Given the strange juxtaposition of the happiness of St. Patrick's Day and the horrors that were perpetrated in New Zealand on Friday, it got me to thinking about the way in which things change. There we were, nearly a hundred of us, in a Canadian Protestant church, celebrating a Catholic saint from England who ended up the patron saint of Ireland. Many of us were festooned in shades of green, commemorating the Celtic conviviality and island gregariousness that we associate with the Emerald Isle, embodying the notion that on this day, there are only two types of folk: those who are Irish, and those who wish they were!
But it wasn't always that way, was it?
You don't have to look back too far to see a time where the Irish were denigrated across much of the western world. Even before the potato famine began in the 1840s, much of Great Britain saw Ireland as a bottomless pit of hopeless pauperism, despite the fact that it was the small parcels of poor land doled out to the natives by wealthy protestant landowners that exacerbated that situation. Small wonder that a working male in Ireland ate nearly 14 pounds of potatoes a day since that was one of the few reliable crops available to them.
The potato blight nearly halved the population of Ireland; a million who starved and another two million who fled, mainly to Protestant North America.
This wave of immigrants, displaced by a humanitarian crisis, was not highly thought of at the time. The Irish were regarded by many as a dirty, impoverished, poorly educated, unintelligible and potentially dangerous folk, with a different religion from the rest of us. And that's without even getting into the sectarian violence of their homelands that many prayed they wouldn't bring with them!
Sound familiar?
And yet, here we are, almost a century since "Irish Need Not Apply" was a common adjunct to job postings, and the denigration has turned to veneration, at least once a year. We get together to wear as much green livery as we can, drink pints of Guinness, throw some extra Bailey's in our coffee, affect terrible Irish accents and tell complete strangers that we hope they end up in heaven half an hour before the Devil knows they're dead.
I don't see an easy solution to the pervasive problem of White supremacy and White nationalism, but I am confident in the best strategy to oppose them - outlove and outlast them.
A year or two ago, the taxi I was riding home from a tire change with was a brutally overt racist, going on about how "the turbans" were ruining the trucking and taxi industries.It was especially ironic hearing all this in thickly accented English from someone I guessed was from Lebanon or maybe Eastern Europe, but there you are.
I saw few merits in getting into a debate with the guy, but I couldn't let him just talk up a line of horrible bullshit like that unopposed either, so I said, "Sure, but a hundred years ago, they probably said the same thing about my grandfather, right?"
"What do you mean?' he asked.
"He was Irish at a time when people didn't necessarily want the Irish around, especially Irish Catholics," I said. "There used to be signs that read 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.' Eventually, my granddad went on to be a small business owner in Manitoba. Less than ten years after he died, John F. Kennedy, a descendant of Irish immigrants, became the first Catholic president."
The pause in his vitriol lasted up to the sidewalk in front of my house, where I added, "Look, everyone in this neck of the woods except the Cree and the Blackfoot came from somewhere else, right? It's always someone's turn to be new. We just have to be patient with them, and let them have the same space and opportunity our ancestors got. Things will work out."
I didn't bother to check if he believed or agreed with me, but with any luck, I planted a seed there that might at least cause some additional consideration in the future.
In the meantime, I hope that St. Patrick's Day, despite its 'plastic paddy' culture and green beer (ugh), can serve as an example of how mistrusted newcomers can not only transform themselves into valued members of society but also become examples of hope for those who follow them here.
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