Llewellyn King: The little, and now thriving, island nation that pulls on our heartstrings

A wave of runners in the Holyoke, Mass., St. Patrick's Day Road Race pass the starting line.

— Photo by Simtropolitan

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Ready for craic on Sunday?

Craic, pronounced crack, is an Irish word that has seeped into English and means party or revelry.

Try as you may, you won’t avoid Sunday’s craic because on Sunday, it being March 17, untold hundreds of millions of people around the world will be wearing the green. In short, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, the national day of the Irish, by putting on something green and taking a drink.

No other nation, let alone a small nation with a troubled history, can have such a claim on the heartstrings of the planet. For one day, we are all Irish — and many of us will go to a place where drink is sold to celebrate it. There isn’t a lot of preamble to St. Paddy’s Day – except for the arrival in the pubs of green-colored beer. Ugh!

The Irish diaspora, which reached its apogee during the Potato Famine of the mid-19th Century, sent the Irish to the far corners of the earth, especially to America, where they  endured for some time in poverty but eventually prospered.

They brought with them their music, which influenced American Roots Music, like Bluegrass, Folk and Country, their towering literary talent, which gave us generations of  writers.

And they got into politics, big time.

A documentary now in production and scheduled to be released in 12 episodes at the end of the year, From Ireland to the White House, traces the Irish ancestry of 24 U.S. presidents from Andrew Jackson (of Scots-Irish lineage) to Joe Biden.

Tony Culley-Foster, the U.S. representative of Tamber Media, the Dublin company producing the series, tells me the scholarship has been exacting in tracing the ancestry of the presidents. He said the 24 presidents on the list have been certified by the same independent historians and genealogists used by Clinton and Biden.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 31.5 million Americans who claim Irish heritage. So it has become important for presidents to make pilgrimages to Ireland — to wrap themselves in green.

From my experience in Ireland, the two taken mostly to heart as being of their own, were John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and of those, Kennedy was the greater heartthrob for the Irish.

My late friend Grant Stockdale’s father was Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland, and Grant spent his mid-teen years in Dublin at the U.S. Embassy in Phoenix Park. “I knew what it must be like to be royalty,” Grant told me.

But it isn’t just the presidency that has been shaped by Irish heritage. Irish names are to be found on every public service list, from the U.S. Congress to the local school board. There have been great senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y.) and great speakers of the House, such as the towering, Boston-Irish Tip O’Neill (D.). If it’s politics, it’s Irish.

In Britain, too, historically some of the greatest statesmen and orators in the House of Commons have been Irish, think Edmund Burke and Charles Parnell.

For me, Ireland’s gift to the world has been its contribution to English literature. Hundreds of great names come to mind. Try Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien.

And the books keep coming, tumbling out of the most literary fertile minds on earth.

Two contemporary writers dominate my thinking: John Banville and Sally Rooney. Banville is prolific, profound and a joy to read, a master craftsman at the top of his form. Rooney is a kind of literary Taylor Swift, writing about the sex, love and isolation of young adults of her generation. I am keen to see how she evolves and if she will give joy for generations, as great writers do.

Literacy is part of the fabric of Irish life. An Irish person, far from literary circles, will ask you conversationally, “What is your book?” Translation: “What are you reading?” Ireland treasures books and reading is a national pastime.

Ireland’s literacy may have saved its economy. At a bleak period when, just 40 years ago, I heard many Irish leaders talk about “structural unemployment” of 22 percent, American scientific publishers found that highly literate women were a resource. That led to a boom in footnoting in Ireland, followed by American Express looking for accurate inputting and, suddenly, Ireland was transformed from one of the poorest countries of Europe to a boom nation and the Silicon Valley of Europe, as the computer giants moved in. A town known for its bookstores and fishing, Galway, became ground zero for computing in Ireland.

Craic has no discernible economic value except for the brewers and distillers, but it is such fun. As the Irish say, slainte (cheers)!

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.

Llewellyn King: Many shades of green, including the morning after

One of the O'Donoghue's pubs in Dublin on the author's 2012 pub crawl.

People who are no more Irish than the King of Siam or the Paramount Chief of the Bumangwato will, come March 17, celebrate an island nation famous for its skill with words and its fondness for drink.

It all began, of course, in the 5th Century with a Romano Christian missionary from Britain, Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland. As a bonus, he chased the snakes off the island. Where the fondness for something brewed, distilled or fermented came from is not recorded, but it is an intrinsic part of Irish life.

Life in Ireland often revolves around having a drink. It is treated much as we would treat having a cup of coffee. In Dublin once, I ran into a friend whom I had not seen in a year: a serious man with a big job in government. He thought, in the Irish way, that we should catch up over a glass of something, although it was just after 10 in the morning. “I think Murphy's is open,” he said as naturally as someone in an American city would have said, “There is a Starbucks on the next corner.”

In Ireland St. Patrick's Day was, until recent years, a somber religious festival. It was in America where the idea that the Irish could have a huge craic, as the Irish call a party, took hold.

Even so, the biggest celebrations, to my mind, are in Boston, Chicago and New York. But there are celebrations everywhere the Irish have set foot from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Ushuaia, Argentina, off the tip of South America.

But if you are very lucky, you will celebrate in Dublin. And what better way than with an authentic pub crawl.

I know just a bit about pub crawling in Ireland because I was lucky enough to be involved in a wonderful Dublin pub crawl in 2012. It was not a bunch of celebrants struggling from one pub to another, but rather a work of planning art.

I was in Dublin for an engineering conference  that coincided with the 60th birthday of one of our number, Sean O'Neill -- by birth an American, but otherwise through and through Irish.
A pub crawl was organized by the engineers with precision: times, distances, and safety procedures.

There was a map and the 12 pubs were selected with fiendish skill. The early ones were fairly far apart. But as the crawl went on, they grew closer together, and the last two were next to each other -- in consideration of possible loss of mobility.

We were urged to go with a buddy, eat something about halfway and, in case of pub fatigue, to call a taxi.

If you get to Dublin and want to try the engineers’ crawl, here are the pubs in order: Toner's, O’Donoghue's and Doheny & Nesbitt's on Baggot Street; Dawson Lounge on Dawson Street; Kehoe's on St. Anne Street; Davy Byrnes on Duke Street; O’Neill's and another O’Donoghue's on Suffolk Street; The International Bar and Stags Head on Wicklow Street; The Long Hall on Georges Street; McDaid's and Bruxelles on Harry Street.

I think I made it as far as The Long Hall, one of Dublin's most famous bars, before I cried uncle, refused a last drink and hailed a taxi. Others persevered and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale.
You probably know that Ireland is so lush that its flora is supposed to support 40 shades of green.

Well, there is another shade of green not mentioned in the tourist brochures. It is the 41st shade and you see it in the bathroom mirror the day after a pub crawl. Surely, some of you will see it on March 18.
 

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Postcard postmarked 1912 in the United States.

Llewellyn King: St. Patrick's Day and the delicate matter of Irish immigration

St. Patrick’s Day is hard upon us. The green dye is being added to the beer in bars across the land, while more than 40 million Americans will remember their linkage to the Old Sod, even if that is sometimes tenuous.

Aye, it’s time for a wearing of the green and we will do it on March 17, in the great celebration of a small Irish nation and its relatively obscure patron saint.

On St. Paddy’s Day, we are all Irish whether we are, in fact, African-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American or any other hyphenated American. We all watch the parades, maybe take a drink or two and wear some green, from a hair ribbon to a whole suit.

If Britain has a special relationship with the United States, then Ireland has an extra-special relationship.

As has become a modern tradition, the taoiseach -- as the prime minister of Ireland is called -- will visit the White House to lobby the president.  

The prime minister, Enda Kenny, heads Fine Gael, which is more conservative than Ireland's other two parties. Kenny will, one supposes, present the customary bowl of shamrock and talk of the long history of Ireland and the United States. Ireland has always looked to the United States as kind of safety valve – a place where Irish immigrants could find safety and hope, particularly during and after the Potato Famine of 1845-49.

Kenny also will have a purpose: lobbying  President Trump on behalf of the 50,000 Irish who are in the United States illegally -- "illegal aliens" in the lexicon of the administration.

But the Irish PM will eschew that term in favor of “undocumented immigrants.” He will want to invoke that long history of migration from Ireland to America. He might even point out that the “wearing of the green” was illegal during the Irish Rebellion against the British in 1798.

The language is as loaded in Ireland as it is here. The Irish like to refer to their paperless migrants to the United States as “undocumented” -- suggesting a slight matter of language, rather than an implicit indictment of “illegal.”

By contrast, and several Irish commentators have pointed out, workers in Ireland who do not have papers to work or live are referred to by Irish politicians as “illegal aliens.”

The Irish intelligentsia and many Irish analysts say that this is racist. That the unspoken message Kenny will convey to Trump is: Take it easy on the Irish undocumented, they are white and Christian. Not brown or Muslim. We are you.

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole rages against what he sees as the race preference, and points out that the Trump administration is loaded with those of Irish descent. O’Toole calls them the “enablers” of Trump's immigration policy: They are advisers Steven Bannon and Kellyanne (nee Fitzgerald) Conway, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly -- as was short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Another Irish journalist, Cillian Donnelly, makes the same points and fears that Kenny, who has said his mission is to speak up for the undocumented Irish in America, will become complicit in the Trump immigration stand and the deportation of “brown” migrants.

Trump himself has links to Ireland. He owns a huge golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, on County Clare’s Atlantic coast.

Ironically, there he is enmeshed in a dispute over building a seawall. It seems when it comes to Ireland, Trump believes in global warming and sea rise: He has tried to get permission to build a 1.7-mile-long wall to keep severe storms from flooding his resort.

Trump's request to build the original masonry wall were turned down, and he is pushing for two more limited rock and steel structures. Environmentalists are opposing them, too. They maintain that these structures will not end the erosion, but rather will increase it with time, destroying the dunes. However, Trump is the largest local employer and his wall is supported locally.

If all this is enough to drive you to drink, St. Patrick's Day is a good time to start. Slainte!

Llewellyn King, a frequent New England Diary contributor, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle,  on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Llewellyn King: Ireland's pain was America's gain

There will be the “wearing of the green” all over the world come St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Nowhere more so than in Boston, Chicago and New York. That’s right, not even in Ireland; although they’ve gotten the hang of their own saint’s festival in recent years.

For centuries, until the Americans showed their cousins in Ireland how to party on St. Patrick’s Day, it was a somber, religious feast day.

St. Patrick was what was known as a “Romano-British” missionary, who went to Ireland in the 5th century, probably in the latter half of the century. We know this from fragments of his own writing. He settled around Armagh, in the north of Ireland, and became the first bishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland. He described the Irish as “heathen men.”

Myth tells of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. But myth has many faces in Ireland, and is part of the charm of the Irish – a charm that has affected the whole world, and stirs people far removed from that small and at times very troubled island to wear something green, drink and pay homage.

Not the least of the celebrations this year, as in recent years, will be in London, where so many of the agonies of Ireland had their genesis. The English — and I was born into the British Empire — have treated Ireland savagely down through the centuries. Oliver Cromwell, the English reformer, wrote of his incursion into Ireland, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” At the battle of Drogheda in 1641, about which Cromwell was writing, the English killed some 3,500 Irish patriots. Hard work with broad swords.

William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant ruler who became William III of England, Scotland and Ireland, invaded Ireland on July 1, 1690 to fight massed Catholic forces, led by James II, the deposed Catholic king of England. The two armies faced each other across the River Boyne, just to the north of Dublin. William won the battle, but his victory left a divide between Irish Protestants and Catholics which exists in modified form to this day.

The “wearing of the green” most likely dates from the uprising of 1798, when the Irish tried to throw off the English yoke with French help, and were soundly defeated by Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who was seething from his defeat in the American Revolution. The Irish, who were rounded up and hanged in groups of 20 a day by some of the English general’s officers, showed their defiance by wearing something green — often a shamrock in their hats. The English considered that an offense: sedition.

Cornwallis also oversaw the formal incorporation of Ireland into Britain. But to his credit, he fought with George III (remember him?) over Catholic emancipation, and for a while resigned his commission.

More horror from England was on the way — and persisted essentially until Irish independence in 1922. During the potato famine (1845-49), England refused to let relief ships with grain land in the belief that the famine was part of a natural order, as laid out by the philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus. One million people died as potatoes were their only sustenance.

In this case Ireland’s pain was America’s gain. Hundreds of thousands of Irish fled starvation for a new life in America. This diaspora changed Ireland and America, forever. It is how 50 million Americans claim Irish ancestry.

The Irish in America began to celebrate the national saint of their motherland in their new land — and so was born the St. Patrick’s Day joyous celebration.

To my mind, the final Irish reprisal against England is not the world recognition but that Irish writers, writing in English, not the Irish language, have had such an incalculable impact on English literature. To take a few names at random Beckett, Behan, Goldsmith, Joyce, Shaw, Synge, Swift, Wilde and Yeats.

In Ireland, there is an endless flow of wonderful language. The Irish will never say “yes” or “no” when they can give you a sentence with a flourish, which makes the mundane poetic.

Once in Dingle, my wife asked a waiter: “Is the fish fresh?”

He answered, “If it were any fresher, it would be swimming, and you wouldn’t want that would you?”

Also in Dingle, when I asked an elderly man whether the pub he was sitting outside of was open, he replied, “He would hardly be open now.”

The English occupied their land, but the Irish occupied their language and added to it with their genius. Erin go bragh!

Llewellyn King is a long-time publisher, columnist and international business consultant. This first ran on InsideSources.