Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam
If a woman in Aran is milking a cow and the milk is spilled, she says, "There's some are the better for it," and I think it a very nice thought, that they don't grudge it if there is any one it does good to.
As I collect my thoughts on this national day of feasting, I am reminded of my roots. Of what once was, and what might have been. On the pain of loss, and the unforgiving march of time. On the price of butter, and on dirt behind my fingernails. On George M. Cohan and longshoremen. And what people really mean when they say "so long."
I hope you enjoy your peaceful family gathering, but before you set down to eat tonight, just remember the millions of my people who perished never having known buttered mashed potatoes. In the extended, you will also learn how to arrange for reparations to be delivered to me, personally.
The Irish of the 21st Century are enjoying quite a rennaisance. Irish
cultural icons are widely acknowledged and revered. Hell, after languishing for decades in obscurity, even
The Undertones are back on tour. Entrenched joblessness has given way to prosperity unknown to modern Irish youth. Tourism is healthy and traditional language and
culture continue their strong climb out from under the mists of darkness.
But it has not been ever thus:
As the nineteenth century progressed, the Irish became very dependent on the potato for their main food source. In fact, a majority of rural people lived on it completely (the potato is one of the few foods that has all the basic vitamins necessary to maintain a human life). Several English committees that studied the economic situation in Ireland warned that if there was a major failure of the potato crop, extensive starvation would result. All these warnings were ignored.
In 1845 it happened, the biggest fear hit Ireland and suddenly became reality. A disease attacked the potato crop and half of the crop was destroyed. People harvested the few potatoes they had and prayed that the next years crop would be an abundant one. But the crop of 1846 suffered even more than the previous year. To add to the misery, that winter was the "severest in living memory". When the 1847 crop failed also, the Irish population of the whole nation was faced with starvation. This is when the first wave of immigrants escaped their starving homeland. The majority of this first group went to Canada because prices were very low--ships bringing lumber to England were glad to receive paying passengers instead of returning to Canada empty. Unfortunately, many of these people carried typhoid and many other diseases with them on to Canada.
Ironically, during these tragic years it was only the potato crop that failed in Ireland. Wheat, oats, beef, mutton, pork, and poultry were all in excellent supply but the Irish-English landlords shipped these to the European continent to soften the starving there and receive a very good profit in return. When people today wonder about the hatred between the Irish and the English, they don't recognize the fact that Irish peoples memory is a long one and that stories are still being told about those ships leaving Irish ports loaded with food at the same time that their ancestors were eating grass to live.
The results of the Great Potato Famine of 1845 are well known. Povery led to displacement and death on a shocking and massive scale:
Towards the end of the 1870s the alarming realization broke on Ireland that there was once again the dangers of Famine on something like the scale of the terrible tragedy of 1845-9. That tragedy, apart from bringing death to possibly as many as a million of the Irish people had started an outpour of emigration from Ireland, mainly to America, which had continued for many years. In the ten years after the start of the Famine some two million had left - about a quarter of the entire population of Ireland in 1945.
That's where my family comes in.
As a child of an adoptee, I am only certain of my mother's Irish heritage. The Hunts from County Cork, and the Duffins, of whom we know less. My father was born with the surname Sumner, and was left to Catholic Charities in Chicago around the late 1930s. Sumner is an unusual name for the Irish, it's actually of English derivation. From "Summoner," as in the town crier, the earliest form of blogging (no, I will not maintain the Irish invented blogging). The only famous Sumner I'm aware of is Gordon Sumner, to whom I sometimes fantasize I am distantly (or closely) related. We do share a passing resemblance, though it seems to have worked out somewhat better for him than it has for me. Ah, well...An té a phósfas an t-airgead, pósfaidh sé óinseach.
My forebears settled in Chicago, and we still have roots there, though I haven't been there in over 25 years. They were among the great successes, compared to their less fortunate brethren and sistern. They etched out a middle class existence against depressing odds, having to contend with sectarian and racial violence. My grandfather was lucky enough to learn a trade and became a typesetter. Years later I had to learn desktop publishing skills to supplement my income, and I often marvel at the irony at being the first college educated member on my side of the family, yet ending up plying essentially the same job as he did.
Our family diet was straight out of the American 50s. Dull and satisfying. Apple pie. Spaghetti with meat sauce was considered "Italian food." And we were insane for the butter. When we moved to the east coast and discovered New York style pizza, my parents would astonish waiters by asking for butter to spread on their left over pizza crust.
Butter has a similarly conflicted history for the Irish as that of the potato. The rural Irish made butter to keep the family alive, not to eat, but to sell. The price of butter in the 19th century was completely out of any range of affordability for the Irish peasant.
Herds of sheep, cattle, and goats yielded milk to be drunk sweet or sour or turned into cheeses. One ancient chronicler rhapsodized about the "great daintie" of sour curds called bonnyclabber, which is still enjoyed today. The Irish are prodigal about using dairy products in their cookery, butter, for instance, being used rather than oil. That so many Irish recipes call for buttermilk or sour milk rather than whole milk reminds us that refrigeration was not available to Irish bakers until relatively recent years.
Butter played an important role in the household in earlier times; every household had its churn. Lumps of butter were sometimes thrown into the water through which cattle were driven in order to ward off evil and to keep the cows' milk flowing. Bags of butter have been found in bogs, edible after centuries of burial.
It was many years before I understood how my parent's almost psychotic devotion to butter was a reaction, generations later, of how unavailable the luxury of butter had been to my forebears, and how the lavish application of butter where it didn't belong was really a way of sticking it to the man, an act of revenge for centuries of deprivation.
The great Irish diaspora set in motion by Queen Victoria's callous indifference to famine conditions of which there had been many warnings, had an incalculable impact on American life, culture, and especially language. From the music of the Atchafalaya basin, to Tinpan Alley, there's little question that we would be poorer if not for the contributions of Irish musicians. After decades, if not centuries, of the British army's nearly successful attempts to destroy the Irish language, we find it peppered throughout our speech today.
So if at your table tonight, you make your way through brisk weather to gab about phoneys in a glamourous setting, with food galore, you'll be speaking Irish, even if you don't know it. You'll know that my family is there with you, the ones who survived, the ones who had to dig the praties from the ground with their bare hands, for whom shoes were an unthinkable luxury. Perhaps you'll agree with me that they should be "Irish fries" even if it was the French who developed the method of preparing them. The Irish would have fried them in butter.
I'll leave you with this.
Is iad na muca ciúine a itheann an mhin.
It is the quiet pigs that eat the meal.