Cracker Culture

Ian Jackman

• Irish America by Reginald Byron
  Oxford, 317 pp, £40.00, November 1999, ISBN 0 19 823355 8
• Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past by Richard White
  Cork, 282 pp, IR£14.99, October 1999, ISBN 1 85918 232 1
• From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish by Eamon Wall
  Wisconsin, 139 pp, US $16.95, February 2000, ISBN 0 299 16724 0
• The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America edited by Michael Glazier
  Notre Dame, 988 pp, £58.50, August 1999, ISBN 2 680 22755 7

Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city. Or so it seemed. There were sixty or seventy years when the Irish were everywhere. They felt it was their town. It is no longer, and they know it. That is one of the things bothering them,’ The great Irish achievements, he said, had been the American Catholic Church and the Democratic machine, but the Church was cautious and backward-looking and drained the people’s resources, while the Irish knew how to get political power, but not how to use it, and were interested only in climbing to the next rung of the ladder. Weakened by booze, softened by Catholicism, enervated by politics, Irish culture in America was in decline. Its major celebration, the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City, served only to embarrass Irish people visiting America by its ‘Top o’ the Mornin’ sensibility. For their part, Irish Americans were embarrassed by the conditions they found when they visited Ireland.