Table of Contents

Irish
Transatlantics

1980–2015

For
Chuck Feeney
and
Mary Robinson

Irish
Transatlantics

1980–2015

ÍDE B.O’CARROLL

First published in 2018 by Attic Press

Attic is an imprint of Cork University Press

Youngline Industrial Estate

Pouladuff Road, Togher

Cork T12 HT6V, Ireland

© Íde B. O’Carroll 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2.

The right of Íde B. O’Carroll to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000 to 2007.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78205-252-4

Typeset by Studio 10 Design

Printed in Malta by Gutenberg

www.corkuniversitypress.com

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction

1Irish–US Migration and New Irish Transnationalism

2Immigrant Advocates

3Entrepreneurs, Here and There

4Legal Aliens, Now, in America

5Carers: Childcare, Eldercare, Parenting

6Academics: The Flow of Ideas and Professional Networks

7Artists: Meaning-Making and Mobility

8Promoters: Irish Culture and Sport

Conclusion: Transatlantic Perspectives

Irish Transatlantics

APPENDIX 1: Interviews conducted by Íde B. O'Carroll, PhD for the Oral History project, Archives of Irish America, New York University, 2013–2016

APPENDIX 2: Irish Immigration to the United States, 1841–1980

APPENDIX 3: Estimated Net Migration, Republic of Ireland, 1991–1998

APPENDIX 4: Foreign-Born Population in the USA by Region of Birth: Selected Years, 1850–2000

NOTES AND REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first thanks go to Breda Gray, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland, my advisor during the doctoral work that formed the basis of this book, and now a mentor and dear friend. I would also like to acknowledge Atlantic Philanthropies, founded by Irish-American, Chuck Feeney, who funded my PhD scholarship and, indeed, much of my social research in Ireland over many years. I have dedicated the book to Chuck and to Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, both are champions of human rights.

I would like to thank my former colleagues at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, Marion R. Casey, Linda Dowling Almeida and Miriam Nyhan Grey. Marion established NYU’s Archives of Irish America and negotiated the grants from Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs that enabled my work on the New Irish Oral History Project. I sincerely appreciate Marion’s permission to draw on the interviews in the book and for writing its foreword.

I re-interviewed many of my PhD participants for the Oral History Project at NYU between 2013 and 2016 so that their stories could become part of this public archive. In the end, however, I had to select twenty people whose lives illustrate the transnational patterns I explore in the book. To those whose narratives appear here and those who do not, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

Friends and family in Ireland and America have sustained me and provided encouragement throughout the lifetime of this book. In Ireland, Kay and Dermot Lawler, Maura and Luigi Rea, Martina and Denis O’Keeffe, Brian O’Mahony and Fiona Ryan and, of course, the Stoneybatter Sisters, all supported me from afar. Stateside, my thanks to Mary Mullens Rogers, Derek Pyle, Elise Kaufman, Lee Badgett and Elizabeth Silver.

It has been a pleasure to work again with Maria O’Donovan, Editor, Cork University Press, her colleague Mike Collins and designer Alison Burns of Studio 10 Design.

To my readers Breda Gray, Annie G. Rogers and Derek Pyle, I thank you for your careful review of the manuscript and for your feedback.

I acknowledge, with gratitude, the staff at the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College for their assistance. I am also indebted to Lisa O’Donnell who painted the cover image for this book and my last.

My deepest gratitude is to my spouse, Annie G. Rogers, for her generous, calm support, love and encouragement. Míle buíochas.

FOREWORD

Communications technology, air travel, visas, dual citizenship and return migration are the foundation of today’s global Irish experience. These realise what previous generations of emigrants from Ireland could only experience virtually, through letters from America, the reunification abroad of siblings and cousins, support for Irish nationalism, or the ability to stand on imported Irish soil, as they did with reverence at the world’s fair in Chicago in 1893 and in 1897 at the Irish fair in New York City. Scholars have been teasing out an understanding of ‘dispersal’ and ‘diaspora’ in the Irish context ever since. ‘Transnational’ is the word now most often used to describe a phenomenon that is not territorially bound, either in practice or historiography. It implies a continuing engagement with the homeland despite physical absence, one with ramifications for personal and ethnic identity.

What might we understand about the psychology of living here and there if we had the ability to talk with old transnational families? Facts give hints. Patrick Nealis from Ahamlish, County Sligo was compensated generously for property confiscated from him by the British while serving with George Washington during the American War of Independence. That financial legacy enabled Patrick’s Irish-born son James, with his wife and children, to return to Ireland in 1810, where he purchased a farm in his birthplace. Two of James’ sons re-migrated to New York in 1822 and 1831, the former a policeman in Manhattan’s Five Points, the latter a real estate developer in Brooklyn’s Red Hook. Emigration like this – within families and over many decades – replenished ‘home’ in the diaspora and made the diaspora an intimate part of local consciousness. In 1847 Lord Palmerston ‘assisted’ emigrants from the same parish to cross the Atlantic. Canada was a temporary detour; the pre-Famine Sligo colony in New York was their ultimate destination. There, in 1849, young men started a Sligo society, a new American expression of Irish regional identity.

Using oral history, Íde B. O’Carroll introduces us to the next iteration of the bonds that tie the present to the past and here with there. Modern Irish immigrants are ‘transatlantics’, bridges connecting Ireland and the United States who can live in two places simultaneously and contribute significantly to both. In some respects, theirs are classic emigrant portraits but, in important ways, the late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century experiences documented in Irish Transatlantics distinguish such women and men from all previous generations. The story of Larry McCarthy and Jimmy Nicholson in Chapter 8, for example, brings to mind John Kerry O’Donnell and Bill Burke as profiled in Donal O’Donovan’s Dreamers of Dreams (1984). Gaelic football was a passion for these four, who also recognised the value of sports networks in helping them build new lives in the United States. But McCarthy is a transatlantic because his transnationalism is circulatory: he was a key intermediary for Ireland at the 1996 Olympic Games and represents North America on the Gaelic Athletic Association’s sesquicentennial committee.

Irish Transatlantics takes a long view on the impact of recent emigration, thereby extending the important scholarship of Linda Dowling Almeida, Mary Corcoran and Íde B. O’Carroll herself when, in another example, she reconnects with Rena Cody in Chapter 2, a woman first chronicled in Models for Movers (1990, revised and reissued in 2015). Cody’s social work in Boston in the late 1980s was critical to the establishment of what today is a vital support network there for vulnerable migrants, young and old, funded in part with grants from the Irish government. When Cody returned to live in Celtic Tiger Ireland, she was able to use her American-honed skillset in her role as a Social Exclusion Officer with Waterford County Council to help vulnerable populations there with similar issues. ‘Transatlantic’ is a framework that can accommodate a wide variety of modern Irish experiences – immigration advocates, legal aliens, carers, artists, academics, promoters and entrepreneurs – for whom ‘here and there’ is the pivot that practically, psychologically, or emotionally links Ireland and America.

Here, too, in the pages of this book, you will meet twenty men and women for whom this phrase carries deep meaning. And there, in the Archives of Irish America at New York University, another transatlantic initiative is now preserved for the future. Between 2013 and 2016, Íde gathered many more interviews in Ireland as well as the United States, eighty-four in total, for the Glucksman Ireland House Oral History Collection. We are grateful to the Emigrant Support Programme of Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for funding her work, and are proud to see some of it in print in Irish Transatlantics.

Íde, it is a rare privilege to work with someone who is professional, collegial, generous and empathetic. Thank you from all of us.

MARION R. CASEY

Glucksman Ireland House

New York University

June 2017

ILLUSTRATIONS

All photos by the author for the Archive of Irish America, New York University, unless otherwise stated.