The Greatest Day to be Irish in Kansas City
There’s something unreal about being Irish today.
And actually it’s been kind of unreal the last six weeks with phone calls home to Ireland yielding frequent reports of ridiculously fine weather.
And so it is then, today, the first day of a new era.
Through all these years, to have been Irish abroad is to have been known for the death and violence we visited on ourselves, and on others in the name of ourselves
And now with the formal end to that violence, I live in a foreign land and I hear so little talk, so little excitement. But then what exactly is the sound of joy?
The Irish Times today lists by name the 3,722 people killed in the period of June 1966 to March of this year - all as part of what we call the Troubles. That’s my lifetime; I have known nothing else. Seven years, don’t make it eight; forty-one years, don’t make it forty-two.
The first time I came to Kansas City was 1995. The provisional IRA were on ceasefire, the first concrete steps of a peace process already many painful years old. In pubs where Irish music was played grown men stood with their fists raised in salute to rebel songs, as did underage students, all hopelessly out of touch with even the physical force tradition in Irish Republicanism.
As that ceasefire broke down with a Canary Wharf bomb, and then was reinstated, the peace process rumbled on with everybody saying they wanted peace but not believing everybody else. Meanwhile as I visited KC, and ultimately moved here four years after the initial cessation of hostilities, I kept running into local people who on hearing I was Irish, demanded England move out of Ireland - a rhetoric even the militants had stopped using in a previous age.
-Why do you Catholics want to kill Protestants, a man in Kansas City with a hot dog would ask me in a back garden, I can have a barbecue and not care what religion the man next to me eating a burger is, would add the Midwest man whose religion I didn’t know.
Sometimes I would try and explain the difference between political nationalisms and convenient religious labels, and sometimes I would just point out that I didn’t want to kill anybody, but always it was noticeable that nobody was interested in hearing that there was a peace process going on, that progress, however slow, was occurring.
In the last eight years while I’ve lived in KC still the pamphlets of an irrelevant age of Irish Republicanism have got pumped out. I say this as an Irish Nationalist. It’s very strange to have people who are absolute mindless morons agree with your general political ideals.
Meanwhile in Northern Ireland the SDLP and Official Unionist Party slide down into secondary positions as Sinn Fein and the DUP do the negotiating. Personally I thought this was great news because those were the parties you wanted to agree if you wanted everybody to agree.
An interesting contrast with the world of guns in Ireland and America is that in the Irish peace process everybody wanted weapons put out of commission in the belief that unavailable weapons won’t kill anybody, while in the US a popular argument still runs that there is no point in removing any number of weapons from circulation because those who want to kill will find a way anyway. Now we all know very well that huge bombs can be made from fertiliser, but there is a priceless hope in the symbolism of decommissioning weapons.
Scour forums and blogs that touch politics in Ireland today and it won’t be long before you see resentment of Irish-Americans who financed guns and bombs used by Irishmen. In the part of America I live I’ve never had an American discuss with me the differences between the the OUP and the DUP, or between Republican Sinn Fein and Provisional Sinn Fein. No reason why your average Irish-American should of course, but there’s 3,722 reasons why those who financed violence should.
When Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach of Ireland he came with the reputation as the consensus man. He was seen as a pragmatic, not a political idealogue, and he had successfully negotiated for years in Irish labour. In Britain Tony Blair reinvented the Labour party and immediately set about instituting devolved government in Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland, and by extension, Ireland and the United Kingdom - what somebody once called the totality of relationships - had never had a better chance for peace.
Being an emigrant you miss the nuance. You hear talk of Paisley smiling, yet you can remember him years earlier on the Late Late smiling. A headline somewhere reports the death of Mary Holland and you’re even further removed from where your country is going.
In 1994 when that first IRA ceasefire was called I lived in Dublin and I remember wanting to sing that night as I went for a walk by the mountains. Unlike the DUP I didn’t have trust issues. I believed it really was over. And so now in the middle of incredible photographs of a smiling Paisley and McGuinness together it has come to be. It just took another thirteen years to win everybody else’s trust.
Today feels great to be Irish, though as an emigrant in the middle of America, it also feels quite lonely.
See Related:
• Six Week Earlier: The Impossible
• Reluctant Irish Optimism: An Agreement Coming?
• Why Won’t Unionist Agree (This Time)?
• Michael Flately in trouble with Unionists
• Irish Trivia Prison Question
• Bobby Sands
• 90th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
This is beautiful, Eolai! Right, I’m prone to cynicism and pessimism, but these moments signal high notes in the human condition and experience that we must pause to recognize and celebrate. The power sharing government restores my belief in humanity’s inherent reasonableness. My own experience of discussing Irish politics in the U.S. was fairly similar and equally frustrating. Irish Americans in particular believe that nationalism is genetically encoded and permits them to pass comments without having read a freaking word. It’s lazy and sloppy and makes me angry and embarrassed.
Cheers!