Flight of the Gaels

The Flight Of The Gaels

During the 1840's, the Irish scattered from their homeland, like the flight of the wild geese. Hunger and oppression prodded them, like a drover's goad, to the four corners of the earth.

The Ireland that they left was hungry and poor. Potatoes were what sustained them, four pounds each per day. When the five year potato blight struck, in the 1840's, there was literally nothing left for them to eat. The " Famine" some called it, though not the Irish. To them it was " The Hunger." Oats, grain, barley and corn were grown in abundance and shipped to England, for Eire was her granary. Fish and the fruits of the sea belonged to the Landlords. A hangman's noose awaited the poacher.

Hundreds of thousands died from starvation and disease. Some of the cynical overlords offered soup to any of the Catholic natives who would renounce their religion. And their own called them "soupers, for generations afterward. Out of a population of eight million, a million died from starvation and disease. Another million and a half emigrated in search of a better life.

From Queenstown(Cork), Galway and Dublin, they flocked like lemmings onto rickety wooden barques, headed to the four points of the compass. Many more thousands died in the foul smelling hell of steerage in these coffin ships. But, their spirit was never broken. They settled, like a great wave, in the new lands and created smaller versions of their past, amidst the foreigners.

O'Reilly, O'Malley, O'Toole; Deegan, Dugan & Dunne. It was a litany of the Gaels, that crossed the wide oceans. Wherever they settled, they built great churches to honor their Religion. Whether the church was called St. Patrick's or St.Bridgid's, it served as a spiritual shelter for the immigrants and a magnificent stone monument to Catholicism. These soaring limestone epiphanies were erected by the faithful, using as mortar, the pennies of the poor.

And the green was ever among them, to remind them of their homeland. In Ireland, The English had decreed it a crime to be "wearin' the green." In the new lands, like Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Buffalo, it was worn proudly, like a badge of identity. A great profusion of shamrocks and leprechauns, studded in emerald green, seemed to sprout up everywhere.

And on March 17th, the feast of himself, St. Patrick, sure didn't even the waters and the sky turn green in his honor? Grand parades, with pipers and bands, marched down the south sides of these new cities, to commemorate the heritage of the Irish.

Corned Beef and cabbage, from the slums of New York City, became as Irish as McNamara's band. Neither was known in the homelands. For, the immigrants were evolving into a breed of Irish-Americans that had a culture all their own. Dim memories of the " old sod " were of a spectral brigadoon that emerged, only in reverie, over the odd glass or two of the barley. Only the lilt of the brogue remained.

They are a mercurial people these Hibernians, steeped in the mysticism of their Island home. Poets and dreamers, they are quick to anger and slow in the forgivin'. The Poet, G.K.Chesterton, summed them up ruefully. He said, " The Gaels are a race that God made mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad." They had a heart the size of a lion, though, and would help those in need, even if their own went without. They remembered their own troubles from " the hunger."

The Irish had the advantage of the language here in America. They could put shoulders to the wheel and work their way out of the slums. There was plenty to build in the great new land of America and the Irish set to it, with a will. They labored as miners, dock workers and track layers, hod carriers and masons, domestics and shop clerks. Many is the modern city, in America, that was built with the sweat of the Irish.

And sure, didn't the proper natives think Paddy had the brains of a potato and was over fond of the barley? They didn't expect any of us to be good at what we did. It was the wit and the blarney that were our allies.

Soon, the lads had infiltrated the Police and the Fire Brigades. Tamany and other political machines banded together the Gaels and gave them clout in state houses and city halls. Hundreds of thousands, who fought in the American Civil War, earned their citizenship with the barrel of a gun. The Irish were becoming a political force in the social fabric of America.

The coming tidal wave of immigration, from 1880 to 1920, would bring a flood of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe. They competed with the Irish, the Chinese and others for the scarce menial jobs.

It was Politics that gave the Irish an edge. They were great talkers and well suited for the verbal labyrinth that is the grand game of American Politics. From these political strongholds, they were able to secure the municipal jobs and contracts, that meant prosperity for their own. The public schools were easier for them, because they shared the language. Clerks, civil servants, Doctors and Lawyers soon peopled their rise through the middle classes.
Socially, they were still considered as upstarts. But, even these walls soon crumbled, under the onslaught of the financial rise of the Gaels, in American Society.

Finally, one identified as one of their their own, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, rose to the Presidency of the United States. The stigma of being Irish and Catholic, in America, was gone forever. The wild geese had come home.

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Joseph Xavier Martin