I remember going down to Rush Street on St. Patrick’s Day wearing a big “Kiss me I’m Irish” button hoping to get lucky. St Patrick’s Day was a time to party and sing Irish songs and look for a good time, but it is so much more. All the bars were crowded. The ones I remember were “Pat Harans”,”Mothers” and some vague Irish looking pubs. It was a great time and I looked forward to it every year.–that was a while ago.
This past weekend was the annual St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. It was also the weekend we spent in the city. It seemed much crazier than when I was in college. There were more people and many had painted themselves green or decorated themselves in some wild manner. There were pop-up vendors selling hats and green beads. Our Pakistani taxi driver told us that he expected to have a very long and crazy night with all the drunks.
I’ve always had this ambivalence about being Irish. My grandparents are from Ireland. They emigrated in 1902 and raised their family on the south side of Chicago. There was always a difference between south side Irish and north side Irish. The north siders were always better off while the south siders were more laborers and tradesmen. They worked in the stockyards and the steel foundries. They were also extremely prejudiced and there was much anger towards black people. They saw them taking over their neighborhoods and their jobs.
As I grew up the N word was used frequently by my relatives. They began leaving the city and moving to the suburbs but they took their prejudice with them. I saw myself as so much better because of my education and liberal hippie ways, but I didn’t have their responsibilities or their worries. I began telling my friends about the tribal ways of the south side Irish. I would make fun of their mispronunciations and peculiar worldview.
As I got older my Irish heritage became more important. I wondered why my grandparents came here. In 2014 we were fortunate enough to visit Ireland and some things became clearer. We even visited the town my grandparents came from. We were able to talk to one of the town historians and he told us of the incredible poverty of that time. There was also a real persecution by the English. Apparently the IRA burned down the police station in their town in retaliation for some action. We saw the sculptures commemorating the famine from the mid 19th century. The more I saw the more I understood why they came here. I began to get angry at the English for starving my relatives and taking advantage of them for centuries.
Now I was proud of being Irish and would tell my own sons the importance of their heritage. In the early 1980s my wife’s brother was dating an Irish girl from the south side. They would spend all their weekends in these south side Irish bars. In each one there would be a collection box to help the Irish poor. The collections really were another way to fund the IRA because Chicago was one of their main financial hubs. The “troubles” in Ireland took thousands of lives and there are now concerns that it is starting again. I suppose it is easy for me as a 2nd generation American to be critical of people dressing in green paint and getting drunk and hoping for a hook up. I suppose it is also easy for me to be overly critical of the way England and Ireland have managed their struggles over the last four hundred years. The older I get the more I realize that there are no easy answers and the more I judge others the more I have to realize that I haven’t walked in their shoes or faced their lives. So Erin Go Bragh and the part of me that’s Irish will always be conflicted about what that really means.