It’s Soccer…uh, Football Time!

This is a plea to my fellow Irish Americans. It’s time to start giving a damn about football.

And I don’t mean the Giants or the Jets. I mean soccer.

As the rest of the globe knows -- as opposed to most Americans -- the 2010 World Cup in South Africa is about to get underway. This Saturday at 1:30, the U.S. -- led by two stars with distinctly Hibernian names -- takes on England.

Does a true green-blooded Irish American really need another reason to get hyped up for this game? (I mean match.)

Okay, so even if you have no love for the Brits, you might still need to be persuaded to tear yourself away from the other sporting events on tap for this weekend.

After all, the Yankees and Mets and every other Major League Baseball team will be playing this Saturday. Hockey’s Stanley Cup title will finally be decided by the weekend, and the Lakers and Celtics will be squaring off as the NBA’s basketball championship series continues.

So, for those of you still baffled as to why soccer (I mean football) never quite takes hold in America, there’s reason number one -- an embarrassment of athletic riches.

There are so many sports -- not to mention other entertainment options -- available to even the casual fan that it seems like you’d have to invent a third day of the weekend to take them all in.

But it seems to me Irish Americans have a particular interest in rooting hard for the Americans when they take the field (I mean the pitch), and not just because the U.S. is taking on the Brits.

First and foremost, let’s get this ugly bit on news out of the way -- Ireland is not playing in the World Cup this time around. Which is an interesting bit of news for Irish Americans to keep in their back pockets on the off chance that some Irish-born friends or family start running America down.

Second, two of America’s brightest stars are the Irish Americans Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey. Yes, yes, England has superstar Wayne Rooney, whose parents are Irish. But when you take all things into account, I think we know which country has done more for the Irish over the centuries.

Third, if the Irish truly do love an underdog, even a lost cause, soccer (I mean football) remains one of the few places the Americans can be seen as underdogs.

Military dominance. Financial dominance. Entertainment dominance. America has it all.

But soccer remains one of the few endeavors during which the Americans can view themselves as struggling upstarts among giants.

That’s exactly why last year’s FIFA Confederations Tournament in South Africa was so thrilling. (That sentence alone might seem downright bizarre to an average American, but I’ll move on.)

The Americans entered that prestigious tournament as an afterthought, with traditional powerhouses such as Brazil or Spain expected to dominate.

Fittingly, the Americans started off slow, losing two matches to Italy and Brazil by a combined score of 6- 1.

But from this modest start came what was nearly the defining moment in American soccer history. Dempsey and Donovan led the Americans in a dominating win over Egypt, which put them into the next round. Then came a stunning win over Spain.

Suddenly, the Americans were in the finals, facing Brazil. What happened? They were only up 2-0 over Brazil -- as in Pele’s Brazil -- at halftime.

Can you imagine what would have happened if the U.S. topped Brazil? Well, that’s all you can do is imagine it.

The Brazilians seemed to field 25 men for the second half, relentlessly attacking and, by the 85th minute, scored the go-ahead goal.

But that was last year. This is the World Cup. In a way, it is understandable for the rest of the world to root against America.

After all, the thinking goes, you Americans dominate everything else. Leave the football glory for the rest of the world.

And yet, the Irish have played such a big role putting America in such a position of dominance.

So they have a right, perhaps even a responsibility, to revel in a little football glory on the pitch.

Besides, who else are you gonna root for? The Brits?

(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Margaret Sanger, an unlikely sexual revolutionary

Much was made of the recent 50th anniversary of the birth control pill, which revolutionized sexual behavior in America.

There were cover stories in magazines, big questions about how “the pill” changed American culture, and even a new book by Elaine Tyler May entitled

America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation (Basic Books).

What is not so well known, however, is that the daughter of devout Irish Catholics was at the center of the movement that culminated with the unveiling of the birth control pill in May of 1960.

It’s also easy to forget that there was a time when “the pill” was wildly controversial. To Irish Catholics, of course, it was a forbidden form of birth control.

Much of the 1960s and 1970s were spent struggling to reconcile the Catholic Church’s teachings with the demands of a modern world, which made it nearly impossible to have 12 children.

This is something Margaret Sanger knew all too well. She was born in 1879, one of 11 children, to Anne Purcell Higgins and Michael Hennessy Higgins in Corning, New York. Sanger went on to become the founder of Planned Parenthood. She was also a crusader for the rights of women.

“Before Margaret Sanger bravely took up the fight for reproductive rights, women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were slaves to their own bodies,” author Gina Sigillito wrote in her 2007 book Daughters of Maeve: 50 Irish Women Who Changed the World.

That is one side of the story.

Unfortunately, Sanger’s desire for family planning eventually led her to a philosophy of population control. Indeed, she became affiliated with a racist eugenics movement which felt that the world was made of desirables and undesirables.

What Sanger came to call the “magic pill,” therefore, could not only be used to make the lives of stressed-out mothers a little easier. It could also be used to keep the “undesirable” races from reproducing.

Perhaps it is fitting that such a complicated figure played a central role in the American sexual revolution. After all, we’re still muddling through this revolution as we speak.

The profound changes promised by the pill never quite came through. Which does not change the fact that it was, indeed, revolutionary. It was just a more quiet revolution.

But let’s start at the beginning. As a recent Time magazine cover story noted, Sanger trained as a nurse and “as early as 1912 was dreaming of a ‘magic pill’ that would prevent pregnancy.”

It is even believed that she came up with the term “birth control” in 1914, “the year,” Time noted, “she was arrested for mailing her magazine the Woman Rebel, an outlaw tract with its discussions of contraceptive use.”

Sanger fled for Europe only to return to the U.S. to open the first of many family planning clinics in New York City.

In 1917, Sanger met a wealthy woman named Katharine Dexter McCormick. As Time put it, “In the years that followed, Sanger provided the ingenuity and energy to drive the birth control movement, and McCormick provided the capital.

“The movement gained momentum during the Depression, when limiting the size of families became practically a matter of survival.

“America went from 55 birth control clinics in 1930 to more than 800 in 1942, the year Sanger's Birth Control League changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”

That’s one side of the story. Of course, it didn’t take long for the angry letters to hit cyberspace.

One Time reader wrote, “Your article was, in my opinion, a blatant revision of the past. Particularly disturbing is your omission of such key points as Margaret Sanger's role in supporting eugenics …

“Considering the pivotal part played by Planned Parenthood in performing abortions on minority women, Sanger would no doubt smile if she were alive and say, ‘Mission accomplished.’”

All of which leaves you feeling that the next time someone promises a revolution, you might want to remind them to be careful what they wish for

It's a right mosque mess at Ground Zero

Charles Wolf’s wife, Katherine was among the thousands murdered in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

But Wolf is not among those outraged that there are plans to open a Muslim cultural center near this hallowed ground.

"The Muslims are not responsible for 9/11. There have been extremists in all religions," Wolf recently told the BBC.

"Denying them the ability to build a mosque… would be like London denying the Roman Catholic Church the opportunity to build a church during the years of the IRA bombings."

It’s debatable, of course, whether or not Irish Nationalists who took up arms were fighting strictly for their religion, the way the 9/11 terrorists claim they were doing Allah’s work.

The point, though, is that an entire religion should not be dismissed because of a few fanatics.

Now, many families who lost loved ones that awful day -- a large number of them Irish Catholics -- do not agree with Wolf. That does not make them Islamaphobes or bigots.

Emotions simply run raw when it comes to the future of Ground Zero. Still, this is getting out of hand.

On Monday, a Tea Party political leader blasted Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer as "a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank," because Stringer does not oppose the development of the Muslim cultural center, which will reportedly include a mosque.

The New York Post ran an ominous report about how the imam behind the proposed center will have to “turn to Arab and Muslim nations around the world to help finance the estimated $100 million project.”

If this sounds like creeping Muslim influence in the lives of everyday New Yorkers, imagine if we really started doing business with such rogue states.

Perhaps by, say, purchasing billions and billions of gallons of oil from them, to the point that we became dependent on the precious fuel.

At this point, only one group is benefiting from the rage and rancor of this mosque mess at Ground Zero -- atheists.

This mess seems to vividly illustrate the way religion can divide people, rather than bring them together.

Irish American Franciscan priest Brian Jordan (pictured above) -- a well-known crusader for the rights of workers and immigrants, not to mention a member of the same order as the martyred Father Mychal Judge, the first official victim of the 9/11 attacks -- recently wrote an article claiming, indeed, that a Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero could bring people together.

“What brought the towers down were 19 men who were deeply misguided and brainwashed by an ideology that is not blessed in the teachings of the prophet Mohammed in the sacred Koran. To believe otherwise is to equate Catholicism with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by Irish American Catholic Timothy McVeigh, or to connect Judaism with the 1977 Son of Sam murders with a Jewish American, David Berkowitz,” Jordan wrote in an article he penned along with a Jewish and Muslim leader.

The developers hoping to open the 13-floor Islamic cultural center also claim it will teach New Yorkers about the true nature of Islam. Maybe. But the bitter emotions of 9/11 may make such lofty goals impossible.

There is, however, another reason why it’s kind of pointless to oppose this Muslim cultural center. The proposed structure is not located at Ground Zero.

If it ever does open, it will open several blocks away on Park Place. You can’t expect 9/11 families to be happy about such a place.

But where does it end? Is a symbol of Islam acceptable five blocks from Ground Zero? Ten blocks? Anywhere downtown?

Should Muslim vendors not be allowed to sell t-shirts -- or bow to Mecca -- in the vicinity of Ground Zero?

You can’t force people whose lives have been forever changed by terrorism to swallow optimistic declarations about the brotherhood of man. But as was often said in the days after 9/11, the business of New York must go on.

Religion and real estate are part of that business. If an imam wants to open a legal house of worship a few blocks from Ground Zero, it may not be a wise or sensitive thing to do.

But doing dumb, insensitive things is pretty much business as usual in New York, isn’t it?



(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

A tale of two Irish gangsters and Junior Gotti

Last week, federal judge Denise Cote received a letter from FDNY Captain Liam Flaherty. The letter was about the long hours Long Islander Michael Finnerty put in at Ground Zero in the terrible days and weeks after the attacks of 9/11.

But this was not a court case about, say, compensation for breathing toxic air in lower Manhattan.

No, instead Flaherty was enlisted to show that fellow Irish American Finnerty -- who used to crack skulls for John A. (Junior) Gotti back in the 1990s -- had managed to turn his life around.

Finnerty, now 45, was staring at a six year jail sentence. Though he’d gone legit and even offered up information about Junior Gotti -- son of Gambino kingpin John Gotti -- Finnerty’s past finally caught up with him when was nabbed two years back and charged with a long list of crimes. He cooperated with investigators and, just this week, pled for mercy in federal court, hoping to avoid prison completely.

On Friday, May 14, Finnerty got his wish. He will pay a fine, but so long as he does not violate his probation, he will not serve additional jail time.

As fate would have it, another Irish American who ran with Junior Gotti was back in the public eye recently for the worst of possible reasons.

Joseph O’Kane, who like most of Junior Gotti’s crew hailed from Queens, actually testified on behalf Gotti last fall, when numerous ex-cons were turning on the alleged kingpin.

Back then, O’Kane was up front about the many crimes he’d committed, which had landed him a life sentence in a Waymart, Pennsylvania prison.

Well, in late April, O’Kane -- whose jaw was wired during his 2009 testimony as a result of a prison fight -- apparently got into another scuffle. In fact, O’Kane was ultimately stabbed as many as 10 times and eventually died from the wounds.

It’s hard not to see the almost biblical symbolism in a story such as this. Two Irish Americans in an underworld more or less dominated by Italians, running with some of the same bad guys on the same tough streets.

Finnerty was known to steal cars, rob drug dealers and work as muscle. O’Kane, meanwhile, “made no bones that he was guilty of federal racketeering and murder charges for which he was serving life,” as master crime chronicler Jerry Capeci has written on his website ganglandnews.com.

But at some point, Finnerty decided to get out of the life, whereas O’Kane seemed unable to do so.

In court testimony and published reports, Finnerty said that it was when he met his wife, Stephanie, that he decided to turn his life around.

In 1995 he reportedly wanted a loan from Junior Gotti to start a business, but the alleged boss wasn’t interested.

Eventually, Finnerty found work with Local 52, the union which represents set builders on hit TV shows for cable stations such as HBO and FX. As a member of the Motion Picture Studio Mechanics Union, Finnerty worked on the Glenn Close show Damages and the Ted Danson show Bored to Death.

Acclaimed TV producer and writer Tom Fontana, whose credits include Homicide and Oz, wrote to the judge on behalf of Finnerty, saying, “In the decades I have known him, he has been an outstanding human being who continues to evolve.”

Whether it was luck or fate, O’Kane was nabbed by authorities much earlier than Finnerty ever was.

By 1996, O’Kane was serving life for racketeering, but remained busy with mob business. That’s because the feds kept trying -- and failing -- to convict his ex-boss, Junior Gotti.

O’Kane appeared on the witness stand back in October of 2009, during the fourth trial against Junior Gotti.

The feds were hoping turncoat John Alite would once and for all put the Teflon Don Jr. away.

Why was Michael fate so different from O’Kane’s? Is it because the former repented?

Was it just a matter of timing? Was it God? The dumb luck of the Irish?

You can search for explanations such as this. But if you find a good answer, you also have to explain this -- how, in January 2010, did the feds fail for the fourth and apparently final time to convict Junior Gotti?

If only we all had such luck.



(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The secret life behind iconic Irish immigrant Annie Moore

It is a heartbreaking question for any Irish American -- were your people lace curtain or shanty?

The question is all the more heartbreaking because -- and here is Irish logic at its finest -- being lace curtain can be as much a source of shame or embarrassment as being dubbed “shanty.”

But when such a question is asked about an unqualified Irish American heroine, well, it makes you start thinking that maybe we should be careful when we look into our past, because you never know what you’re going to find.

For decades, “rosy-cheeked” Annie Moore from Co. Cork was celebrated as the first immigrant to enter America through Ellis Island, back when the famous processing facility was opened in 1892.

It was not just the Irish who benefited from this story. Americans are completely schizophrenic about immigration, and always have been.

So you have to believe it soothed the national psyche to have a cute, young, English-speaking colleen celebrated as Ellis Island’s first immigrant. Foreign, but not too foreign.

Meanwhile, Annie went on to become a perfect Irish American, with honorable emphasis on both sides of the hyphen. According to family lore, she struck out for the western territories and married a descendent of the great liberator Daniel O’Connell in Texas, before dying young in 1919, the victim of a streetcar accident.

In recent years, however, the Annie Moore myth has unraveled. In the current issue of New York magazine, journalist Jesse Green takes a long, sometimes painful look back at the “real” Annie Moore, who, it turns out, never left the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The new phase of Annie Moore’s seemingly endless journey begins with genealogist Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, who began chipping away at the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of the Annie Moore myth between 2002 and 2006.

Several vocal people in New York who claimed to be descendents of the Lower East Side Annie had died, and so Smolenyak Smolenyak took to her blog and offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could lead her to the “real” Annie Moore.

The search led Smolenyak Smolenyak to Manhattan’s old Fourth Ward, the same tough streets which produced Al Smith, who grew up on Oliver Street.

If Smith would go on to run for president, and the “fake” Annie Moore would gain immortality in history books and on collectible tea cups, the real Annie Moore was notable for how swiftly she was forgotten by the throngs which greeted her when she arrived in Ellis Island on New Year’s Day, 1892.

Annie’s was not an easy life. She married a German who worked at the nearby Fulton Fish Market, the same place from which Al Smith often quipped he earned his FFM degree.

“She had spent nearly every year of her marriage pregnant with, giving birth to, or burying a child,” Green writes in this week’s New York.

“In an age when the average life expectancy for white Americans was 47, and surely lower in the slums, Annie would have expected some children to die.”

At one point in the article, Green explains to Annie’s great-niece the disease which felled the children, and she breaks down in tears.

“I hear that list and I think of Angela’s Ashes. I don’t want Annie to be an Angela!” she says.

“I think the Irish brought that kind of hard life with them. It has to do with the British presence. If you can have national low self-esteem and at the same time be very arrogant, that was Ireland.”

You can quibble with the sociology of this statement, but not the emotion. Annie Moore clearly remains an important symbol of the Irish past in America, and it matters -- though it shouldn’t -- if that past was plucky or downtrodden. Lace

Curtain or shanty.

But if Annie is a symbol of the New York Irish past, she is also a symbol of the American present. Do we need still need to construct myths around today’s immigrants?

Or can we take the Annie Moores of today for what they are -- struggling, striving, hard-working parents of future Americans. (Annie’s offspring now includes “Dominicans, Chinese, Jews and Italians,” according to New York.)

Or will we decide not to take today’s Annie Moores in any way, shape or form?



(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The Irish cop behind Arizona's anti-immigrant law

Arizona lawmaker John Kavanagh -- who was actually born in Queens -- was recently challenged by a protester.

Kavanagh, a former Port Authority police officer, was a major force behind the controversial law which allows Arizona police officers to question people who might be in the U.S. illegally.

Quite a few folks believe this is a law which, at best, makes racial or ethnic profiling legal and, at worst, is anti-immigrant.

So, a protester asked Kavanagh, where did your people come from?

“Ireland and Germany,” Kavanagh was quoted as saying. “But legally.”

Perhaps a deeper, follow-up question was in order -- should Irish Americans who have been in the U.S. several generations (such as John Kavanagh) sympathize with current immigrants?

This leads us to a dirty little secret among a sizeable number of Irish Americans. For decades, many have embraced their own immigrant ties while sneering at more recent immigrants.

Is this a majority of Irish Americans? Probably not. And they should not make us forget the passionate Irish Americans who work tirelessly to make sure a new generation of immigrants enjoys the same access to opportunity that earlier immigrants had.

However, for many Irish Americans, it’s not hard to find an uncle or cousin or aunt who has particularly passionate opposition to America’s current immigration situation.

If you’re lucky enough, you might here an anti-immigrant rant at, say, a St. Patrick’s Day party. Which will get your head spinning faster than Jameson.

One line of reasoning you often hear is similar to the argument made by Kavanagh. The past waves of Irish came here legally, whereas so many of today’s immigrants -- including those targeted by the controversial

Arizona law -- are here illegally.

Well, it’s not hard to oppose illegal immigration. Of course, you might argue that if the immigration system were comprehensively overhauled, we might not have so many illegal immigrants in this country right now.

But back to the Irish, there is this problem -- the deeper into the past you go, it’s harder and harder to say who, exactly was legal and who was not.

Even if your grandparents proudly displayed their Ellis Island papers on their living room wall next to their portrait of JFK, who’s to say there wasn’t an uncle or cousin or aunt somewhere who might have entered through the back door? Or, for that matter, who simply jumped the (Canadian) border?

America, after all, didn’t have any sort of national immigration policy until the 1870s. Incidentally, one of the first national directives was to limit the number of Chinese laborers coming to the West.

Why? Well, for one thing, the Chinese were taking a lot of jobs that Irish immigrants had been performing.

A cynic might say that Kavanagh and those anti-Chinese Irish laborers share a motto, “I got mine, you get yours. Somewhere else!”

But the immigration debate is already rife with cynicism. Irish Americans such as Kavanagh make arguments about not only the legality of current immigrants, but the crime which they supposedly spur.

Again, no group was seen as more congenitally criminal than the Irish. But that’s the past.

Today, we have laws that deal with criminals no matter where they come from. And, just as an Irish criminal was likely to be arrested by a police officer named Flanagan or O’Shaughnessy, an immigrant suspect in Arizona today should not be surprised if he is booked by a cop named Garcia or Gonzalez.

So what’s the deal? Are the Irish and Mexicans inclined to criminality or law enforcement?

To answer an earlier question -- I think today’s Irish Americans should see today’s immigrants as the latest arrivals in a long line of folks simply seeking better lives. The Irish should, indeed, have sympathy for today’s immigrants.

No, of course not the criminals or the terrorists. But then again, what would the Irish know about criminals or terrorists?



(Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The End of Anti-Catholicism?

By now you’ve probably heard the story about the knucklehead (or as he has been called in the press, the “junior diplomat”) who thought it would be funny to suggest that Pope Benedict open some abortion clinics and hand out condoms when he visits Britain in September.

The aforementioned knucklehead actually put these thoughts down on paper, in a memo that was subsequently leaked to The Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

“This is clearly a foolish document,” was the official response from Britain’s Foreign Office.

Personally, I enjoyed the response of Rt. Reverend Malcolm McMahon, bishop of Nottingham. He said that the memo showed “appalling manners,” but he also added that it would not cause much fuss for the over four million Catholics in Britain because “they are getting used to bad press.”

What is noteworthy about McMahon’s response is that, rather than raise his voice and spew vitriol -- which would have been understandable -- he implied that this is not very different from a strain of anti-Catholic thought which the Pope’s army has been dealing with in the U.K. and U.S. for centuries.

Or that’s how I would have viewed Rev. McMahon’s comments in the past. But the more we learn about the depth and breadth of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse cover-up scandals, it is harder and harder to call on the anti-Catholic card.

In fact, if certain cardinals and bishops want to take credit for yet another accomplishment, they should know that their mismanagement of these tragedies has now made it hard to distinguish between legitimate criticism of the church and good old fashioned Pope-bashing.

Anti-Catholicism is one of those things people tend to know happened a very long time ago yet ended once John F. Kennedy was elected.

And, true, not many folks in recent decades can claim they lost a job or home simply because they are Roman Catholic. After all, these days you could start of Knights of Columbus chapter amongst members of the Supreme Court alone.

That, however, does not mean a soft intellectual bigotry was not alive and thriving in elite places. On the East Coast, the Irish may have dominated cities such as Boston and New York from City Hall to the police commissioner’s office.

But that meant little to editors at the Boston Globe and New York Times, which have been accused of treating Catholics harshly well into the 21st century.

Even after the election of JFK (not exactly a model Catholic, incidentally), it was not hard to find people on both sides of the debate who would eventually acknowledge that anti-Catholicism was the last acceptable form of bigotry.

And by the way, there’s no need to pile up simply on the WASPs. Irish Catholics themselves did a fine job of looking back in anger and exposing what they saw as hypocrisy and intellectual shortcomings in their own backgrounds.

From James Joyce to Eugene O’Neill, from Mary McCarthy to James T. Farrell, from Maureen Dowd to Jimmy Breslin (pictured above, who wrote a scathing book called "The Church That Forgot Christ"), Irish Catholics have said things that would make even the most notorious 19th century anti-Papist cringe.

None of which changed the fact that from TV to movies to print media, devout Catholics always made for great punch lines and even better punching bags.

And so, it is understandable that some feel the extensive attention given to the latest round of church sex revelations -- which may or may not directly involve the Pope -- have Irish Americans once again crying anti-Catholic.

“I am outraged each time The Times intentionally disparages the Catholic Church, its pope and its bishops,” wrote Richard Kelly of Pittsburgh, in a New York Times article this past Sunday, which, to its credit, soberly analyzed the paper’s coverage of church issues.

The problem now is that powerful church officials may be more guilty of -- at the very least -- a judgment much poorer than any newspaper editor ever could be.

A nasty kind of anti-Catholicism will always be around. Now, though, powerful defenders of the faith have done more to encourage it than discourage it.

(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)