"Exploited in the Extreme, and Getting Nothing in Return"

"Imperial-colonial relationships are not limited to those between European empires and colonies elsewhere in the world but occurred extensively within Europe itself. Irish and Ukrainian historians explore these intra-European examples in a forthcoming book which argues that understanding this better undermines the usual normative distinction between good western European civic and bad eastern European ethnic nationalisms. Post-colonial and othering relationships apply in Europe too."

Paul Gillespie at The Irish Times compares Ukraine and Russia to Ireland and Britain.

"One of the Few Successful Irish Campaigns Against the British in Irish Republican History"

"During the Great Starvation of the 1840s, more than one million Irish emigrated from Ireland to America. These immigrants proved to be invaluable resources to the Union during the Civil War. And after the war, there were enough of them that only a foolhardy politician would ignore the causes held dear by such a large constituency.
"In this environment, the American branch of the Fenian movement thrived. Founded primarily to raise funds and obtain weaponry to send back to Ireland for a military rebellion against the English occupiers, the American Fenian organizers adopted a new strategy at the close of the Civil War. They would take the fight for Irish freedom to British Canada."

Dan Murphy at Irish Central recalls the 1866 "Irish Fenian invasion of Canada."

"What Happened to Irish America?"

"As the Irish left the subway tunnels, mills, and nursery wards for the middle and upper middle class, maybe we held hard to the wrong things. Step dancing classes and children's names with complicated Irish spelling, but not the old neighborhoods' practice of shared advancement. Donations to the Irish Studies Departments at prestigious colleges, but not commitment to the on-ramps that did us so much good."

Eileen Markey at The New Republic writes that Irish Americans "seem to have shed what was once a hallmark of Irish identity: a solidarity with the oppressed."

"The Story of Capitalism Begins Not in Smog-Laden Factory Cities but on the Farms of the English Countryside"

"To be sure, plenty of pre-capitalist societies have relied on some of what we see as the trappings of capitalism: money, trade, markets, and even wage labor. But capitalism itself, Cook argues (like many historians and theorists of capitalism, going back to at least Marx), is something very novel. 'Markets, commodities, and consumer goods,' he writes, 'while certainly necessary components, do not a capitalist society make.' For Cook, it is instead the rise of dividend-producing investments that defines capitalism. First land, and then people, came to be seen not merely as commodities to be bought and sold, but as capital, the price of which was increasingly tied not to some measure of innate value or even to hours of labor committed, but by the promise of future profits."

Adam Gaffney at the New Republic reviews Eli Cook's The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life.

"Is This the Strange Death of Irish America?"

"What happened to Irish America, that closed, intense world I know mainly from movies and books? How could I make sense of its drying up and blowing away, unmourned? Here's one version of its disappearance. At some point since 2000, I noticed that the right-wing chorus pontificating from screens in bars and shops was filled by men with names like Hannity, O'Reilly, and Buchanan. Nobody else seemed to care, so I let it go as one of those oddities that interested only me. Then came Bannon's ascension as Trump's eminence grise, and it seemed impossible to ignore. This can't be accidental. Why have these white men come to the fore, rather than a more multicultural Catholic cohort—a Pole, an Italian, a German, and so on?"

Van Gosse at History News Network looks for "an Irish America I can embrace."

"These People Don't Want to Separate Church and State, They Want to Institute a New Religion, Just with Themselves at the Helm"

"If the CIA or MI5 wanted to encourage a style of 'activism' that could consume an infinite amount of energy, yet was utterly ineffective at anything other than dividing people, it would be the prominence of this very type of politics. We need politics that unites us in our shared humanity, for the 99.9 per cent to come together and fight the 0.1 per cent who are stealing the wealth of the Earth, pitting the poor against the poor and entrapping us in ignorance. We do not need politics that explicitly sets out to divide us and perfectly mirrors what it claims to oppose."

Frankie Gaffney at The Irish Times asserts that "Identity politics is utterly ineffective at anything other than dividing people."

"Just Do Great Songs but Play Them Really Fast"

"Playing every weekend for 18 months had turned us into a real band, who could begin a song together and end at approximately the same time. Forgive me, I have used that line too many times in conversation over the last three decades. We were good but we didn’t really want to say it out loud. It wasn't part of our character to boast, brag or bullshit about the band. Davy Shannon didn't try to butter us up either, with any motivational moonshine from the producer’s manual. He put the microphones in the proper places, waited for us to tune up and pressed the play button at the same time as the record button and told us to go. We had the four songs on the tape before the day was done. They sounded OK to us. Even Feargal's singing didn't attract any mutterings from the corner where Billy and I were sitting."

The Guardian runs an excerpt from Michael Bradley's Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone.

Four Little Poor Prot Jaws Chicken

The New York Times reports the deaths of designer Sergio Rodrigues, historian Michael Katz, Jehovah's Witness Lillian Gobitas Klose, artist Marjorie Strider, restaurateur S. Treutt Cathy, actor Richard Kiel, recording engineer Cosimo Matassa, songwriter Bob Crewe, and politician Ian Paisley.

What's the Matter with Irish-Americans?

"In its finer moments, the Irish republicanism of the ’70s and ’80s sparked a global consciousness among a population of privileged white Americans whose cultural distinctness was fading fast. You didn’t have to support Angela Davis, Che Guevara and the PLO to understand that there was a historical relationship between their issues and the Irish Troubles. Ireland was the original colonized nation, and was subjected to a near-genocidal conquest centuries before the Holocaust. It was where the policies of the British Empire were road-tested for use in India and Africa, and where a subject population stripped of property and political rights was then blamed for its own poverty. The island’s native people, despite their white skin, were viewed as savage and barbaric because they did not speak English, practiced an alien religion and hewed to unfamiliar cultural customs. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, which produced a huge wave of Irish emigration to America, the Irish poor were starved to death or driven off their own land by the millions. Yes, the potato—a plant imported from South America by the British—had been ruined by blight, but the famine itself was avoidable. Its true cause was not the black fungus that turned the prátaí to inedible mush, but a pseudo-Darwinian, proto-Milton Friedman free market ideology, insisted upon at a time when Ireland as a whole was a net exporter of food."


Andrew O'Hehir in Salon calls on Irish-Americans "to get back that feeling we briefly had of being an immigrant group that was trying to confront its history, and to see the prison of whiteness for what it really is."

"Paul Ryan Never Learned"

"There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

"But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy."

Timothy Egan in The New York Times compares Paul Ryan to Sir Charles Trevelyan.

"No Greater Evil Than Interfering with Market Forces"

"Recognizing that the British handling of the famine was 'parsimonious, short-sighted, grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology' rather than deliberately genocidal is important because while powerful, paranoid, racist madmen like Hitler are relatively rare, our own time is replete with men like Trevelyan. The Moralists saw the famine as a combination of divine judgement on the Irish people and the market working itself out in accordance with God’s plan, an equation of brutal capitalism with pseudo-Christian piety that can be just as destructive as outright malevolence."

Laura Miller in Salon reviews John Kelly's The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People.

"There's No One as Irish as Barack Obama"

"Many of the visitors knock on the door of Henry Healy Jr., 24, the genial spokesman of Obama's current-day Irish kin. According to local records, Healy's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt was Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
"'So there's a definitive blood link between our family and Barack Obama. It makes me an eighth cousin,' declared Healy, a full-blooded Irishman with brown hair and blue eyes.
"'The resemblance is uncanny,' his friend Stephen Neill added.
"'Uncanny,' agreed Healy."

In the Los Angeles Times, Henry Chu writes about Moneygall, Ireland, the current U.S. president's "ancestral home."

Patrick Go Bragh

"Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn't rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn't even Irish."

Slate revives a 2000 assessment of Saint Patrick by David Plotz.