making individuals who
were faced by three essential choices: migration (to be peripatetic);
community (to form independent, defiant communities based on the symbols of
their difference, notably Catholicism and nationalism); or 'integration' (to
seek assimilation into British society). Herson rejects the notion of
community on the grounds that the Irish community was permeable. (Evidence
includes high-levels of inter-marriage and a tradition of Catholic and
Protestant migration.) In addition, the town of Stafford harboured no
obvious Fenian threat and its Irish formed no branches of the various Home
Rule organisations. While this could mean that the Irish in Stafford
assimilated, it could also mean that they lacked the critical mass required
to maintain such political bodies. Although Herson's research is enviably
thorough, the wider application of his findings is offset by the small size
of Stafford's Irish community.

Religion, nationality and politics - issues at the heart of Hickman's
work - feature prominently in this volume as they did in the previous two.
Gerald Moran's study of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick in
Lancashire, for example, demonstrates the movement's rise and demise in the
face of suspicion and opposition from both the Catholic Church and
nationalist movements. Despite its failure, Moran contends that the
movement laid the foundations for future political movements by raising
levels of organisation among the Irish of Lancashire. Marie McCelland's
study of Catholic education in Hull also emphasises the importance of
grass-roots organisation, particularly the role of the Irish Sisters of
Mercy. In an essay that echoes many of the themes discussed in other
chapters, John Hutchinson and Alan O'Day offer a lucid discussion of the
Gaelic Revival and the London Irish. This chapter focuses on a relatively
small Irish Catholic intelligentsia - a group for whom history, language and
music could be employed to articulate a political vision. They demonstrate
the interplay between various organisations (the Gaelic Revival, Irish
National League, Irish Self-Determination League, Sinn Fein, Catholic Church
and others), and their wider arguments, concerning ethnicity and the
experiences of migrants, are revealing. 'The Gaelic revival', Hutchinson and
O'Day contend, 'offered the ethnic community an avenue to escape
incorporation but unable to effectively "colonise" the social institutions
most germane to the life of the Irish population-the Catholic Church and
trade unions-any revival was likely to be short-lived.' In what might be
seem as an act of unwitting revenge, O'Day and his co-author reject Hickman's
incorporation thesis because '[h]er tendentious style and political
purpose obscure a conclusion essentially consistent with scholars who are
impressed by the rate at which Irish Catholics have disappeared into British
society.' It is not very often that a single collection of essays is dubbed
'important' - but how many editors can say they have produced three volumes
deserving of such approval?

Donald M. MacRaild
University of Sunderland

From Patrick O'Sullivan

Forwarded on behalf of the University of Notre Dame...
Please circulate widely.

P.O'S.



University of Notre Dame (IN)
Assistant Professor, Medieval Irish History



IRELAND TO 1600.
The University of Notre Dame Department of History seeks to appoint a tenure
track assistant or tenured associate professor in Irish medieval or early
modern history, specialization open. The successful candidate will be
expected to teach at both undergraduate and graduate levels and to
offer survey courses in Ireland to 1600 and in European history to
1600. Breadth of interest and excellence in teaching and scholarship
are expected. Screening of applications will begin 1 November 1999.
Applicants should send letter of application, CV, sample of scholarly
writing, and three letters of recommendation to Christopher Hamlin,
Chair, Department of History, Notre Dame , IN 46556. Notre Dame, a
research university in the Catholic tradition, is AA/EOE.






- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
Fax International +44 870 0521605

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
University of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP
Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan


The University of Melbourne, Australia, has asked us to let it be known that
they have had some applications for their new Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish
Studies. But they have decided to keep the search open for a while.

I have pasted in, below, the basic information and contact details. Please
circulate widely.

P.O'S.


THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

GERRY HIGGINS CHAIR OF IRISH STUDIES
FACULTY OF ARTS


The University, recognised internationally for excellence in teaching and
research, is located centrally in Melbourne, a vibrant centre of Australian
intellectual and cultural life.

The Position: This new Chair is located in the Department of History,
Faculty of Arts. The appointee will be expected to provide leadership in
teaching and research in the field of Irish Studies, and to support the
educational activities of Newman College, a residential college affiliated
to the University.

The person: You will have a distinguished international record in a field
of Irish History. You will have a demonstrated capacity to give leadership
in Irish Studies, teaching and research and in the development of Irish
Studies in the University and wider community.

The Benefits: The remuneration package is approximately AUD120,000
including superannuation. In addition, provision exists for four weeks
annual leave and for study leave.

Duration: This Chair is offered on a continuing basis, subject to
satisfactory performance.
This appointment will be available from 1 February 2000

Contact: Academic enquiries to the Dean, Faculty of Arts, telephone: 61
(3) 9344 5242; secure facsimile: 61 (3) 9344-4938; e-mail:
arts.dean[at]arts.unimelb.edu.au
Further information about the position, including details of the
application procedure, conditions of outside work, superannuation, travel
and removal expenses, housing assistance and conditions of appointment, is
available from the Registrar. Please contact Ms Lydia Simonow; telephone:
61 (3) 9344 7528; secure facsimile: 61 (3) 9344 6897; e-mail:
l.simonow[at]execserv.unimelb.edu.au. This information is also available on
the internet: HYPERLINK
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/ExecServ/Seniorapp/index.htm
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/ExecServ/Seniorapp/index.htm .

Application to: The Registrar, The University of Melbourne, Parkville,
Victoria 3052, Australia (marked "PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL"). Secure
facsimile 61 (3) 9344 6897.

The Council reserves the right to make no appointment or to fill the Chair
by invitation at any stage.


Professor Peter McPhee
Department of History
The University of Melbourne
Parkville VIC 3052
Australia

Tel: 61 3 9344 5961
Fax: 61 3 9344 7894
Email: p.mcphee[at]history.unimelb.edu.au

http://www.history.unimelb.edu.au/



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Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
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Yorkshire
England

Subject: Ir-D One Man's Hero, Mexico City

From: Eileen A Sullivan

Paddy dear,

So glad to see that the San Patricios are getting more publicity. In
the 1970s I lectured on them at the ACIS meeting at U of Mich. A Judge
in the audience questioned me about them for his ancestor was one of the
Irishmen executed; some talk went on about an exoneration of these men.
All of them were not Irish, of course, but O'Reilly made it seem they
were all out of Ireland.

In St. Augustine (1997), at one of my O'Sullivan/Sullivan seminars :
"The Spanish, British, and American Associations",
we viewed the San Patricio Video, made by Mark Day of California. The
audiences was favorably impressed. A friend, Father Tom O'Rourke, a
Maryknoll missionary in Mexico, many years ago alerted me about the group
and sent photographs of the monument in Mexico City which inscribes all
their names He also sent me a novel in Spanish by Patricia Cox about
the San Patricians, BATTALLON DE SAN PATRICIO, 1963. The Mexicans have
not forgotten the event.

JFK's magazine GEORGE also had an article about Tom Berenger and the film;
don't recall the date of the issue- sometime summer or fall of last year.
It is worth reading.

Your Irish-Diaspora list email of Apr 12,'99, was an update about Pres. McAleese's
viewing of the monument. Keep up the good work!!!!!!


Eileen A. Sullivan Tel # (352) 332 3690
6412 NW 128th Street E-Mail : eolas1[at]juno.com
Gainesville, FL 32653

From Patrick O'Sullivan


Those who follow the H-Ethnic list will know that that list has been
very busy over the past months. H-Ethnic has some 1000 members - spread
throughout the world. But North American interests tend to predominate,
as do United States ways of understanding and pre-occupations...

Recently H-Ethnic touched on two areas, in particular, of interest to
Irish Diaspora Studies...

1. There was some discussion of the use of family names in
ethnic/migration/diaspora research. It was intriguing to see the very
same issues that arise in discussion of Irish family names arise here,
again, in other contexts. The discussion touched only briefly on Irish
family names.

I suppose I should have charged in to the discussion at that stage.
Really, there are ways in which the uses made of Irish family names in
research highlighted issues in very dramatic ways. The politics of the
'authentic' - with authentic and 'inauthentic' name forms. Hierarchies
of name groups. The consequences of identifiably Irish names. Irish
names used in insult and denigration.

BUT... I was very busy. I did not join in the discussion. Maybe the
notes I made will be turned into some more permanent form, some time in
the future.

2. There has been much discussion of the usefulness and appropriateness
of terms and concepts such as 'assimilation', 'integration',
'incorporation' and 'Americanization'. Again, issues of interest to
Irish Diaspora Studies were touched on.

I have chased up one reference, to John McClymer's notion that 'becoming
ethnic is part of becoming American', which I will post to the Irish-
Diaspora list as a separate email.

Patrick O'Sullivan
- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
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Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

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Irish Diaspora Research Unit
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Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan


Forwarded with the permission of
John McClymer

>Dear Paddy,
> Thanks for the kind words. The exchange on H-ETHNIC was been
>sparkling, I think. By all means, you can use my posting. the citation is:
>"A Battle of Parades: 'National Days' and Swedish-Irish Competition in
>Worcester, Massachusetts, 1880-1920," Migrants and the Homeland Symposium,
>Uppsala University, Sweden, 12-14 June 1996. the proceedings are
>forthcoming from U. of Uppsala press, edited by Harald Runblom.
>
>John
>
>

And this is the original H-Ethnic message...

From: John McClymer

John Radzilowski writes:
>"Assimilation" carries so much negative baggage that it often difficult to
>use without wincing. When immigrants and their children are getting both
>more ethnic and more "American"--is this assimilation? What if becoming
>ethnic is a key part of becoming American? What about ethnic groups (eg
>Poles) who fuse notions of America with notions of their homeland so that
>loyalty to one equals loyalty to the other? . . .
>When words like assimilation begin to confuse us more than they explain or
>illuminate, we might question their usefulness. Especially in the case of
>assimilation, which increasingly seems to be a covert version of
>modernization theory or at least of certain rather smug concepts about the
>direction in which historical events are supposed to be moving.
- --------
Becoming ethnic often is a key part of becoming American. I have an essay
coming out sometime soon in a collection published by the University of
Uppsala in which I trace how Swedes in Worcester didn't celebrate a
"national day" until 1912 (more than 30 years after the beginnings of their
mass migration into the city) and then only because the Irish had succeeded
in getting Columbus Day declared a state holiday. Yes, the Irish. In
Worcester, Italians boycotted the Columbus Day celebration precisely for
this reason. And the Irish stopped celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Faced
with this Irish triumph, Swedes decided it was past time to have a "day" of
their own. I find this story fascinating because the Swedes initially tried
the assimilationist route by claiming to be a "founding" rather than an
"immigrant" people. Forefounders' Day, first held in Minnesota on the 250th
anniversary of the founding of New Sweden, fizzled. Swedes finally had to
turn to an immigrant strategy of achieving recognition, a specifically
ethnic day -- Midsommar. In this they were, as they very well knew,
following the lead of the Irish, French Canadians, and any number of other
ethnic groups. Should we say that the Swedes were becoming more ethnic in
publically proclaiming their origins? Yes. Was this a way of becoming
American? Yes. Because, Woodrow Wilson to the contrary notwithstanding,
America did consist of groups. Well then, what should we say about the
Irish? Were they becoming less ethnic? Tricky question. On one level the
answer would seem to be yes. Columbus Day was avowedly a Catholic holiday
and certainly not an Irish one. Insisting upon the compatibility of being
Catholic and being American was an old Irish strategy. Irish bishops pushed
Americanization, although prudence often dictated that they not push too
hard. Yet the opposition of the Italians to the Columbus Day festivities
suggests that it was an Irish triumph. Certainly the Irish so regarded it.
So did the Swedes for whom Columbus was an especially bitter pill since
they espoused the claim of Leif Ericson.
Prof. Radzilowski has a point in insisting that assimilation can be
a confusing concept. But we need a term. And assimilation is less freighted
with negative baggage than Americanization.

John McClymer
Assumption College

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Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
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Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
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Irish Diaspora Research Unit
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Yorkshire
England

From Patrick O'Sullivan



This is all a bit rough and ready, and perhaps someone else would like
to do something more scholarly with the idea...

I had been looking for some way of demonstrating the ways in which
denigration of the Irish are built into the English-speaking cultures -
and maybe even of measuring that denigration, in some comparative
manner. Remembering that our Irish-Diaspora list discussion of 'The
Dark Side' began with the report of one American student's almost
automatic denigration of a character in Joyce's short story, 'The
Dead'...

And I found myself reading Jonathon Green, _Words Apart: The Language
of Prejudice_, Kyle Cathie, London, 1996, ISBN 1 85626 216 2. [I should
add, 'Jonathon', so spelled...]

_Words Apart_ is a collection of about 4000 words and phrases, the
vocabulary which draw on and demonstrates race prejudice. 'Not for the
squeamish, let alone the politically correct...' says the blurb. Green
does not look only at English-speaking cultures - and, as will be
expected, many well known problematic continguities (Turkish/Armenian,
Turkish/Greek, German/Polish) bring in their own examples of a
prejudiced vocabulary. But by far the majority of his examples come
from the English-speaking countries.

Green's index then becomes a - rough and ready - way of measuring
comparative denigration. We can pick a group, and the number of
references to that group in the index is a measure of denigration.

No index is exhaustive, of course - and here some references to (for
example) the Irish have not been picked up by the indexer. Thus, on p
141 we find 'come the paddy over', to bamboozle, which 'adds yet another
slur to the many aimed at the Irish - in this case at their verbal
skills...' This specific reference is not indexed under 'Irish' or
'Paddy', but the same point is made on p 119, amongst many other 'Irish'
references, which are indexed. So, in rough and ready fashion, we
assume that such things balance out, and that the index can be used as a
measure of comparative denigration.

Another possible objection is that within the English language the use
of terms like 'black' to indicate something unattractive or inauspicious
predates colonialism, black slavery, the African Diaspora, etc., and the
effects of those on attitudes and language. Black/white, dark/light,
low/high, down/up are oppositions that language uses - especially, as
Ninian Smart, _Dimensions of the Sacred_, has observed, the language of
religion and ethics. The very word I have used in the Subject line of
this email, 'denigration, means 'blackening'. Whilst noting that
objection I will add that Green's book is so resolutely a record of the
language of race prejudice that I do not think that the objection
distorts our - rough and ready - use of the index as a measure.

Old-timers are used to the idea of 'column inches'. And here in Green's
index a column inch usually means 8 entries. So, here are the column
inches that the index allots to specific groups...

African (Afric to Afro engineering) 2.5
black (black to blak sospen) 8.0
dark (dark as Egypt to darky) 1.25
negro (neger to negro-fellow, also nig to nigger wool) 18.0
TOTAL 29.75

American (americain to Amerikanzi) 0.75
Yankee (yankee to yanqui) 1.75
TOTAL 2.5

British (britannia metal to Briton) 1.00

Chinese (China to chinoserie de bureau) 9.0

Dutch (Dutch to Dutchy - possible confusion of 'Dutch', as used by the
English, and American 'Dutch-Deutsch' uses) 10.75

English (Engelsch gaar to English winter) 2.5

French (franca to franzoischenen) 6.25
(French to Frenchy) 9.00

German (German aunt to Gerry) 3.25

Indian (India to Indo, and add Injun - difficult one, this, for two
separate groups are being disparaged: the Indians of India and native
Americans. Mostly here it is Native Americans.) 4.75

Irish (Irish to Irish wedding) 11.25
Paddy (paddy to paddywhack - plus Mick, Murphy, Mulligan, shamus) 3.75
TOTAL 15.00

Jewish (Jerusalem letters, etc, jew to Jew York, also Jud to juivoler,
also Yid to Yidney) TOTAL 20.25

Mexican (Mexican to Mexican window shade) 5.75

Scots (Scot to Scotty, including Scotch etc.) 4.75

Spanish (spagnola to spanska veikin - a lot of these seem to connect
with the supposed Spanish origins of the early C20th flu epidemics) 7.25

Welsh (Welch to Welsh uncle - I suppose there is no way of taking on
board the suggestion that the very word, 'Welsh', 'the foreigners', is
derogatory?) 2.25

White (white to whitey-whitey, including white-paddy) 2.75


So, which groups are most disparaged?

African, black, negro, TOTAL 29.75
Jewish, Jud, Yid, TOTAL 20.25
Irish, Paddy, etc., TOTAL 15.00

There are patterns within this pattern - thus the chapter on 'Violence'
is almost entirely about the Irish. A very great number of the 'Irish'
insults seem to come from the boarding house, flop house, life of C19th
American cities. This would seem a reflection of Green's reading, and
his sources - which come, as I say, mostly from within the English-
speaking world.

Turning back to a very early Irish-Diaspora list query... 'Luck of the
Irish' is there, p. 345, 'good fortune, with the proviso that it can
often be meant ironically, and implies a degree of unfairness...' No
source is given.

P.O'S.

- --
Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Email Patrick O'Sullivan
Irish-Diaspora list
Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/

Personal Fax National 0870 0521605
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Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies
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Yorkshire
England

Book Review by Donald MacRaild

A version of this book review will appear in Immigrants & Minorities at a future
date. The book review appears here on the Irish-Diaspora list through the
courtesy of Don MacRaild.

Don MacRaild acknowledges that this is very much the First Draft of the review
and would be happy to hear comments and suggestions.




Thomas Kenneally, The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in he Old World and
the New (London, Chatto and Windus, 1999), pp.xiii+732. 25 (hardback).
ISBN 1 85619 788 3.

Book Review by Donald MacRaild

'Australia', Robert Hughes wrote in his classic, The Fatal Shore, 'was the
official Siberia for Irish dissidents at the turn of the [nineteenth]
century.' Critics have since cast doubt on the veracity of these words,
citing the 'ticket of leave' status, or full legal freedom, that most
surviving convicts obtained as a measure of the greater humanity of the
Australian system. Perhaps Solzhenitzyn's gulag was indeed a more cruel
place? There is no doubt that Australia's penal systems rested upon some
sort of legal basis, however flimsy it might have been. Nevertheless,
Norfolk Island and Macquarie Harbour would have struck fear into any convict
destined to go there. We must also remember that particular sorts of people
usually end up in gulags and far-flung penal colonies, and a
disproportionately high number of those sent to Australia were Irish. Some
39,000 of the 160,000 during this century-long experiment in social control
were from Ireland; and social and political rebels-Defenders, United
Irishmen, Whiteboys, Rightboys, Caravats, Hearts of Steel, and so on-were
regularly among the shipments.

The epic story of transportation is just one strand of The Great Shame, the
latest epic from the pen of Thomas Kenneally, author of the acclaimed
Schindler's Ark. This is a book about the Irish Diaspora: its famous exiles and
reluctant emigrants; its political victims and their tortured families. But
it is also about the Irish Diaspora today. Kenneally an Australian writer whose
own ancestors include a transported Fenian, and whose wife is descended from
a transported Ribbonman, brings a personal passion on his work. The Great
Shame is his own great journey. Kenneally's wider concern is with the
question of how the transported of Australia fitted into the wider
international community of Irish. The Australian exile of ordinary men such
as Hugh Larkin (the great great grandfather of Kenneally's wife) provides
the author with moving stories of the separation and isolation that tore
apart ordinary lives. But it is the mental torture of the famous-men like
William Smith O'Brien - described on the dust-jacket of this book as 'the
Nelson Mandela of his age' - which provides the core of The Great Shame. The
plight of such men raised liberal voices of opposition the world over, and
it soon became clear - much to the chagrin of the authorities - that the British
Empire's convict system was not an antipodean endpoint but a Diasporic
beginning.

Writers also employ the concept of Diaspora to convey a sense of political
struggle, resistance and exile; in this way, too, Kenneally's book is
Diasporic. Whether we draw examples from the Maze prison or penal
Australia, Ireland's relationship with Britain has been punctuated
repeatedly and often by the injustice of brutal imprisonments. Kenneally
provides an acute sense of how the Irish Diaspora developed its critical faculty
in relation to these very sufferings, outraged by the crimes committed under
the shield of law on their natal soil. Without a Diaspora, the sense of
anger at the imprisonment of Young Ireland or the Fenians would have
remained inchoate or unspoken. Thus, what makes this book so fascinating
is not the uneasy link between Britain and Ireland that fed the convict
stream, and which has been described many times before, but the connection
between America and Australia that boosted Irish nationalism and gave hope
to many prisoners. Some of the more famous Irish political leaders escaped
their Australian hell thanks to Amerian intrigue, and the welcome afforded
to the escaping heroes - in San Francisco, Chicago or New York - was truly
staggering. Kenneally's narrative delivers a very immediate sense of the
innate power and great size of America's Irish community at this time.

Not all of the individuals in this book were quite as lucky as Young Ireland's
famous escapees. Hugh Larkin's wife Esther was refused permission to
join her husband in Australia, and Patrick O'Donovan, one of Young Ireland's
middle-rankers, enjoyed only a short and bitter freedom after his flight to
America. Alcoholism and appalling weather consumed him on 28 January 1854 as
he awaited the arrival of his wife and brother from Ireland. Yet none of
these tales of lesser lights is quite as melancholy as that of William Smith
O'Brien. As a wealthy Protestant landowner and MP, O'Brien's sin of treason
was somehow much greater than that of colleagues of lower social station.
O'Brien's exile was a particularly tortured affair. He was singled out for
exacting mental (if not physical) maltreatment, but he resisted nobly. At
first he refused a conditional, and geographically restricted, 'ticket of
leave'; but he was so moved by the public response (whipped up by supporters
such as Terence Bellew McManus) that he accepted the conditions in the end.
He was required to promise not to escape. As a gentleman, he had to honour
his word - but it hurt him to submit. 'Until now', O'Brien lamented, 'I
have never felt myself thoroughly beaten by English power.' He took a
teaching post, of which the forlorn O'Brien said: 'after having acquired
experience which ought to enable me to rule nations, I am reduced to a
position in which nearly my whole time is consumed in teaching two boys the
elements of languages which they could learn with equal advantage from some
pedagogue'. When in 1858 pardons came in for the Fenians and Chartists, men
such as Kevin Izod O'Doherty and John Martin were in a better position than
O'Brien, the descendant of Irish kings. Whereas they were to told they would
be free after their ten-year sentences had expired, O'Brien was to be
banished from Ireland for life. Although he was eventually allowed to return
home, his powers had atrophied considerably by then. The death of his wife
Lucy took another chunk out of him, and, towards the end of his life, he
refused to stand for a parliamentary seat. He died in Wales, on 18 June
1864.

The remaining years of the escapees, Thomas Francis Meagher and John
Mitchel, were to be much more fulfilling. The two men, though friends in
captivity, were to lead increasingly different lives in the United States.
Whereas Meagher made a comfortable living lecturing to the Irish citizens of
the great northern cities, Mitchel found himself increasingly attracted to
what he saw as the more Irish style of life in the South (he was appalled by
the anti-Irish aspect of the Fifties 'Know Nothing' campaigns). In
developing this preference, Mitchel also began to propound some of the
strongest pro-slavery views of that day, eventually coming to advocate the
re-opening of the slave trade. That this Young Ireland 'rebel', the doyen of
militant Irish nationalism during the Famine years, and scourge of the
British empire, should become such a vehement racist is a bizarre and tragic
fact. Mitchel's pro-slavery line remains a woefully under-developed subject
of historical analysis, although Kenneally has made a significant
contribution in The Great Shame. Mitchel denounced Harriet Beecher Stowe,
author of the influential anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a mere
instrument of her brother, Revd Henry Ward Beecher. But Mitchel's wife,
Jenny, sought to allay her friends' fears by stating quite categorically
that she would never become mistress of a slave household, because 'My
objection to Slavery is the injury it does to the white masters.' John
Mitchel argued that the abolition of slavery would imperil the whole
American republic. Mitchel's principal anxiety was for ordinary Irish
workers, many of whom he knew had suffered horribly in the Famine: he saw
the free black and the Irish proletarian as natural competitors. When the
Civil War ripped apart American society, the Mitchel family paid a high
price for their Confederate loyalties. One son, James, recovered from a
serious shell wound picked up in the retreat from Marye's Heights in April
1863, but much worse was to come. Willy Mitchell died along with most of
General Pickett's Virginians during the suicidal charge towards Unions lines
in the Battle of Gettysburg, and John Mitchel Jr was killed at Fort Sumter
in July 1864.

Meagher's career provides a crucial cog in the narrative, for it was a very
northern affair. Meagher, too, began his American phase as a lecturer - and a
good one too - before being admitted to the bar. But when the Civil War broke
out, Meagher raised a brigade of Irish Zouaves from the working-class
districts of New York, leading them himself in numerous heroic and bloody
engagements in the early phases of the war. He genuinely thought the
experience of war would serve Ireland's purpose and that one day he would
lead the same troops across the Atlantic to drive the British away, but the
dream became mired in the mud and blood of what was, prior to 1914, the
world's most brutal war. Meagher led his battered units with bravery and
distinction, but rumours of drunkenness dogged him until, in mid-1863, he
resigned his command. He went on to join the Fenians, with whom he had a
frosty relationship, and was later governor of Montana. Meagher is thought
to have fallen to his death from a steamer, in July 1867, but, because no
body was found, the cause of death has was not satisfactorily established.
Some say he was the victim of a Fenian assassination.

While the Young Ireland impact upon the Irish Diaspora provides the centre-piece
of the book, other sections centre upon the Fenians, Clan Na Gael and,
to a lesser extent, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Fenians who were
transported to Australia in 1867 were among the last convicts ever sent to
Australia. Among their number were the soldier Fenians - men such as the
dashing but, in captivity, tortured, ex-Hussar, John Boyle O'Reilly, whose
escape to America, and his eventual success as a Boston Irishman, provides a
major narrative thread of the later stages of The Great Shame. The men of
this phase were no less heroic, and were a good deal more organised, than
their Young Ireland counterparts. (Notwithstanding the tendency of the
latter generation to bump off members of the former!) The Fenians were more
numerous and more lower middle class or proletarian. As Kenneally states,
'There were few equivalents to Meagher, Thomas Davis, Kevin O'Doherty, and
certainly there was no Smith O'Brien'. But, by the time the Hougoumont set
sail for Australia with Boyle O'Reilly and his fellow captives on board, the
Irish of America were more numerous, wealthy and better organised. Boyle O'
Reilly was the only soldier Fenian to escape incarceration without American
planning. For some of the others, however, for the men whom Boyle O'Reilly
left behind, Clan Na Gael bought a ship, the Catalpa, and converted it into
a whaler. This was the guise under which more Fenians were to be liberated
from their Australian gaol. The chase which saw Catalpa and her illicit
Fenian cargo leaving western Australian waters with an armed steamer,
Georgette, at her tail, is part of a remarkable tale that caps a remarkable
book. With the Georgette confounded by the favourable winds that send the
Catalpa scudding through the waves, the captain brought the Fenian on to the
deck: 'Boys, take a good look at her, probably you'll ever see her again'.
The happy tale also had its sad side. The six Fenians who escaped that day
in 1876 left behind one of their comrades, James Keilley, a young married
man whom they suspected had colluded with the authorities of Dartmoor
prison, when the men awaited their trip to Australia. Keilley compounded the
error in Australia by becoming too friendly with the Comptroller-General,
Fauntleroy. Although Keilley received a conditional local pardon, he never
again saw his family in Ireland. He lived out his days more less in poverty
in Western Australia where he died in 1918.

The reviewer can quibble about certain things. There is an infuriating
tendency to be light with endnotes. This makes it difficult sometimes to
see where quotations and evidence have been drawn from. (Then again, the
breadth of the research which the author has undertaken is quite staggering.
Kenneally has sniffed the clean air of Meagher's Montana as well as inhaling
the musty atmosphere of Australia's archives.) There is also a question
over the title. What is the eponymous 'great shame'? It could just be that
a writer who empathises with his subject calls out 'great shame' each time
he reminded of the sorrowful peregrinations of his forebears. Some reviewers
have mused that Kinneally might be referring generally to a sense of shame
that hangs over Ireland's history. The Famine, too, might be his intended
reference. In which case the 'shame' is Britain's more than Ireland's - a
shame which is not really explored here but which is crucial. As Patrick O'
Sullivan has argued (in the introduction to volume six of The Irish World
Wide series), the lessons of the Great Famine, however horrible, may
eventually have been learned. The British perhaps became less blase about
famines as a result of Ireland's devastating experience; and the British
empire thus eventually became 'an Empire capable of shame'.

It seems churlish to ask any more of Kenneally, for this is a noble project.
The Great Shame is an epic of life and death, imprisonment and escape,
emigration and exile. A review cannot begin to do justice to the sheer
number of individual lives that are examined in this big but always readable
tome. We learn of the rise and fall of 'wee' D'Arcy McGee, champion of
Canadian federation and another victim of a Fenian hit; the lovely 'Eva',
poetess of the Young Ireland, who married Kevin O'Doherty, is delivered to
readers as a player in her own right. The list of names is endless, for this
is truly a book of Irish Diasporic life histories - but life histories that are
woven into a broader cloth, with Australia, America, Canada, and, of course,
Ireland and Britain enmeshed together by Kenneally. Perhaps as many as 40
million Americans today can claim Irish heritage, and many millions more in
Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Britain and elsewhere can make a similar
claim. The Great Shame illustrates clearly why so many of them choose to
remember that is the case.

Donald M MacRaild
University of Sunderland





Dr Donald M. MacRaild
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Sunderland
Priestman Building
Green Terrace
Sunderland
SR1 3PZ
tel: (0)191 515 2205
fax: (0)191 515 2229
email (work): don.macraild[at]sunderland.ac.uk
email (home): d.m.m[at]dmacraild.freeserve.co.uk

From: "Brian McGinn"

Ir-D A Measure of Denigration


I believe the term "Luck of the Irish" originated in the U.S. and referred
to the good fortune of Irish and Irish-American mining entrepreneurs who
became overnight gold, silver and copper barons during the latter half of
the 19th Century. If this derivation is correct--and I'll provide the
source for it as soon as I can remember where I read it--the term as
originally used seems to have denied or downplayed the undoubted business
acumen of the former hoteliers and saloon keepers who 'struck it rich' by
assimilating information in their previous employment, identifying
opportunities overlooked by others, and utilizing both law and force to
defend them. In this sense, the term could be interpreted as a literal
rather than ironic form of denigration.

Brian McGinn
Alexandria, Virginia

From: Patrick Maume
Re: Ir-D Kenneally, Great Shame, Review; Mitchel

From: Patrick Maume
Mitchel's hostility to blacks (and to Jews) existed before he left
Ireland. (Gavan Duffy comments on his illogicality in supporting
Catholic but not Jewish emancipation.) I think it reflected (1) the
influence of Carlyle (2) hostility to British liberalism as
hypocritical and to Daniel O'Connell's alliance with British radicals
(O'Connell of course was an abolitionist and one of his quarrels with
the Young Irelanders was over his reluctance to accept donations from
American supporters of slavery). I agree that this is an area which
needs a lot more research.
Best wishes,
Patrick.