In his foreword to Ray O’Hanlon’s 1998 book The New Irish Americans, noted journalist Pete Hamill addresses the differences between Irish émigrés to America at the new millennium and those who came before. He observes that, “for the Irish, the days of the American Wake are long over; nobody waves goodbye forever from the rocky shores of Donegal.” It is, he concludes, easy enough to stay in touch with home via “telephone, fax, and e-mail.”1 Nothing surprising there—less so over twenty years later as social media keep people connected around the globe and around the clock.
Hamill, an American-born journalist whose parents emigrated from Belfast in the 1920s, did, however, make one startling observation, startling because, if he is correct, the role of Irish American journalists and newspapers has not changed much at all, at least since the end of the Washington presidency. In the foreword, Hamill concludes his analysis of how easy it is today for immigrants to stay in touch with home by observing that “several superb weekly newspapers complete the sense of remaining connected, preventing Ireland from becoming a permanent part of the past.” And this might have become even easier now Irish newspapers are easily at hand on the internet. Virtually every chapter in this volume, regardless of the time period covered, at least implies the very same idea. Newspapers have always connected Irish immigrants to home. They have helped those immigrants adapt to their changed circumstances, but they have also kept “the Old Country” from becoming “some distant spot on a vast map.”2
Hamill also notes that today’s immigrants are not the immigrants of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. “The new Irish immigrants . . . can . . . create their own American narratives, and with the help of technology, maintain a powerful connection to the old.”3 Journalism, and other forms of media, remains an important player in keeping that connection powerful. With the rise of social media, online newspapers, Facebook, and other means of digital communication, immigrants, and interested Americans, can easily keep up with the day’s news in Ireland. True, media is only one factor—immigration laws, tourism campaigns, romanticism, and the fact that one-tenth of the American population refers to itself as Irish American, coupled with Americans’ search for an identity within their vast pluralistic melting pot, have all played important roles in forging close relationships between not just Irish immigrants and Ireland but also between non-Irish Americans and Ireland. More than two million American passport holders visited Ireland in 2018, a 13.4 percent increase over 2017.4 Jokes about Ireland being the fifty-first state are common on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.5 Even the irascible Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole has admitted that the Irish had much to do with creating American culture, but, he added, “Irish culture is inconceivable without America.”6
As Ambassador Mulhall points out in his foreword to this volume, national identity does not arise out of the air, nor does diasporic identity. Both must be grounded in something, and both must have something to sustain them. As this book documents, print culture, particularly journalistic products, have played an important role in creating and maintaining Irish American identity—at least up until the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, American journalism itself has been influenced by Irish printers and journalists who immigrated to the New World and infused journalism with their knowledge, skills, and professional routines they were socialized in, as becomes clear from the contributions in this volume.
The ambassador also observes that the Irish-American relationship is today somewhat more remote than it was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the heyday of both Irish immigration and the transfer of journalists, news, news practices, and technologies between Ireland and the United States. In the early years of the twentieth century the ties between the Irish and the American Irish were extremely close, especially because so many of the latter vigorously supported Irish nationalism. The American perspective was often more anti-British than that of the native Irish. American Irish newspapers supported Irish freedom, although a tension existed between those who accepted the concept of “Home Rule,” meaning domestic self-rule within the British Empire, and those who supported complete independence. This division was reflected in the editorial perspectives of the major American Irish newspapers. The Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin inflamed Irish America: it played a key role in the subsequent Anglo-Irish conflict (1919–21) which culminated in a British withdrawal.
However, at that point, existing tensions boiled to the surface. When Ireland became (mostly) independent with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, there was rejoicing in America—but the Irish legislature had barely accepted the treaty with Britain before civil war broke out. This conflict puzzled and appalled the American Irish.7 To them, Ireland had just succeeded in a centuries-old struggle for legislative freedom. They had neither understanding nor sympathy for the rebels who refused to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) on the grounds that it required Irish parliamentarians to take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.8 It was not a question of misunderstanding; rather, it demonstrated that the two groups of Irish, despite their connections, looked at the world in very different ways. The American Irish did not lose their connection to Ireland, but it would never be the same. The “Irish Question” to them no longer existed.9 The advent of the Great Depression also concentrated minds on issues closer to home.
Another factor in the changing Irish-American relationship is the greater ease with which those who do come to America can stay in touch with those back home in Ireland. Yet another factor is the lesser need for assimilation. America in the twenty-first century has plenty of problems associated with its pluralistic society, but many Americans embrace the diversity of their fellow citizens—hyphenated or otherwise. Few in America today would have the issue Joseph P. Kennedy faced in 1957 when he demanded to know, “What the hell do I have to do to be called an American,” after a Boston newspaper referred to him as an Irishman. Kennedy pointed out that both he and his children had been born in America.10 Three of those children would grow up to become, respectively, the first Irish Catholic American president, a US senator, and the attorney general of the United States. Yet, three years later when his second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was elected president, his Irishness was taken for granted by most Americans who willingly accepted him as one of their own, regardless of their particular ethnic backgrounds. A century earlier, he would likely have been portrayed by newspapers as an illiterate simian drunkard.11
In many ways John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s visit to Ireland during his presidency marked the emotional high point of Irish-American relations. His visit—the first time a serving US president visited Ireland—in the summer of 1963 was an affirmation of the emigrant experience and, as the Irish Times put it, the story of “a local boy who made good.”12 Kennedy’s tour was broadcasted around the country by the national broadcaster (RTÉ), which had been established only eighteen months previously, and thousands of people—many with “Welcome Home Mr. President” banners—lined the streets wherever he went. His address to the Irish Parliament, his visit to the ancestral family homestead in County Wexford, and his evocative speech at the quayside in New Ross, from where his great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, had emigrated at the height of the Great Famine in 1848, received blanket coverage in the press and gave a fillip to a relatively new nation that was still finding its way in the world. His assassination in Dallas five months later stunned everyone: though even in death the Irish connection persevered. At his funeral a party of Irish Army cadets performed a military drill that had impressed Kennedy when he had laid a wreath at the Irish Garden of Remembrance in Dublin. This was the first—and remains the only—time in history that representatives of a foreign army have performed a ceremony at the burial of a US president.
In subsequent decades, other US presidents have visited—Richard Nixon in 1970; Ronald Reagan in 1984; Bill Clinton in 1995, 1998, and 2000; George W. Bush in 2004; and Barack Obama in 2011—all of whom have claimed Irish heritage. While each visit had its own characteristics, the visits of Clinton—at the height of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and Obama came closest to generating the positive frenzy that greeted Kennedy’s visit in 1963.13
In a real sense, the Irish-American relationship in the twenty-first century has evolved almost beyond recognition, and while Americans remain the second-largest tourism cohort to Ireland every year, in many ways the relationship is increasingly framed in economic rather than identity terms. Having positioned itself as “the gateway to Europe,” Ireland is home to the European headquarters of a multitude of high-tech US firms. In 2020, US companies based in Ireland directly employed 160,000 people and indirectly employed a further 128,000 people. In the opposite direction, Irish companies employed 110,000 people in the United States.14 As the relationship has changed, so too has the structure of the Irish American press. Its numbers now stand at fewer than twenty individual titles across the United States. That shrinkage is likely due in part to the greater assimilation of the Irish into the larger American society as well as to limits on Irish immigration that began in 1965, and came close to being expanded in 2018 before being defeated in the US House of Representatives.15 Though there is a proud Irish diaspora in America, the Irish American community is smaller than it once was—many fewer immigrants are arriving on American shores because of limits on immigration. Consequently, the new “first generation” is smaller than it has been in the past, and those who have been here for several generations have slowly assimilated to the point that many only recall their Irishness on St. Patrick’s Day.
The need for an Irish American press industry may have declined, as has the transfer of journalistic norms and practices from Ireland to the United States, but that has not stopped Irish American journalists from having influential positions at American media—just as they have done since the 1780s. Prominent Irish American and Irish journalists range from the ultraconservative talk-show hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to the more traditional political journalist Maureen Dowd, filmmaker Michael Moore, chat show host Conan O’Brien, President Regan’s legendary speech writer Peggy Noonan, and Irish-born Alexander Cockburn. Each has made his or her mark on American public opinion: a process that, as this volume demonstrates, began centuries earlier in a very different media environment.