St Patrick's Day Special: Who Exactly Are The Irish Americans?

0:00David McWilliams: Coming up on the podcast today, it is St. Patrick's Day, so happy St. Patrick's Day to you. We are going to talk all about the Irish tribe, Irish diaspora, the people who are out there who are Irish, the 35 million Irish Americans, the Irish in Australia, the Irish in the UK. We welcome you all. Happy St. Patrick's Day, but it's going to be about the economics of the diaspora. That's all coming up in a couple of minutes. We've got two With its two juicy beef patties Three slices of melted cheese And tangy Big Arch sauce The Big Arch is what happens when you start Making a McDonald's burger and never Stop the Big Arch the most McDonald's McDonald's burger yet For a limited time Did you know you can save up to 70 % On your favorite brands every single day From Rebel.com Sells strollers, car seats Espresso machines, skincare care, cookware, everything you need for your home, your family, and your life, all for way less.

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1:33David McWilliams: We've got a fantastic offer for you for St. Patrick's Day. Well, actually for St. Patrick's Week. It's a 30 % discount on joining the David McWilliams podcast crew. It'll cost you about the price of a pint in Temple Bar per month. Now you get 30 % off that. And you can sign up at davemcwilliams.ie forward slash crew. You get ad-free listening. You get early access to all our episodes. You join our esteemed Q &A. You join our book club. You get free online monetary economics course, the course I give in Trinity. and you get first dibs on tickets for Dalky, Kilkenomics and upcoming live podcasts.

2:21David McWilliams: What's not to love? That is 30 % off all this week, St. Patrick's Week to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. And again, the address is davidmcwilliams.ie forward slash crew. Sign up and join the gang and we will learn, talk about and analyze economics together to celebrate St. Patrick's Week. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? Happy St. Patrick's Day to you. It is the 17th of March. It is our national day. And wherever you are, wherever you're listening, if you're one of us, or if you're not one of the tribe, We don't care.

3:14David McWilliams: Just happy St. Patrick's Day to you. Law, Bela, Horik. Johnny boy, how are you? Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. I'm in festive mode. But actually, Mac, I have to admit that I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with St. Patrick's Day. It might have to do with being dragged into the parades when I was a young fella. Were you ever brought in there? Not only did I go to the Paddy's Day parades, John, but I loved Paddy's Day because when you gave up curly whirlies for Lent, right? When you gave up curly whirlies and Twix's for Lent. That's true. It was a special dispensation for Irish kids on St. Patrick's Day that you could gorge yourself on chocolates and sweets and then go back on Lent.

3:55David McWilliams: So for me, St. Patrick's Day was a day of abundance. It was a degenerate day of curly whirlies, of all sorts of good stuff. Loads of opal fruits. buckets of open fruits, cans of lilt, the whole thing. Yeah, I remember that so well. But I also hate it. I remember being dragged into the parade. And I remember sitting there, and it's usually pits and rain. And you're going, what's the point in this? I never got it. I never got it. Young ones from Tlondalk and pretending they're Americans on top of milk floats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember that? But the point is, it is an extraordinary day because it is celebrated around the world.

4:43David McWilliams: I don't think there's any other nation that has managed to galvanize its marketing and branding department so well as ourselves. So you have St. Patrick's Day almost everywhere. And I mean, what has been interesting over the last few years is the way in which it's permeated through to European countries. I mean, where there's no... Yeah. Barbera's as well. It's a huge parade, apparently. The Red Legs. I've been down there. We've done a podcast on it before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So today's podcast is all going to be about the biggest chapter of the tribe, and that is the American chapter. It's going to be about Irish America.

5:22David McWilliams: Who are the Irish Americans? Where did they come from? When did they leave? What did they do to America? How were they politically? What were their main or are their main, let's say, nodes of power within the United States? Are they still a coherent group? Can you describe any group which is over 30, 35 million people as a coherent group? And what is the future of Irish America? That's what we're going to talk about today because... Considering as well, Mac, that, you know, you go through the kind of name list of American politicians, particularly in the current administration? Half them are Irish, MAGA Irish.

6:04David McWilliams: Well, that's going to be our question at the end. Is MAGA, in a sense, Irish America for the 21st century? Yeah. Is that what we look like? And if it is, how will the people in the home country, or as the Americans describe as the old country, deal with that? And, John, we're going to offer a, I think, quite innovative solution to allow the tribe outside to actually have a closer relationship with us in the home country for the 21st century. That is going to be our objective. But first, John, let us go and talk about Irish America because I know you've got first cousins there, you've got friends there, we've all got friends there, we've all got relations there.

6:46David McWilliams: But I want to go to a UCG historian, Brendan Moxivna, And he has done a huge amount of work about the Irish-American experience, the Irish-American history, and the chemistry that bonds Ireland to Irish America. For those of you who are not Irish, you'll know there's about 7 million of us now on the island, including the north. There are about 35 million Irish Americans. So the tribe outside is much bigger than we are. And we come together. It is phenomenal. And we come together on St. Patrick's Day. So let's go to Galway and talk to Brendan. Brendan, lovely to see you. I know it's a wet, wet, typical March afternoon in Ireland.

7:37David McWilliams: Let's talk about Irish America, Brendan. I know this is something that you've made an academic, almost life's work out of. Tell me, who are the Irish Americans, you know, in the sense of what are the waves of emigration? When do they start to go to the States? Where do they come from? And where do they go to? That's a big question, I suppose, David. If you want a simple answer to that, it's estimated by the experts, and I don't claim to be one, but the experts estimate that since 1600, some 8 million Irish people have emigrated to North America. They emigrated in the century before the revolution, about 300 ,000 of them.

8:19Between the revolution and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, 150 ,000. And then it really started to take off. About a million people emigrated in the economic downturn that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a million people between it and the famine. during the famine and the few years after it, say between 1845 and 55, 2 million emigrated, and then another 4 million by the Wall Street crash in 1929. And since then, the figures are harder to get precise figures for, and I know you're a numbers man, but it'd be north of half a million. It'd be north of half a million. So we've a long history of emigration to North America, and what's discernible in it is that there are clear patterns, clear spatial patterns and clear changes in the composition of it.

9:08In the century before the revolution, if you think of it as a weather map, the epicenter of the storm was in the north of the country. Presbyterians were being treated like second-class citizens. Their marriages weren't acknowledged as legally correct. They were excluded from political power and they said, damn it, we're leaving. So they resented the oppression of churchmen and large numbers of them emigrated to North America. Then as you go into the 19th century, particularly after 1815, the epicenter of the storm starts to move south out of the north and into Leinster. Leinster? Into the farmlands of Leinster where farmland was being turned over, where tillage was being turned over to pasture.

9:55Those people started to leave at the poor, people who couldn't get a niche in farming. And then with the famine, the epicentre moved into the badlands of the west of Ireland. And it has remained or did remain in the badlands of the west of Ireland down through the 20th century, essentially. So the west of Ireland generally, the wild Atlantic way, call it what you will, some parts of the North Midlands, southern Ulster as well. So we have this big

10:24David McWilliams: Presbyterian, what they call the Scots, Ulster Scots in America? The notion of calling them Scots-Irish, that's really a kind of a 19th century affectation. The Presbyterians who left Ireland in the 18th century, who left Ireland in the first half of the 19th century, they were happy to call themselves Irish. You travel across Pennsylvania, you'll see a letter, Kenny, Pennsylvania, Rafou, Pennsylvania, Straban, Tyrone. You see all these names from Ireland that these people brought with them in the 18th century. And they were very proud of being Irish. So when people came in the 18th century, we'll begin with the Presbyterians, when the Presbyterians, who predominated in that great outflow in the 18th century, when they came, some of them settled in the East Coast cities, particularly around Philadelphia.

11:11These were hubs of the Enlightenment in the latter years of the century. But large numbers of them too moved out onto the frontier. Large numbers of them moved into Appalachia. They moved down the Great Wagon Road to Staunton, Virginia. So they started to people the South. And it's that combination of these kind of God-fearing frontiersmen and the enlightened people in the cities that really the combination of them gave birth to the American Revolution. So America owes something to the old world. But it's important when we say that, like that if the old world made the new or had a hand in the making of the new, that the new world too had a hand in the shaping of what was happening in Ireland.

11:57Those people who went to America and who ended up fighting the British ended up fighting the king. They had friends, they had family at home. The people at home looked upon the king's war in America as a war upon their brethren. And people at home in Ireland initially organized paramilitary companies, volunteer companies to defend the country in the event of a French or Spanish invasion or American privateers raiding Irish ports. And these volunteer companies became a vehicle for radical patriotism. And it utterly transformed Irish politics. I can give you one simple example of that that will resonate with you as an economist.

12:36In 1779, there was a big debate in the Irish Parliament about whether Britain should get from Ireland a long money bill or a short money bill.

12:45David McWilliams: Explain that to me. Explain that to me now, the long money and short money. What period would Parliament grant money to the British Exchequer for? What tax would they raise for them? And the Irish Parliament, the patriot element in the Irish Parliament, showed backbone and they refused to give the British what they were asking for. And when news reached the city of Derry, as far from London as you can get, but in an intensely Presbyterian part of the world, when news reached the city of Derry, the true-born patriot paddies of Derry, that's how they described themselves, true-born patriot paddies, they celebrated that news by drinking Irish whiskey in every possible modification, mixed, plain, out of Irish naggins and out of glasses from which the feet had been broken off and the want supplied by potatoes.

13:35So you have paddies drinking Irish whiskey out of glasses propped up by potatoes. and in that you just see a complete subversion of British stereotypes of the Irish. It's like the Boston Tea Party, they dressed as Native Americans. So there you had Catholic, Protestant and Dessentor on the Diamond of Derry expressing pride and being Irish and that would continue through the 1780s with profound effects for our politics. At this juncture we get the birth of Irish republicanism. So if we have people at the moment in some quarters believing that the involvement of Presbyterians in the American Revolution is something the DUP should be proud of, I think we can all say that this is something those of us who admire another tradition, a republican tradition, can be proud of too.

14:25David McWilliams: Wow. So what you're saying is, I mean, this fascinates me that, first of all, the Presbyterians who left the North were at the vanguard of the anti-royalist putsch that became the American Revolution, the 250th anniversary of which we are celebrating this year. Yes. George Washington's favorite general was Walter Stewart, who was from the city of Derry. He was godfather to his children. Walter Stewart came home after the war and lived for a period in the Northwest. The first member of the American general staff to die in combat was Richard Montgomery. Every place in America called Montgomery is named after him.

15:03He was born in Concealy, but his brother was the MP for County Donegal. He was Alexander Montgomery of Convoy. When his brother died in combat in America at the Battle of Quebec, he went into the Irish Parliament dressed in mourning clothes for his brother, who died a rebel to the king. Blair McLenahan, who provisioned the revolutionary army in America from Philadelphia, major merchant, and he too was from Convoy. Nesbitt and Cunningham, another major Philadelphia firm involved in the revolution, the Barclays of Straban, consuls to France, that the involvement of people from our little country in the American Revolution is second to none.

15:42David McWilliams: So we get the American Revolution, we have the Presbyterian involvement from the northeast of the country. They move because... The north generally. The north general, but they move because because under the official title, i.e. the Anglican Church, the Presbyterians didn't get a fair crack of the whip. They were regarded as second-class citizens. So there's a push factor. What is the pull factor? And then we're talking about the pull factor for the more typical Irish Catholic emigration in the years afterwards. But what's pulling the Presbyterians away from the North? We know it's pushing them.

16:17Yeah, I think if you look at the way they wrote about it, what you can find is that Irish people, whether they were Presbyterian or Catholic, when they went abroad, most especially to North America, they tended, and this has been argued by the great historian Kirby Miller, they tended to look upon their migration as exile that was forced upon them. Now, for sure, there were opportunities for them in America, but there weren't opportunities for them at home. So Push and Pull is a bit, it's a bit schematic, but their understanding of what had happened is that they weren't being treated fairly at home and to Ireland they had to be the Jew.

16:57And Catholics would then, at a later stage, when they emigrated in very large numbers, they'd have the same notion of it.

17:04David McWilliams: So let's look then at the post-Napoleonic period. So we're talking about the period from, let's say, 1815 onwards. It's coinciding with a massive, massive population boom in Ireland. And what you're saying is the sort of the wheel turns around and it's farmers from Leinster that go to America. Yeah, it's people who couldn't get a niche in the emerging economy in Leinster at the time. There's a depressed agricultural economy at the time and people start to get out. Tradesmen too start to get out. And you get large emigration at that time in the region of 1 million from across the country as a whole.

17:44You alluded to the population of the country having increased. The population of the country is often guessed, and we're essentially guessing here, estimated, at about 2.5 million in the middle of the 19th century. It had doubled by the end of the 18th century. It went from 2.5 to about 5 million around 1800. And it's hitting about 8.5 million at the time of the famine. Okay, about 1845, it hits about 8.5 million. And the population of Ireland has never achieved that population since. A million die, a million emigrate. The population of the country falls due to the million who die and the million who emigrate.

18:24But then there is mass migration in the wake of the famine, and there is less and later marriage among those who remain at home. So by the end of the century, the population of Ireland has fallen to about 4.4 million people. There are more people in New York born in Dublin than there are in Dublin. It's shocking. And the population will never again, the population of our little green island, never again went above 4.5 million until the early 1970s. There was a survey of European nuptiality done in the 1960s. And the lowest rate of nuptiality, the lowest marriage rate in Europe, was in my home county.

19:06and marriage was strongly correlated with sex in Donegal so there was less sex in Donegal than anywhere else in Europe at the time. You'd think the lowest nuptiality rate...

19:16David McWilliams: We're glad that that's all changed now though apparently. I've heard. I've been up in Letterkenny recently. I'll let you edit that one out.

19:27You'd expect the lowest rate of nuptiality in Europe to have been in a fancy arrondissement of Paris where people were cohabiting but it wasn't. it was in our little corner of the world. So the population tipped over 4.5 million in the 1970s, but that recovery in population stalled, as you will well remember, David. It stalled in the 1980s when there was again mass migration, including a very high level of emigration, legal documented and illegal undocumented to the United States. And it's only when peace came falling slowly in the 1990s, the late 1990s, it's only when prosperity came and a quick-witted economist came up with a term for that prosperity.

20:14It's only then that we saw the population really start to recover in a sustained way. There have been blips. The big blip was the last economic downturn, 2008, 2009. But when people went away then, they didn't go to the United States. It was harder to get into the United States day then. So they found the warmth of a southern sun. They started to emigrate to Australia. And now for the first time, there's nearly as many Irish-born people in Australia as there are in the United States.

20:47David McWilliams: Yeah, no, it's completely changed. But what is significant, I think it's about 110 ,000 or something like that. But what is significant in that figure is that the Irish born in the United States are now older. Yes. While the Irish born in Australia are young and better looking than the rest of us. Yes. No, we've definitely, we were in Australia. John's about to go next week. We were in Australia. I was in Australia last year. And again, the footprint is extraordinary. The Irish footprint, particularly the younger ones. Let's focus now on the Irish Americans. Okay. So we know who they were. We know that there's three massive waves, Presbyterians, then Leinster Catholics in the main, and then the West Coast in and around the famine and thereafter.

21:27David McWilliams: Where did they go? Where did they settle and what did they do? Okay, the people who are emigrating, and I think your question is really driving towards the latter half of the 19th century and through into the 20th. So the people who are emigrating in the wake of the famine, the prime destinations for those people are urban and industrial America. So the cities of the north, essentially, the places that would become the heartlands of industrial America. So I can look at my own family. My forebears from West Donegal emigrated in large numbers to the coalfields of Pennsylvania. So anthracite was discovered in Pennsylvania before the famine.

22:09It was discovered in 1820. The big merchants of Philadelphia, who are Irish Presbyterians in origin, they knew where they could get big hairy fellas to dig the canals and to dig the coal. They could get it out of the Sperrins. They could get it out of County Derry, County Tyrone, and County Donegal. So they brought these people over. They dug the canals, they made the railroads, and they dug the coal. So they were going to do that work before the famine. America is still an agricultural country. It'll only be in 1920 that America becomes predominantly urban. But we were an urban people, predominantly, not exclusively, but very heavily in America.

22:49These people had really tough, hard lives. You're born in the west of Ireland, and you're taken out of it, you leave it, and you go into a very rapacious industrial capitalism in its early stages in Scranton or Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I remember being in the Irish section of Hazleton, a mine town in Pennsylvania. And the Irish section of Hazleton, the old Irish section, was called Donegal Hill. The graveyard, you'd walk through it and it was McFadden's and Sweeney's and O'Donnell's and Gallagher's. And in it, there was a grave of a fellow who emigrated just before the famine, Cumbie Brestland.

23:31And carved on it was a shovel and a pick and a drill. when he died about 1880. It was carved by one of his sons, and he had an inscription on it. Forty years I worked with pick and drill, down in the mine against my will. The coal king's slave, but now it's past. Thanks be to God, I'm free at last. So these were hard, hard lives. And the majority of Irish people who went over, whether they were women working in cotton mills, whether they were domestic servants, whether they were miners, whether they worked on railroads, they were tough, hard immigrant lives. You know, Bob Dylan, I pity the poor immigrant.

24:11You know, you're at the bottom of the heap. And the Irish remained in the blue collar section for a very, very long time. So mining, which my forebears went into, you know, mining was very well paid, but it was also intensely dangerous. And a lot of people died young. But that's what the Irish were going into. And getting a niche in something like that, they could then move across the continent as the American Leviathan expanded and gobbled up the continent. So we had a student here lately in Galway who did a wonderful master's degree on a group of people from northwest Donegal who went out to the coalfields of Pennsylvania, who moved out then to live for a period with relatives who were farming near Springfield, Illinois.

24:56This is in the 1880s, but continued on up into the Rocky Mountains to mine for silver and lead in Leadville, Colorado. So they were in a place in the 1880s that had a deeply multi-generational Irish community of men and women. They went out to a smaller Irish community on the plains involved in agriculture, and they ended up in a boomtown, predominantly male environment high up in the Rockies, where one of them wrote home about the cold and how people were dropping like flies.

25:30David McWilliams: So you have blue-collar Irish America, defined by the trade unions, the church, the army also plays a big part in the Irish experience in the United States. And explain to me this intersection, because what intrigued me was when I look at other rural people who emigrated, German people, Scandinavian people in the main, Swedes and Norwegians, they went from rural Germany to become farmers in America. We went from maybe even a much more rural, almost quasi-feudal society, and we became urban very quickly. We organized very quickly. We got political very quickly. Tell me that story. Well, I think part of the story is often said that the American Civil War was an important step up for the Irish and American, that they got into the army and they served with distinction in the Civil War and so on.

26:21But the organizations and the bodies that you mentioned, if you think of the great Bing Crosby movies and Barry Fitzgerald movies, Going My Way, you know, the power of the Catholic Church in the ethnic community, the power of the labor union, you think of Marlon Brando on the waterfront. So you have the church, the labor unions, but you also have City Hall. Okay. And you have the Democratic Party. This is the machine, as it's called. The machine. So you have access to jobs as firemen, as policemen. You have a route into education, be it teaching in Catholic schools or city schools. And so I would say, yes, the church, the labor union, city hall, city hall part of the broader state system, that they're very important vehicles for the Irish community over a long period of time.

27:11but that world is fading as quickly as young people today could pick Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby out of a lineup.

27:20David McWilliams: Well that's very true that's very true but let me come back I want to come back to that core of the Irish American experience. I want to locate it in around the 1950s post the second world war the Catholic church is very strong the labor unions are very very strong the democratic party is very strong it's a two it's a two horse race and every now and then they get their man. It's a golden age on the one hand. You've had FDR. You've got the New Deal. The war is over. People are doing well. The GIE bill has got them all houses with the white picket fences. It's great. Except that the places that they went in large numbers to the coalfields of Pennsylvania, to the factories of Motown, Detroit, Michigan, where they were building cars, the glory days of those places was then behind them.

28:12So the Irish that were in those places start to move away from those places. They move south to some degree following industry. They go west and a lot of those older Irish settlements fade away and you don't get the same ethnic concentrations of Irish people as you move towards the end of the century that previously existed. There are some in New York and other places, but it's not the same. There's white flight to the suburbs of some of the big cities as well. So America changes in that golden age, you know, that comes out of the New Deal, and the older communities fade away. They become the Rust Belt.

28:54And those people in the Rust Belt, the blue collar ethnics, as the political scientists would call them or used to call them, they are the people who voted in large number for Ronald Reagan. And that began this kind of drift away of people of Irish backgrounds from the Democratic Party.

29:12David McWilliams: Now, we're marking this, obviously, because it's St. Patrick's Day today, and the Taoiseach will be doing the shamrock, doing the jig with Donald Trump, etc. What we're talking about is the progression of Irish America. We are still talking about a group of maybe 35 million. Would that be right, Brendan? on. But what does it mean, David? That's my next question is what does it mean? We have all these people who are descended from the 8 million we believe to have emigrated to North America over the last three and a half centuries. But how many of them have a deep and meaningful consciousness of being Irish in a way that activates or activates their political political lives you know to what extent is there an irish american community in america now what do you think i mean you've this is your life's work you've studied it you know the culture you know the history you know the numbers you know the people what's your sense um my sense is that a lot of it has gone away like the old ethnic communities have gone the old ethnic urban communities working class communities there are some left there are some pocket.

30:26You've got Southie, you've got a couple of other places, but it's not what it was. I went to see where an uncle of mine died young in Plymouth, Pennsylvania in the first decade of the 20th century. I went in the first decade of the 21st century and the little mining town that he lived in, in a little miner's house that's still there, high up on a hill over Plymouth near Wilkesbury, that's now inhabited by people who are of Hispanic extraction, Latin American extraction who were in the New York metropolitan area and have moved further out. And they're working now in low-paying industries such as Amazon and other delivery companies and the like, because Hazleton is a hub and that part of America is a big hub for the major distribution companies.

31:13So it's dissolved, David. And that's my impression. I'd be interested to know what yours is. But I would say that in our time, in the 1990s, and since to a degree, the investment of the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton in our peace process kept America engaged with Ireland. The opportunities that opened up for American capital around the same time that was independent of that, that continued to engage America. And we have benefited from that. We've benefited from American investment in our economy. We've benefited from American investment in our peace process. But I don't see in the same meaningful way Irish-American community the way there once was Irish-American community.

32:08A lot of the county associations that were once prominent in the major cities, you know, the Galway Association, the Mayo Association and the like, they are now folding. Yes. A lot of the old fraternal organizations, the Hibernians and whatnot, Knights of Columbanus, that's a different world, you know. You were in the United States in the late 1980s, I was there in the early 1990s, I was in college, you were working or whatever. And even then, that was for old people, you know, it wasn't something that was connecting to an awful lot of young people. So we haven't had large numbers of working class Irish people emigrating to the United States since the early 1990s.

32:49Those who go now go to work for major corporations and they move with the logic of major corporations who sort their visas for them. They go to the Silicon Valleys, they go to the American South, and you don't get the concentrations that you once had or that you might find in Melbourne or Sydney.

33:07David McWilliams: Can I also ask you about the politics? I agree with you completely on the diffuse nature now of Irish America and the sense that once you lose those ethnic regions, those Irish areas, you lose the coherence of the message, you lose a bit of the Catholic side of the, you lose the Democratic Party, and the Labour unions are nowhere to be seen in the United States. So all those three central pillars are... The Labour unions have been seen, like the Teamsters at the last election, the head of the Teamsters turned up at the Republican convention to endorse Donald Trump. I remember, I remember. I want to take this.

33:45David McWilliams: Is Irish America now MAGA and vice versa? No, I wouldn't say that. I would say, like, if you were to look across Labour unions, you know, there were unions that heavily invested in our peace process. You know, they were very engaged by the peace process. So I think it's important to say that, that there is an affection for Irish people and a concern for Ireland. We never invaded anybody. In terms of what people of Irish descent in America look like, they look like the rest of America by and large. Half of them watch Fox, half of them watch CNN. And the two things that they watch most together are their 401k and the price of gas.

34:28And the Super Bowl. Yeah.

34:33David McWilliams: But okay, I want to come back to this idea that white working class America, as we know, has moved to the MAGA movement in big numbers. And it's answered the call to MAGA because MAGA, in a way, has addressed their concerns. I mean, the Democratic Party's, you know, this bizarre alliance of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. That is as far away from blue-collar America as you can get. And the Democratic Party's fixation on bathrooms and identity issues didn't do it any favors with working-class Americans. You know, like identity politics and gender identity. It's only going to take you so far in the real political world, however important those issues may be.

35:20So the Democratic Party has shed its connection to working people has lessened. It needs massively to improve its messaging and to speak to ordinary working people in a clearer way. To listen to them.

35:37David McWilliams: My question is, does Irish America now look more like Steve Bannon than George Clooney? It's a terrifying thought, really, isn't it? My point is, they're both Irish Americans. They're both of the same generation. they are both very, very proud of being Irish Americans. They talk about it. Their surnames give it away on the pair of them. But they're both very different. Well, one is good looking. It's certainly not the Irish America of Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby and Going My Way. You know, it's a very different Irish America. Nobody has real figures, you know, and there are no real figures because it's a diffuse thing we're talking about, identity.

36:19but I think I'd like to think I hope that something Timothy Egan the American journalist writes for the New York Times I remember him quoting somebody once saying well if you can't support the underdog what's the point in being Irish and so I do think that within Irish America among people of Irish descent in America there is to some extent among some of them a consciousness that their people came from elsewhere that they didn't have it easy that they felt they'd been poorly treated elsewhere and that there is some memory of that that can feed into their understanding of the world but yeah the ticker ticks between the George Clooney's and the liberal politics and the Steve Bannon's but you want to get back to the fella getting off finishing up teaching the fella coming off a shift as a policeman the fella teaching in a in a university the woman working in a factory you want to get it back to ordinary people if you want to get elected and the democratic party has banked an awful lot and getting hispanic votes and i'm not sure if those votes will necessarily go to the

37:37David McWilliams: democratic party brendan before we go i'm going to ask you so we were talking about the both of us were in the states, various states, you know, late 80s, early 90s. And this was a period when lots of things in America atrophied. Lots of America's sense of itself, lots of its politics, lots of its economics, perceptions of equality, perceptions of fairness, etc. changed. I think the Irish-American experience changed with them, and it became, as we said, more diffuse. At the same time, I sense the Irish state has grabbed hold of St. Patrick's Day in a sort of an enthusiastic, slightly neurotic enthusiasm, the sort of which we didn't see back then from the state side.

38:18David McWilliams: Because as you said, it was more the sort of the parochial, the collegiate, the county fraternities. where do you think Irish America or where do you think it goes do you think it remains a coherent mass do you think it's just something that Americans turn up for on St Patrick's Day or do you think it is something that we could in Ireland actually engineer to be closer to us in the future than it is now I think there's another aspect to that question it's how should the state you know or how should Ireland north and south how should we engage with America now that the we accept the flow of Irish people into America has certainly dwindled the people in America don't encounter Irish-born people with the same frequency that they did in the 1980s when you were there or the 1990s you know but there aren't that many irish-born people there so in terms of how how we should engage or activate irish america i think that's extremely hard um i do know that the that the second biggest thing on the internet is genealogy yeah people want to know where they came from yeah here at the university of galway we have a project where we're creating a massive database of Irish immigrant letters.

39:43We get a lot of traffic from the United States. They're immigrant letters from North America. I have quipped that genealogy being the second biggest thing on the internet, the university wouldn't let us do the first, so we had to do genealogy.

39:58David McWilliams: I can see you in an OnlyFans account, Brendan, straight away.

40:04David McWilliams: Don't knock it till you've tried it, man. Don't knock it till you've tried it. moving briskly forward, I would say that the state can look at things like that. It can look at the arts, look at the humanities, but not in the kind of mechanistic way it did around the time of the last crash. These are the things that can connect people to Ireland. Our environment can connect people to Ireland. Our history, our literature, these are things that do have an intrinsic interest. But you can't keep looking at this imaginary group of people who are descended from people who left Ireland. You have to look at America in totality.

40:40So you look at a bus tour of Ireland, you go to a hotel and you look at the people from America who are coming here. They're all races, all cultures, all creeds within America. So you have to deal with America, not just the people that you imagine are your Mary Robinson's diaspora.

40:59David McWilliams: Brendan, on that very, very fine description, wonderful stuff. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Good morning. Happy St. Patrick's to you too, David.

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43:26Incredible story and really well told by Brendan there, actually. But the Irish-American identity is being diluted constantly and it doesn't have the same. You know, when you and I went to America back in the kind of 80s and 90s, you know, I did loads of trips over there. I actually had a green card and subsequently gave it back. They didn't like that.

43:50David McWilliams: You are now going to galvanize an entire fan club of your own. and you're the only man I know who gave it back since there you go, I don't want this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But America then was a very, very different place than it is now. And that whole idea of Irishness in America seemed to hold more sway than it does now. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the problem is actually one of geography, not history. But basically, as Brendan said there, like once an ethnic minority leaves their own self-imposed ghetto, whether it's a geographical ghetto or a psychological ghetto or a political ghetto, and they begin to become members of the normal American middle classes, which is what the Irish have done.

44:38David McWilliams: That sense of us against them, that we're fighting, that we're all connected, that we have a sort of a parallel power structure that goes with being an ethnic minority, that begins to dissipate. But the interesting thing is the story doesn't end there because what happens in Ireland is there's a slightly fatalistic view, which is the following. Oh, my God, not so many Irish people are going there, bar my own son who's there, right? And all his mates are there, right? Okay. So it's not all over for Irish America. Wrecking the place. Wrecking the place. Exactly. By any stretch of the imagination, right?

45:11David McWilliams: But I don't think we should be that fatalistic. I think you can be proactive. So typically what happens in Ireland is we are reactive. We're like, oh, it's terrible, and Irish people aren't going there, and the bonds aren't as strong as they were, and there's not so much we can do about it. I think that's wrong. I think that we should see Ireland, if we value the tribe, and I really believe the tribe is one of our hidden powers, that we should see Ireland as the recharging battery for Irishness of the tribe. that Ireland is not just a geographical location, not just an island off the northwest coast of Europe, but it is an entity.

45:52David McWilliams: It is a psychological, it is a historical, it is a cultural, it is an emotional place. And we have a responsibility to the tribe. And I was really struck. And again, don't come down to me, listener, because I know saying that anything good comes out of Israel will be regarded as almost a red rag to a bull. So I take that. But bear with me. Countries with large diasporates, the Croats, the Georgians, the Armenians in particular, and the Israelis have done something interesting, right? The Armenians, the Georgians, the Israelis said, look, we are nothing without the support of our tribe abroad. So in effect, it's a symbiotic relationship between, let's say, in the case of Israel, the country of Israel, the state of Israel, and the Jews abroad.

46:37David McWilliams: Now, of course, that is already a political hot potato because you have Palestinians there. And they have an equal right to the country. But we don't have any Palestinians. There is no Palestinian tribe around. This is our country. We all live here. We're all from here. So we shouldn't have to worry about, you know, making comparisons with Israel. But what the Israelis do very well is they have a thing called birthright. And what they realized was that their connection as well with Jewish people outside of Israel was becoming less and less strong in the 1980s and 1990s for a variety of reasons.

47:14David McWilliams: And only in the late 1990s, they came up with something and they were copying the Armenians and the Georgians, and particularly the Armenians, because the Armenians have a very big diaspora abroad, huge diaspora abroad. They've also, the Armenians suffered a genocide in 1918, and their tribe was thrown all over the world, right? Including the Kardashians. Exactly, John. Exactly, exactly. So what they decided was that they would bring, I'm talking about the Israelis, the Armenians have done it too, but the Israelis do it better, more systematically. Their idea was, why don't we bring Jewish kids from America, from Argentina, from Britain, from all over the world to Israel for a 10-day free holiday, right?

48:02Yeah.

48:02David McWilliams: And what they do is that allows them to solder on an identity with Israel, which becomes real and alive if they've experienced it, right? Yeah, yeah. And this works amazingly well for them. That's the kind of ultimate soft power. And it is an amazing propaganda tool. Complete propaganda thing. Yeah. But it's a bit like us going to Irish college as well. Well, exactly. But the best form of propaganda is word of mouth. Yeah. That is the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know if your propaganda is working, if I convince you and you convince somebody else and you convince somebody else and you go for a drink and say, wow, I spent some time.

48:40David McWilliams: So what the Israelis do is they take American Jews They bring them to Israel. They show them a great time. They have a total laugh. They probably have a little fling with somebody because they're young. They're from the age of 15 and 20. And they go back to America feeling a little bit more Israeli. So again, as I said to our listeners, stop, take a deep breath. This is not saying you should support Israel. This is saying, look at what they do in this instance. And is this interesting for us? I think what we should do is aim to do exactly the same thing. to take Irish American children, teenagers, back here for a 10-day free holiday.

49:20David McWilliams: Maybe do it in conjunction with GAA clubs because then you can actually get them to play a bit of gah. It's a voluntary organization. They can stay with the family. They get really embedded into the Irish experience. They have fun here. They make friends here. They go away. And those Irish Americans go back to Chicago, go back to California, go back to New York, and they are a little bit more Irish. and they feel a bit closer to us. And actually, in fact, I think we should give them passports as well, the kids who come here, right? Because we're giving everyone else bloody passports. We might as well give Irish Americans who are culturally proximate to us, right?

49:57David McWilliams: And if you think about it, the Israelis - You might even get them on the football team. You might even get them on the football team. Exactly, exactly. But the point is, it costs about five grand for those holidays, right? This is how the Israelis do it, right? and let's say you get 20 ,000 of them multiplied by five grand. Yeah. That's 100 million euros a year, right? It costs. But think about how much money the government is getting in from the multinationals. Yeah. We talked about Eli Lilly gave, I think it was 3.8 billion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So 100 million, and of course, because it's a tourist concept, we pay for them, they come back here, but they have money in their own pocket.

50:41David McWilliams: Their own parents would have given them money. So the multiplier effect for tourism is hugely positive. You get Aer Lingus to fly them over, and you create this, again, this new Irish experience that those Irish American kids have. So just when that sense of proximity to the old country is disappearing, suddenly what you do is you re-inject the new generation with a sense of Irishness, and that new generation are the generation that carries the Irish flag into the next generation. And you could even get the likes of Eli Lilly and Apple and those to sponsor this trip. And they can visit the Apple plant and all.

51:21So they actually see how the American investment here is working and operates.

51:29David McWilliams: You could have 10 days and you could set aside the dullest day of the 10 days and go and look at a pharmaceutical factory, John. I'm thinking more that they should snog Irish people. they should have a laugh all that stuff yeah yeah okay when you put it like that that's fair enough I just go back and say is there really really a boring bunch of you guys who wants to go and look at a pharmaceutical factory it's the nerd of me coming out but what I'm thinking look you know a hundred million is nothing because it'll be reinvested back in the country because it's a tourist party you're basically giving them money to spend on us yeah so it's a net gain to us number one number two if people get upset about think it's a lot of money like we're spending a billion euros on Ukrainians a year this is a tenth of that to spend on Irish Americans also what it does is it gives us access to a whole new labor market over there in the United States a whole new talent market it means that when they're thinking about the world they're emotionally a little bit more attached to Ireland and ultimately this is the sort of thing that creative economies do because as I always say the economy exists in our minds this is the key yes When we learn economics, it's like learning about a machine, right?

52:43David McWilliams: This is why economics has taught in school is basically gives the wrong message because we basically say the economy is machine. We're going to turn you into mechanics. This is how you understand the machine, right? But the economy isn't a physical thing. It's a psychological thing as well. The economy resides in our minds and it's an emotional thing. So if we were this St. Patrick's Day to do something positive for Irish America. It would be to set up and execute as part of an Irish diaspora program. By the way, I suggested this years ago at the Global Irish Forum. Yeah. How did that go down?

53:24David McWilliams: Well, it was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. But of course, balls were dropped and all that sort of stuff, right? But to come back to the big idea, you'd spend 100 million euros every year on reconnecting Irish people with Ireland, recharging the Irishness of the Irish tribe, and then you get paid back in spades in the future as those people become closer to us, number one. And number two, you arrest the decline in the relationship between the tribe and the island. And you are actively doing something, and it's a dynamic, positive thing to do. And in terms of finance, it's A, self-financing, and B, the state has the money anyway.

54:09David McWilliams: So that's what we should do. We should call it... Bring it all back home. Bring it all back. There you go, Johnny Boy. Bring it all back home. Dylan. We might even adopt Dylan. So let's leave it there. Bring it all back home. Happy St. Patrick's Day, and we will talk to you on Thursday.

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