Irish Roots

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, the malls and bars bloom shamrocks, and people plan where to get drunk to celebrate the man that Christianized Ireland, I think about my ancestry. According to my calculations, my blood is approximately 30% green. My father’s father was 100% Irish, his mother is some uncertain percentage, and both my mother’s parents were Polish. Actually, I am more Polish than Irish. But I have the Irish last name. And an Irish first and middle to match. However, I am a misbranded product of Ireland. I have never really felt all that connected to the Emerald Isle.

When I was a kid, being Irish meant that my ancestors had walked straight out of the pages of a fairy tale. It made my imagination run wild with the brownies. Ireland of my dreams was a place so lush and green it made your eyes hurt. The island was overrun by leprechauns obsessed with gold or sugary cereal, and a tall priest in a bishop’s hat and green robes roamed the land chasing snakes into the ocean with a curved staff. My ancestors had lived a charmed life. I was descended from magic.

I got older and the leprechauns disappeared into the hills. I learned about the Irish potato famine and strife with England, the various conquerors who had thought this green jewel an easy prize. And I learned about the mad racism that greeted those that fled to America, trading persecution and poverty for different flavors of the same. In reality I came from people who had struggled to make their way, keep their homes, their freedoms, and even their lives. But never having struggled for anything vital, this has always been a vague concept to me -- perhaps something akin to fairy tales and legend again. Being separated by so many generations from this heritage adds to the vagueness. Day to day I don’t think about my roots at all, except when someone might read my name for the first time and give me a wink … “Irish, eh?”

And then, of course, there’s St. Patrick’s Day, where every cliché related to Ireland is thrown in your face. At this time everyone reaches into their family tree and dusts off an ancestor or two so they can pin on buttons that say “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” It makes me wonder what the turning point was, when Americans went from putting up signs in the window that said “No Irish,” to filling those windows with cardboard shamrocks.

After I turned 21, celebrating being Irish meant drinking. A lot. And when people want to buy a lot of alcohol, enter Commercialism. After those folks sign on, expect the true meaning of any holiday to be seized, the core extracted, and the meaning sold back to you for a couple of bucks, a cheap version of the original. Strangely, they’ve done this to our nation’s pride day, the 4th of July, but people do still feel something akin to respect about this day, in spite of stuffing themselves with barbeque and wearing flag boxers.

It's all in good fun. I love parades and green beer as much as the next person. Well, except that I'm not a big fan of beer, so pass me the green punch instead. But the problem is that the celebration of St. Patty's Day has done to my concept of Irish heritage what McDonald's has done to food -- cheapened it, even made it easy and tasty to swallow, but there's really very little useful in it.

St. Patrick’s Day is here again, and this time I want to know what it means to be Irish. I’ve tried books, history, digging through my geneology. But what I really want is to write a letter to my ancestors and ask. Or maybe it would be enough to ask someone who lives in Ireland now. I would feel silly doing so, like I am one of the many Irish wannabes who wants to trade in their mutt ancestry for 100% pure green blood. Now that it’s “cool” to be Irish, the bandwagon is overflowing with drunken idiots in green plastic derbies.

It's enough to make anyone want to pull up their roots.