St. Paddy's Day: The Wearing of the Green
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
The Great St. Patrick's Parade in Chicago as well as the Specials on television
about Ireland and St. Paddy's Day obliterates the ugly history of English Conquest of
Ireland and the stubborn resistence of the Irish to English occupation and exploitation.
A current movie, Angele's Ashes, captures the enduring poverty of the Irish. However, it
fails to put that poverty in its political and economic context. The poverty, the Parade
and the migration of the Irish have a common history. The Irish Famine was but part of it.
Encarta Encylopedia explains the Irish Famine as a:
"...disastrous food shortage in Ireland between 1845 and 1847 caused by the failure
of the potato crop."
Actually, tons of wheat, beef, mutton and, Yes, Potatoes were shipped from Irish ports to
England before, during and after the failure of the potato crop.
While the efforts of England to subdue and exploit Ireland go back some 800 years, the
economic key to understanding the migration of the Irish to America...and all the St.
Patrick's Day Parades in the USA since turn on Oliver Cromwell and his subjection of
Ireland (and Scotland). The massacres following Cromwell's capture of Drogheda and Wexford
sealed the animosity between Ireland and England and English scorn for the Irish they
murdered and contempt for Roman Catholics opposed to Puritanism.
Cromwell is, of course, from many points of view, a most progressive warrior in the battle
for democracy, equality and social justice...limited, to be sure, to the English middle
class and to those who share his religious sensibilities...non-the-less, the execution of
Charles I and his domination of a kept Parliament was in historical terms, progressive.
Not for the Irish.
Cromwell awarded the best lands and the governance of Ireland to officers of his army of
occupation. Sucessors to Cromwell saw to it that political, economic and religious
oppression remained in force in Ireland until the resistence of 1800, 1840 and
1910...religion has determined access to voting and jobs, standards of living, and
education in both North and South of Ireland.
Irish peasants, displaced from the land and oppressed in the city migrated around the
world...many went to England to work as 'navvies' common laborers building the roads,
bridges, railroads and elegant manor houses of England.
Many went to Australia and South America...and many came to North America to bring their
music, their dance, their great capacity for poetic speech and their enduring hostility to
England as well as their inalienable pride in Ireland and commitment to the Catholic
Church. The hundreds of parades in the USA in yk2000 is direct legacy of the struggle of
the Irish against English exploitation of their land.
One of the songs still sung in Ireland and the various Irish communities around the world is 'The Wearing of the Green,' which goes, in part:
O Paddy Dear and did you hear the news that's going
'round?
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish
ground!
The modern history of Ireland began with the Easter Rebellion of 1916, in which rebels
captured the city of Dublin and declared the independence of Ireland. The rebellion was
put down by the English army. Resistence was halted, temporarily, with the execution of 15
Irish nationalist leaders. The Sinn Fein emerged to become the dominant political party in
Ireland. Sinn Fein had been organized several years before the uprising by Arthur
Griffith, a Dublin journalist.
With much internal division, the Irish Free State began governance of Ireland on 6 Dec.,
1922...and following the abdication of King George 8th in 1936, the Irish Dail eliminated
all references to loyalty to England.
One of the more unsettling spin-offs of the hard and bitter struggle for independence in
Ireland was the KKK.
In Ireland, precursors of the Klan harrassed the British, burned their crops, stole their
cattle, killed their horses and mocked their Royality. Gulliver's Travels has a scene in
which Gulliver puts out a fire in the quarters of the Queen of the Lilliputians by pissing
on her court through a window of the palace. Swift noted the British could solve the
problem of over-population by roasting Irish babies for their dinner.
I marched in the St. Patrick's Parade in Chicago last year. Two years ago, on Good Friday,
with the aid of our good Senator, George Mitchell, a peace agreement was worked out
between the English, Northern Ireland and Sinn Fein...it had much promise and remains the
best hope for peace in that unhappy history. Garth Massey, his family and I were in
Ireland that day...and I attended Catholic Church on Good Friday in Dingle to see what
prayers might be said for the peace. It was inspiring to those of us who claim to be
Irish.
One of the enduring treasures of Irish art are songs of resistence. My children won't
remember but I sang it to them at bedtime when they were babes:
'Oh, the English came and tried to teach us their ways,
They scorned us just for being what we are,
Well, they might as well go chasin' after rainbows,
or light a Penny candle from a star.
Today, Ireland seems well on the way to the prosperity it never saw under the
English...and, for those who like their anthropology in fiction form, the books of Maeve
Binchy are a good way to catch the flavor of the recent life of the Irish.
May
the Wind be at your Back, TR Young