Ireland shares story with U.S. small towns

Drogheda, Co. Louth native Patrick Carr has encountered good fortune and bad on a road which has taken him from Ireland to some of the smallest towns in the U.S.

“I was on the last set of planes…that left Ireland before the Celtic Tiger took off.” With a laugh, Carr adds, “Things got much better when I left. I came of age in Ireland in the 1980s. People talk about recession in Ireland now, but things were much worse (back then).”

As luck would have it, however, while in Ireland, Carr met up with some very pleasant folks from a small town in Iowa. Carr accompanied the Iowans on trips all over Ireland before they returned home.

“They said, ‘You must come to Iowa if you ever get the chance,’” Carr recalled.

“You have to be careful when you invite an Irishman to your home because they may very well take you up on it.”

Indeed, by the time Carr became a sociologist working at Rutgers University, he was hired by the prestigious Macarthur Foundation to study small towns in America. The result is an insightful new book titled "Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America" (Beacon).

Carr, as well as his wife, Maria J. Kefalas, called up the friends he had made and said they would not only be coming to visit, but they would, in fact, be moving to Iowa. Carr was looking to study how children came of age in this town, which they call “Ellis,” to protect the anonymity of their subjects.

What they found is that in Ellis, and many other similar places, ambitious young children not only leave in droves, but are encouraged to do so.

This might be fine for the child who escapes. But the town they leave behind, as well as the kids who decide not to leave the small town, pay a price.

If these trends continue, small towns across the U.S. will slowly perish, leaving the few remaining residents with few economic and social opportunities.

It might seem strange for an immigrant to tackle the quintessentially American topic of small town life. But life in Ireland and Ellis, Iowa, are not so different.

“We’ve always had brain drain in Ireland. I’m part of that,” says Carr, who honed his observational skills as a kid, spending time with his father who worked in bookie shop.

“You’d see all walks of life, all manner of strange people” in the bookie shop, says Carr. “You have to watch what people do and see how they behave. In a bookie shop you have to be very sharp about who’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes.”

Carr himself was the first member of his family to complete college. He adds that the scholarship he was awarded after graduating from University College Dublin was available only to students interested in getting out of Ireland and traveling.

Carr eventually earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. When he began practicing sociology, Carr’s work centered around crime, as well as the influences youth face as they come of age in the U.S.

That latter interest, combined with the “dumb luck” of having some folks fromIowa stay with neighbors in Ireland, eventually landed him the task of exploring how America’s small towns can be saved.

Carr adds that being an outsider helps when it comes to examining a small town.

“All good sociology is done when you are an outsider because you see things with a fresh set of eyes,” says Carr.

“I talk to people and say, ‘I’m just a dumb foreigner. Educate me.’ I’ll play the dumb mick for a little bit, and it works.”

Carr and his wife have been giving talks on this topic across the nation, no easy task for the parents of three young children, including a daughter born just a few weeks ago.

Among the ideas small tows need to pursue, Carr says, is a sensible immigration policy, which brings in new workers but does not exploit them or create tensions with native residents.

Up next for Carr is an intensive study of youth in Philadelphia (where he lives). Of particular interest to Carr is the so-called “stop snitching” phenomenon, in which witnesses refuse to cooperate with police.

No surprise there. Ireland has, in the past, had some issues with informers, hasn’t it?

Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@verizon.net

Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan under fire in terror war

John Brennan grew up in New Jersey, the son of an Irish immigrant named Owen.
Brennan, who this week was dubbed President Obama’s “public face for counter terrorism policy,” was educated by the Jesuits, in high school as well as at Fordham University. Brennan has said a sense of public service was instilled in him, at home and at school, and thus he traveled widely and, after college, began a 30-year career at the CIA, working closely with Obama, as well as Presidents Bush and Clinton.

Despite this impressive resume -- Obama seriously considered naming Brennan CIA director following the presidential election -- it was not until the so-called underwear bombing of Christmas Day that the spotlight turned to Brennan.

The Obama administration -- and Brennan -- faced heat after 23 year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253. The administration had to ‘fess up that it had failed to connect the many dots which might have helped avoid the attempted bombing in the first place.

Just after New Year’s Day, Brennan was on all of the Sunday morning political talk shows defending the Obama administration’s terror policy, which was also slammed in the fall when Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan was charged with going on a rampage which left 13 people dead at Fort Hood, Texas.

The interesting thing about the heat facing Brennan is that it is coming from both sides of the political aisle.

The Republican-leaning Fox News crowd sees Obama and Brennan as soft. This charge was articulated controversially by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who emerged from his bunker recently to charge that the Democrats in general are flunking when it comes to national security.

“I'm very disappointed in the vice president's comments," Brennan himself declared on NBC's Meet the Press on January 3. "Either the vice president is willfully mischaracterizing this president's position -- both in terms of language he uses, and the actions he's taken -- or he's ignorant of the facts.

“In either case, it doesn't speak well of what the vice president's doing."
But even to some Obama fans, Brennan is viewed as a holdover who, a few years back, worked closely with former President George W. Bush.

Last Sunday’s cover story in The New York Times Magazine by Peter Baker, entitled “Stopping the Next One: Obama’s War Over Terror,” includes a lengthy analysis of Brennan’s career. The article said that in the wake of the Christmas Day terror attack, Brennan “has emerged … as the administration’s public face for counterterrorism policy,” and also explained how key figures in the Obama administration also fought the war on terror under President Bush.

“For all of his talk of change,” Baker writes, “Obama has kept a lot of veterans of the Bush administration in place.”

Several of these key figures have another thing in common -- they are Irish American. The article also cites Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

Last Friday, a critical report about the Fort Hood Massacre was released, forcing Mullen to acknowledge that he was concerned about “self-radicalization” in the military. He added, “There is clearly more and more of that going on, and how much of it we have in the military is something that we ought to really understand.”

Joining Mullen in taking a very close look at the Fort Hood report is Army Secretary John McHugh, another Irish American, as well as a former Republican congressman from upstate New York.

Finally, there is Denis McDonough, a Minnesota native and National Security Council chief of staff. Another member of Obama’s inner circle on counterterrorism, McDonough has been out front in recent days talking about the tragedy in Haiti.

This, of course, is how the news cycle works. A crisis is only a crisis until another one comes along.

The Times article opens with a scene featuring McDonough and Brennan briefing Obama about a “major terrorist plot to attack his inauguration.”

That plot, obviously, never materialized. But for Irish Americans such as McDonough and Brennan and McHugh and Mullen, there will surely always be another crisis around the corner.

New attack on Obama from 'birther' conservatives

He is a president with a father born in another country. Whispers, and occasionally shouts, arise that he is not a fit candidate for the White House.

He overcomes those obstacles, but for a core group of critics the charge that he is an unconstitutional president never goes away. They spend time trying to convince their fellow Americans that a man with no legal ties to the nation he governs is serving as commander in chief.

Barack Obama? Well, yes.

But this was also true for President Chester A. Arthur (pictured above), a man whose father was born in Ireland, and who some of Obama’s fiercest critics are now invoking.

“America’s Two Unconstitutional Presidents,” thunders the web site.

Familysecuritymatters.org, which notes that Arthur “was the son of an Irish immigrant …(and) was not constitutionally qualified for the office of either vice president or president, and set a precedent by which it would happen again.”

Meaning with our current president, Barack Obama.

As the glow has worn off the Obama presidency -- most recently, he’s taking heat over the attempted bombing on an airplane by a terrorist on Christmas Day -- the so-called “birther” movement has sustained surprising momentum.

Birthers basically believe Obama was not born an American citizen, so is therefore an illegitimate president. Obama’s father, of course, was born in Kenya. Obama’s much-discussed birth certificate says that the future president was born in Hawaii. However, many birthers simply don’t believe the document is real.

Believe it or not, Chester A. Arthur -- who served from 1881 to 1885, and is generally considered one of the most unmemorable presidents -- had his own pack of birthers nipping at his political tail.

The story began in 1797, when Arthur’s father, William, was born in Antrim. According to the Encyclopedia of the Irish in America (which does not even have a separate entry for Arthur) William settled in New York than moved to Vermont. He married in 1821 and had seven children and became a Baptist preacher known for fiery sermons and abolitionist leanings.

The family then moved around New York state throughout the 1830s and 1840s, before finally settling in Albany in the 1850s.

There are other accounts, however, which suggest that William Arthur left Ireland and settled, first, in Canada. Some, in fact, believe that’s where the future president was born, rather than n Vermont, as Arthur claims. Were he born in Canada, Arthur would be British, rather than American! (Interestingly, Obama’s father also was technically a British citizen -- sorry, subject -- since Kenya, at the time of Obama’s father’s birth, was also a British colony.)

Of course, the U.S. Constitution states that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.” Arthur’s critics argued that since his dad was Irish-born, and since the president may have been born in Canada, he did not technically become a U.S. citizen until William Arthur gained citizenship status in 1843.

Chester Arthur, by then, was already a teenager, and thus, not “natural born” on U.S. soil.

The heat on Arthur did not die down even after he was elected president. In fact, one critic, A.P. Hinman, wrote a scathing book not-so-subtly entitled How a Subject of the British Empire Became President of the Unites States.

Either way, Arthur only served one term as president, and only then because he was vice president when James Garfield was assassinated. History has been kind to Arthur only insofar as it has largely forgotten him.

For the record, John Dumville, who runs historic sites in Vermont, where the (alleged) Arthur birth home is located, recently said this to the Associated Press about rumors that Arthur was not eligible for the presidency: "It's an old rumor that won't die, political slander.”

This also seems to be the case with Obama’s conspiracy critics, who seem to grow more vociferous as the president’s poll ratings drop.

Perhaps we should all calm down. Obama may end up a president as memorable as Chester A. Arthur.

(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)