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)

What has 2010 in store for Irish America?

It’s been another wild year for Irish Americans, but what will next year bring?

Sit back as we gaze into the crystal ball. What will each month of 2010 bring?

JANUARY: Following the success of their tacky new reality show Jersey Shore, in which Italian Americans proudly act like buffoons and call themselves “guidos,” MTV announces its next reality venture -- Irish Riviera. That’s right, MTV will throw a bunch of Irish lads and lassies into a Rockaway Beach bungalow while we sit back and watch the fireworks.
The guys and gals philosophize about religion, Northern Ireland and whether or not they will get a “Mick” or “donkey” tattoo, following a breakfast of Irish car bombs.

FEBRUARY: Susan Boyle releases an album of Valentine’s Day love songs.
Executives from her record label declare that Boyle will single-handedly save the recording industry.
They also announce that Boyle will be releasing an album of St. Patrick’s Day favorites in March, and Easter classics in April.

MARCH: The “St. Patrick’s Day Riots” of 2010 break out in Hollywood. American actors are angry that advertising executives have decided to actually use actors from Ireland to do commercial voiceovers.
“Who knew there were so many folks born speaking with that cool accent?” one commercial director is quoted as saying. “We’ve been killing ourselves all these years trying to match the realism and authenticity of The Quiet Man.”
Also in time for St. Patrick’s Day, despite protests from all corners of the Irish diaspora, MTV unveils two more Irish-themed reality shows.
First there’s Natives vs. Narrowbacks, in which hip Irish immigrants live side by side with the not-so-hip children of Irish immigrants.
Then there’s Real World: Belfast, in which former paramilitaries from both sides of the Northern divide are now charged with the task of running a chip shop in a Polish-Nigerian enclave.

APRIL: Susan Boyle cancels the release of her Easter album. Rumors swirl that she needs radical throat surgery. Record label executives deny the rumors, and announce that Boyle will be releasing albums of classic songs about Memorial Day, Father’s Day and the Fourth of July.

MAY: Despite a letter of concern from the Pope and numerous resignations, the Catholic Church crisis will not end in Ireland. Converts to the church of Ireland, Judaism and the newly-formed Cathedral of Sinead rise steeply.
The Pope writes another letter of concern.

JUNE: Not content with writing a column for The New York Times and working on a freelance basis as world savior, Bono takes a leave of absence from U2.
U.S.-Irish tensions rise when President Barack Obama and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen offer the singing superstar cabinet-level positions. In a wide-ranging interview with 60 Minutes, Bono refuses to rule out any offers.

JULY: Seamus Heaney and Eminem release a spoken word CD entitled White Lightning.
AUGUST: Susan Boyle finally emerges with a healthy singing voice. Executives at her record label try to convince her to record an album of American folk classics.
Boyle, instead, performs a racy duet alongside Lady GaGa on MTV.

SEPTEMBER: Having made movies about the wrongfully imprisoned, a tortured artist who must eat with his feet and, most recently, two brothers who torture themselves because of a domineering father, Irish cinema genius Jim Sheridan announces his next project -- a 12-hour documentary about one, small cemetery outside of Dublin. The only script for the project will be random excerpts from the plays of Samuel Beckett.

OCTOBER: Bono engineers a coup, is named Irish prime minister.

NOVEMBER: Colin Farrell appears in a movie people have heard of.

DECEMBER: Irish church leaders plead with the Pope. They say that only a papal visit to Ireland will help heal the wounds left in the wake of the sex abuse scandal.
Pope writes another letter, promises to get back to them in 2011.

Happy New Year!

Tiger Woods and the immigration dilemma

Irish-born World War II veteran James Patrick O’Donnell has lived a long, vibrant life. He came to the U.S. at the age of four with his family.

He fought alongside members of the greatest generation, serving as a machine gunner in Europe. He then lived in New York and Connecticut for decades before moving to the south to care for an ailing family member.

Along the way, of course, O’Donnell became an American citizen.

Or so he thought.

While enlisting in the military, O’Donnell filed all the paperwork required to become a U.S. citizen. But, according to a news story which recently ran on a Fox network channel in Tennessee, O’Donnell was not, in fact, a citizen.

He told the Memphis TV station, "When I was discharged they had on my discharge papers that I was a citizen. I assumed I was a citizen all that time."

But O’Donnell’s paperwork had never been processed. This snafu remained undetected -- you might say O’Donnell remained an undocumented immigrant -- until he applied for a passport.

That’s when he discovered he had technically never become an American citizen. That oversight was finally corrected earlier this month, when O’Donnell officially became an American citizen.

That’s a nice story if we leave it at that. However, as we exit the 9/11 decade, and venture into the uncharted territory of the 2010s, we also know that immigration remains the most perplexing issue on the American landscape.

Maybe we are glad when a Tiger Woods media frenzy comes along. Why?

Because it gives everyone a break from the impossible task of trying to figure out how to reform America’s immigration system.

But, make no doubt about it. If the war on terror kicked off this 2000s, and health care is drawing this decade to a messy close, then it is immigration which has remained the great, unresolved issue.

Will it remain that way in the coming years? Or worse, will the nativists and alarmists from Main Street to Congress win out by attempting to build unbuildable walls?

That’s not to say we should just lay out the welcome mat and hug every lunatic who wants to come to America.

Consider the recent arrests of five young Muslim men from Virginia, aged 18 -- 24, who had apparently been in contact with the Taliban for months.

If not for the Tiger Woods story, this story would be whipping up a broader anti-immigrant frenzy, and that would be somewhat understandable.

This case is disturbing for many reasons. First and foremost, it undermines the arguments that Muslim youths tend to grow disenchanted and radicalized in Europe, whereas, in America, they tend to assimilate.

These five look like very dangerous fellows, even though they were born in the ol’ U.S.A.

And just this Monday, a court in Pakistan -- where the five men were detained when they suddenly hopped on a plane without telling family members just after Thanksgiving -- ruled that the case must be reviewed by Pakistani authorities.

This means the men will not be sent back to the U.S. for possible prosecution for some time, if ever.

You can see why many people might say, “We should never have let them over here in the first place.”

What a tragic turn of events that would be. And don’t just think about cuddly old veterans such as James Patrick O’Donnell.

Think about all of the immigrants -- Irish, Mexican, Dominican, Russian, and yes, Pakistani -- who have transformed neighborhoods from Queens to Los Angeles.

A recent editorial in the New York Daily News analyzed an extensive report by the Fiscal Policy Institute and

Declared, “Immigration has, in fact, been a vital force in the American economy.

Even in tough times, immigrants boost or replenish the labor pool and inject entrepreneurial energy that opens businesses and creates jobs … providing a road to citizenship for those who are here, while fixing gaping holes in enforcement, is the way to guarantee continued economic benefits for all

Americans.”

We spent this decade avoiding the immigration question. But I don’t think the Tiger Woods scandal will stick around for another 10 years.


(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Rebels, like George Carlin, taught us how to laugh

In his new, posthumous autobiography, the late, great George Carlin writes about how his Irish Catholic parents brought the legendary comedian into this world.

“I was conceived in a damp, sand-flecked room of Curley's Hotel in Rockaway Beach, New York. August 1936. At the Paramount Theater in Times Square, Bing Crosby and Frances Farmer starred in "Rhythm on the Range.''"

“Meanwhile at Curley's Hotel on Beach 116th Street, Mary and Patrick Carlin starred in yet another doomed Catholic remake of Rhythm in the Sack.”

Carlin’s mom (Mary, of course) was the daughter of a cop. His dad (Patrick!) often “drank, got drunk (and) hit people.” Where the stereotypes end and the memories begin is obviously hard to say.

Carlin continues, “For several generations, Rockaway Beach had been a favorite weekend retreat for New York's alcohol-crazed Irish youth in search of sex and sun.

“Popular ethnic slurs to the contrary, the Irish do enjoy sex -- at least the last 10 seconds or so. But we must admit that Irish foreplay consists of little more than ‘You awake?’ Or the more caring, sensitive ‘Brace yourself, Agnes!’"

You can punish Carlin for pandering to negative thoughts about the Irish. But with this new book (completed just before Carlin died this summer) as well as the passing of troubadour Liam Clancy last week, I was reminded of just how rare it is to find authentic rebels who can also make you smile.

These days, so many so-called rebels aim to fire you up with their righteous indignation. Perhaps it’s always been that way.

All the more reason to cherish the likes of Carlin and Clancy, one a child of Irish New York, the other an adopted son by way of Tipperary.

Carlin and Clancy, like so many Irish Catholics of humble origins, had every reason to have chips on their shoulders.

But rather than shout and rage earnestly, they entertained, and along the way changed the world around them in profound ways.

It’s hard to say who had the more difficult task. Carlin aspired to be a comedian at a time when “heck,” was a dirty word.

Clancy wanted to play complex Irish tunes to audiences who wanted little more than sturdy classics such as “Molly Malone.”

A year ago it was my privilege to interview Clancy for Irish America magazine.

Clancy explained that his music was, at first, received coldly by many in New York’s conservative Irish community.

“Irish Americans weren’t really interested in us. Pete Seeger played with us. A lot of people said, ‘They’ve got a Communist up there.’ So most of our audience were folkies and liberal Jews.”

This could have made Clancy bitter. This could have turned him away from Irish Americans, and even Irish music.

But he understood that there was power and beauty and plenty of raucous comedy in the ballads the Clancys and Tommy Makem would make famous. They changed the way people think about Irish music.

Then there’s Carlin. Let me be clear -- he could at times be so stridently anti-Catholic, anti-church and, frankly, anti-human, that he was a little hard to listen to.

Doesn’t change the fact that, just as often, he was riotously funny.

Since Carlin liked to dabble in negative stereotypes about the Irish, we might as well dabble in a positive one.

He had a distinctly Irish love of language and its intricacies, and a fierce yet familiar loathing of hypocrites that stretches back to Jonathan Swift.

Swift, however, could never get a belly laugh like Carlin.

Carlin, of course, was famous for his expletives and his bit on “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”

But way back in the early 1970s, he also performed a bit called “I Used to be Irish Catholic.” And it was not a rant against perverted priests and knuckle-bashing nuns.

It was a tender look at his own parish, which actually had a lot of progressive teachers who granted students a lot of freedom.

“In fact, there was so much freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. Because they made questioners out of us,” he said.

All of which means Carlin, like Clancy, might have had moments of tension with their fellow Irish. But in the end, being Irish is a vital part of their legacy.



(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)