Category Archives: History

McCann’s “TransAtlantic” weaves trio of Irish historical events

UPDATE: Waterford erected a plaque honoring Douglass’s 1845 visit.

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I’ve just finished reading Colum McCann’s “TransAtlantic: A Novel.” The book wraps the stories of several generations of women around three historical events that involved crossings of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Ireland.

The most recent of the three events were the 1990s travels of U.S. Sen George Mitchell to broker peace between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland. Such recent history is well known and have been covered previously in this blog.

The other two events are older and perhaps less familiar. One is the first flight across the Atlantic by John Alcott and Arthur Brown. The men left Newfoundland on June 14, 1919, and reached Clifden, in County Galway, the next day.

McCann’s describes the aviators’ first look at Ireland after a 16-hour flight:

The plane crosses the land at a low clip. Down below, a sheep with a magpie sitting on its back. … In the distance, the mountains. The quiltwork of stone walls. Corkscrew roads. Stunted trees. An abandoned castle. A pig farm. A church. … Ireland. A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.

The third historical event in the novel centers on the 1845 visit of Frederick Douglass, including his meeting with “Liberator” Daniel O’Connell. “The ghost of the Irish nationalist, before and after the Civil War years, often inhabited Douglass’s thinking,” according to this piece by historian Tom Chaffin.

One of the most poignant parts of the novel describes Douglass’ trip to Cork from Dublin as famine began to grip the Irish countryside. McCann writes:

They entered wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animated than the bodies within.

Below: Mural of Douglass on the Falls Road in Belfast.

frederick-douglass

Moore Street, partition demographics and abortion updates

Last October I wrote about efforts to block the redevelopment of Dublin’s historic Moore Street, scene of the rebels last stand in the 1916 Rising.

Happy to report that not only are the buildings being saved, but they will be repaired and conserved, the Irish Independent reports.

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In May I wrote about the “People’s Referendum” that showed support for ending partition and noted a Facebook page for “Protestants for a United Ireland.”

Gerry Moriarty of The Irish Times filed this very interesting piece about “The Catholic unionists.”

Many nationalists – and quite a number of unionists – dismiss the notion of Catholic unionists. “They are like unicorns,” is an often-repeated line. “They don’t exist.” But though they are small in number, they are not mythical creatures, and they could have a role in determining the constitutional future of Northern Ireland.

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I’ve written about Ireland’s abortion bill several times over the summer, most recently this July 11 post that compared and contrasted legislative debates in Ireland and Texas.

Nine days after I posted the blog, columnist Roth Douthat filed this column in The New York Times. I am not accusing him of copying me, only pointing out that somebody else was drawn by the coincidence.

Clipping the news of Ireland

News about Ireland and Northern Ireland caught my attention from the time I began reading newspapers and magazines in the 1960s. During the 1980s and up until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 I kept my own clip file of stories, most of them about the Troubles.

On the day of the Belfast Agreement I paid for online access at an Internet cafe in Mobile, Ala. to get the latest details. I did not have my own computer or online access at my newspaper job.

Today I take my online access for granted. I read the Irish papers from my home and work computers, as well as my smart phone. I pull up audio and video reports from any of these devices, and directly access contemporary and historic documents. I scroll through a torrent of Irish-related Twitter feeds on my @markieam account. I publish my own blog about Ireland.

Newspaper clippings once were common in correspondence between families in Ireland and America, typically obituaries and birth or wedding announcements. My uncle from Kerry kept an August 1933 clipping from the The Gaelic American, which republished Padraic Pearse’s 1915 oration over the grave of republican patriot O’Donovan Rossa. “They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace,” the speech famously concluded.

I was reminded of all this the other day when my local newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, published two Ireland-related stories on page 6 of the Nation/World section. ” ‘Lifesaving’ abortion bill passes in Ireland” read the first headline under a Dublin, Ireland kicker. “Northern Ireland braces for violence” said the second headline under a Belfast, N. Ireland kicker.

scissors

The two stories were located at the bottom inside corner of a six-column page dominated by a five-column-wide department store advert for a one-day furniture sale. The pair of stories were easy to miss if you are not in the market for a sofa, turned the page to fast or not too interested in Ireland.

I thought for a moment of grabbing the scissors. The twinge of an old habit.

Marching in Ireland

Two big marches occurred in Ireland over the weekend, one a political protest in the heart of Dublin, the other a Protestant parade in rural County Donegal.

  • Some 7,000 Orangemen paraded in Rossnowlagh, the only such July 12th parade in the Republic of Ireland. “The march was highlighted as a tourist attraction for the first time as it received the official backing of the Government’s tourism initiative aimed at attracting the Irish diaspora to the country during 2013,” The Irish Times reported.
  • An estimated 35,000 anti-abortion protesters packed the streets of Dublin ahead of a crucial vote this week. Some carried signs that said, “Kill the bill! Not the child!” The Washington Post reported that speakers demanded that the government put its bill to a national referendum.

July 12

Not Northern Ireland. RTE photo of Orange Order parade in the Republic of Ireland.

Pope John Paul II to be canonized 34 years after Ireland trip

News from the Vatican that Pope Francis has agreed to canonize Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII before the end of the year has prompted The Irish Times to republish several photos of JPII’s September 1979 visit to Ireland, including the image below at Clonmacnoise. CatholicIreland.net also posts a collection of quotations from JPII during the trip. This one covers the broad span of the Catholic church’s experience in Ireland:

I am thinking of how many times, across how many centuries, the Eucharist has been celebrated. How many and varied the places where the Masses have been offered, in stately mediaeval and in splendid modern cathedrals, in early monastic and in Modern Churches; at Mass rock in the glens and forests by hunted priests, in poor thatched-covered chapels, for a people poor in worldly goods but rich in the things of the Spirit., in “wake houses” or “station houses” or at great open-air hostings of the faithful – on top of Croagh Patrick and at Lough Derg.

Pope

What would Saint John Paul II have to say about the church’s problems in Ireland today, from child sexual abuse to declining Mass attendance? At least he might take some comfort in knowing that many Polish immigrants in Ireland are keeping the faith.

Irish Brigades at Gettysburg, plus New York draft riots

There was a lot violence in America in July 1863. The Irish were right in the middle of it.

Most attention has focused on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Irish Brigades were among the men who fought and died on the famous battlefield and earlier skirmishes of the American Civil War. These post-Famine Irish and Irish-American soldiers joined units from New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. They had a reputation as fierce fighters, but their participation was prompted by more than patriotism. History.com says:

Ethnic units were a way for the Union Army to help win Irish support for its cause. This support was not guaranteed: Though most Irish immigrants lived in the North, they were sympathetic to (as they saw it) the Confederacy’s struggle for independence from an overbearing government—it reminded them of their fight to be free of the British. Also, many Irish and Irish Americans were not against slavery. On the contrary, they favored a system that kept blacks out of the paid labor market and away from their jobs. As a result, Union officials had to promise many things in addition to ethnic regiments—enlistment bonuses, extra rations, state subsidies for soldiers’ families, Catholic chaplains—in order to assure that the North’s largest immigrant group would be fighting with them and not against them.

Two weeks after Gettysburg, a predominantly Irish mob erupted in a five day anti-conscription riot in New York City. These urban working-class poor believed they were being forced to fight a “rich man’s war.” Their views were stoked by anti-emancipation newspapers and Democratic politicians:

Irish Catholic rioters targeted Protestant charities, such as the Magdalene Asylum and Five Points Mission. By the late afternoon, protesters had entered the city’s arsenal, which they burned (killing ten of their own) when the police arrived. The rioters also began attacking blacks, shouting racial slurs, and torching homes of poor African Americans on the west side of 30th Street. In one of the most infamous incidents, a mob burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on west 44th Street, although its 237 children escaped to safety.

New York riots

 

 

 

 

 

Image from New York Public Library.

Federal troops were needed to finally quell the riot, one of the worst outbreaks of insurrection in U.S. history. At least 120 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. The outburst ended organized Irish participation in the Civil War. Tensions between Irish immigrants, Irish-Americans and the African-American community would continue through Reconstruction and deep into the 20th century, including the Boston busing crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.

Great Hunger Museum acquires “The Ragpickers”

I’ve written several posts about Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. The museum has just acquired a new painting, “The Ragpickers,” by Henry Allan.

ragpickers

 

 

 

 

 

Niamh O’Sullivan, the museum’s consultant curator and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, writes in a museum newsletter:

Ragpicking was a common occupation in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Ragpickers eked out a living by rummaging for scraps of cloth and paper and other discarded items to identify anything that could be recycled or sold (even dead cats and dogs could be skinned to make clothes). Ragpickers turned over what they salvaged to a master who would sell it, usually by weight; anything of value was to be returned to the owner or the authorities….Painters and writers of the Romantic period turned the ragpicker into a type of street philosopher who, living from day to day and unburdened by material things, understands human nature. Unobserved, he observes others.

Allan’s image dates to 1900. O’Sullivan suggests the scene “is consistent with the dunes of Ringsend, Dublin, seen from South Lotts,” which is on the south bank of the River Liffey at the eastern edge of the city, near the open sea. The name Ringsend is a corruption of the Irish “Rinn-abhann”, which means “the end point of the tide,” according to Wikipedia. The area went into decline about the time of Allan’s painting as shipping activity moved to other parts of Dublin and ports further south along the coast.

Irish-American president and streetcar workers

The 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 trip to Ireland is getting a lot of attention. Part of the commemoration has included bringing a flame lit from the eternal flame at Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. to New Ross in County Wexford.

Flame

Image from ABC

Kennedy’s trip was a triumph for Ireland, for Irish-Americans and for Roman Catholics. Thirty-two years before his 1960 election, Irish-Catholic Democrat Al Smith was crushed by Herbert Hoover in his bid for the presidency. The nation was still too mired in its prejudice against Smith’s ethnicity and faith. (As it turned out, missing the 1929 stock market crash and start of the Great Depression might have saved Irish-American Catholics further hatred in the long run. It sure helped the Democrats.)

As Kennedy made his historic visit to Ireland in June 1963, a small group of Pittsburgh-area politicians and volunteers established the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum. They realized that street railways in Pittsburgh and other parts of the nation were fading from regular use as buses became the preferred public transit to serve far-flung, rapidly growing suburbs.

What does that have to with Kennedy?

Irish immigrants dominated the labor force of street railways in urban America from the time the systems were created in the late 19th century. They joined the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees, formed in 1892, to push for higher wages and better working conditions.

“The streetcar workforce and the union were composed entirely of men, many of whom were Irish,” says the National Streetcar Museum in Lowell, Mass.

The same was true in other Irish immigrant hubs such as nearby Boston (where Kennedy’s ancestors settled), New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh. My Kerry-born grandfather, his brother-in-law and three cousins were among many Irish immigrants employed by Pittsburgh Railways Co. as motormen and conductors.

Like cops, the Irish had a big advantage over other immigrants in obtaining these big city jobs, which required frequent public contact. They spoke the language. In both professions, these unionized, uniform-wearing jobs helped first-generation Irish immigrants build middle-class lives that provided even better opportunities for their children and grandchildren.

And that’s another important part of what JFK’s trip to Ireland symbolized in June 1963.

PRC

Early 20th century Pittsburgh Railways Co. streetcar workers.

DISCLOSURE: I am a member of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum.

Irish political violence in the 1880s

The Irish Story, one of my favorite Irish history websites, has posted its review of a Dublin conference titled “The Irish National Invincibles, The Phoenix Park Killings and Their Times.” The 1882 stabbing deaths of two senior British officials in Ireland and related events are part of the post-Famine and pre-Rising period of Irish history that is generally unfamiliar to most Irish-Americans. (Maybe many Irish, too?) In his review, John Dorney writes:

The Phoenix Park murders took place against the background of the Land War – a period of intense civil strife in rural Ireland. In 1879 a slump in agricultural prices and a poor harvest had put thousands of small farmers at the risk of eviction, due to not being able to pay their rent, either in cash or in kind, to their landlords.  This raised the prospect of mass evictions and even starvation as had occurred in the bitter famine winter of 1847…Tenant farmers organised in the Irish National Land League to withhold rents and resist evictions. There also followed a widespread campaign of sabotage, burning hayricks, maiming cattle, intimidating and on accession even killing rent-collectors, ‘land-grabbers’ and landlords. The British state in Ireland responded with the Coercion Bill, which allowed for detention without trial. The Land War was at once a social and national conflict.

The killings were carried out by the Invincibles, “a militant group within the Irish Republican (or Fenian) Brotherhood, who emerged in response the coercion of the Land League tenant farmer movement,” conference organizer Shane Kenna wrote in a 2012 post  for The Irish Story. Five men were executed for the crime, which continued to have political repercussions through the decade and beyond.

killings-phoenix

Kenna has published a separate article about the 1881-1885 Fenian dynamite campaign and other books and research on the period.  Here is a link to his website.

My own interest and research in this period continues to grow.

 

100th anniversary of first color photos of Ireland

In May and June 1913, two French women arrived in Ireland to capture what are still believed to be the first color images of the country. Madeleine Mignon-Alba and Marguerite Mespoulet were part of a project called “The Archives of the Planet,” inspired and financed by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn. He wanted to create a “photographic inventory of the surface of the earth as it was occupied and organized by Man at the beginning of the 20th century.”

This story from Irish Central includes a slide show of the images.

bog flowers

“When Ireland is not a brilliant emerald land, sparkling and fresh, it is a dark country of brown bogs on which the heavy grey sky leans,” Mespoulet wrote in her travel journal. “But in May and June, the bog flowers; the gorse and the white flowers of the marsh open and turn the bog into a festive place.”