Word: irishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...news again. Almost everyone remembers Sands; very few could name the sixth hunger striker to die--Martin Hurson--or the two that seem likely to go next--Kieran Doherty and Kevin Lynch. No political pressure of any sort has been mobilized in America; no message has come from our Irish-American president, and political leaders like Ted Kennedy have done little more than issue perfunctory statements asking Margaret Thatcher for more flexibility. And the left has done nothing at all, despite its support for virtually every other national liberation movement in the world...
...nothing new, actually. Since the days when Woodrow Wilson sold out the Irish for David Lloyd George's support at Versailles, it's been the same story. As Andrew Greeley writes in his new book, The Irish Americans. "The American Irish were never able to persuade their government or their nation's cultural elite of the moral rightness of their cause. ...Concern for human rights in Rhodesia, Chile and Franco's Spain has in recent times all but obsessed the nation's intellectual and cultural elite. The issue of human rights in Ireland, however, even today scarcely gains any notice...
...brave men of the Irish Republican Army--who, in the last months have largely forsaken violence and demonstrated instead their courage and willingness to make this enormous, ultimate sacrifice--will probably return to their old methods, the methods of Collins and De Valera, soon. A campaign to raise consciousness, a campaign that has already cost six lives, seems to have failed, for the world is too blind, or too lazy, to see the pain of Northern Ireland...
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, when my friends and I were only approximately of legal age, we patronized an ancient bar in New York City's Yorkville neighborhood--an establishment that was subsequently turned into a singles bar frequented by professional hockey players. Tended by a genial Irish giant named Ned, the bar had fallen on difficult times and was forced to accept the whiskey-sour-or-rum-and-coke indignities of my friends and me. And like all good neighborhood bars, the Shamrock had its share of local bums who always depended on Ned and his colleagues for a nightly snort...
Whatever the merits of Britain's case, the Thatcher government's apparent callousness over the hunger strikers in the H-block has been costly, especially in the U.S. Since the death of Hunger Striker Bobby Sands in May, direct and indirect contributions to the I.R.A. from Irish-Americans have reportedly tripled. During a visit to New York last month, Prince Charles was the target of loud anti-British demonstrations. Last week Queen Elizabeth's sister, Princess Margaret-who caused a furor in a 1979 visit to the U.S. when she was reported to have called the Irish...