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Archiver > IRISH-IN-UK > 2007-11 > 1194980819
From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: [Irish-in-UK] Author Thos. GALLAGHER - Father EmigrantRoscommon>London>NY
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:06:59 -0800
SNIPPET: In the prologue of his historical book, author Thomas GALLAGHER
("Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847, Prelude To Hatred") published in 1982,
writes: "For most of my adult life, I have been interested in Ireland and
the Irish conflict with England. My father emigrated from Gallaghaderreen,
Co. Roscommon, in 1903, at the age of 15. He crossed the Irish Sea to
Liverpool and made his way to London, where a friendly Englishman advised
him to switch his given name from Patrick Joseph to Joseph Patrick, 'Joe'
being far less liable to abuse than 'Paddy,' the centuries-old British
byword for everything ridiculous about Ireland. 'Joe' GALLAGHER became a
singing waiter in a popular pub in London, where he was treated with the
kindness and respect that a young man alone in the world remembers all his
life. When 'Joseph P." moved on to the United States, married a young lady
born there, and raised a family of ten children, my brothers, sisters, and I
never heard a word spoken against England. A natural result of this was
that the GALLAGHER children did not know what to make of the anti-British
remarks made over and over again by other Irish children in the Amsterdam
Avenue neighborhood on the upper West Side of Manhattan where we lived. It
was almost as if some essential part of Irish heritage had been denied us.
This, of course, only made me curious as I grew older. What lay behind this
antagonism? How did it become so deeply rooted that even among the American
Irish it had turned to hatred? Most of the balanced historical views
pointed to the great famine of 1846-47, often referred to as the watershed
years in Irish history. The more I investigated the generally available
works on the subject, the more aware I became that the great famine was not
a separate or isolated part of Irish history but, rather, the nadir of that
history, so stark and devastating in its effects, so crucial in what it said
about the country's relationship with England, that it was to shape not only
the future of Ireland but the attitudes of the Irish all over the world on
into the 20th century - indeed, right up to the present moment. And yet, to
my amazement, this famine experience in terms of the Irish peasant had been
treated superficially or at a remarkable remove. It was clear that the
individual peasant was in fact the victim. But the victim of what? Who
spoke for this victim? With this book in mind, I undertook in-depth
research, probing all available archives in the United States, England and
Ireland. I naturally could not exclude politics from an event so
catastrophic to an entire nation, but I decided, given the past emphasis on
all the overriding debates, rationales, and expediencies, to keep that
aspect of the story to a minimum while giving as much space as possible to
what happened in the daily life of the Irish farmer, what influence affected
his family, his institutions, his beliefs, his very existence. The deeper I
probed, the more shocked I became. The evidence, thought plentiful, was
scattered in dusty places, and it went all the way back to the reign of
QUEEN ELIZABETH I, in the latter half of the 16th century, when civil wars
and local rebellions in protest against religious oppression and the
appropriation of land erupted throughout Ireland. In the next century,
Oliver CROMWELL led an expedition to Ireland to quell once and for all this
ever-growing discontent of the Irish Catholic population. Following his
triumphant return to England, a new kind of Protestant colonization of
Ireland began. Much of the newly confiscated land became the property of
settlers from Scotland and England, who then leased small parcels of it to
those who had previously occupied it. The latter, the indigenous Irish,
thus joined the country's burgeoning tenant-farmer population, and despite
predictions and expectations to the contrary, they continued to cling to
their Roman Catholic faith. But even with its two separate and distinct
societies, Ireland had its own Parliament in Dublin, which, however packed
it might have been with Anglo-Irish landlords, developed a pro-Ireland
stance if for no other reason than self-interest. The Irish peasant had no
voice in this Parliament, but he did receive a noblesse-oblige kind of
representation from landlords genuinely interested in his welfare. And if
he still spoke Gaelic, he was often defended in eloquent English by great
Protestant writers like Jonathan SWIFT....." (to be concluded)
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