An Explosion of Admiration for All Things Irish

There’s no other day like it in any cultural or religious calendar. On March 17 of every year, one of the largest, most powerful nations in the world pays homage to a small, damp island with a population that barely scrapes past 5 million. Out come the shamrock pins, the tricolored flags and “Erin Go Bragh” T-shirts. Parades snake through multiethnic crowds lining the main streets of every major city, fueled by pipe-and-drum strains of “Danny Boy” and “McNamara’s Band.” Grocery stores run out of corned beef, video stores run out of “The Quiet Man,” liquor stores run out of Bushmills and Irish bars run out of standing room. For 24 hours, every American with a drop of Irish blood, or Irish whiskey, is suddenly filled with a devotion to the Emerald Isle, the old sod, that isle of Saints and Scholars.

But lately, such devotion has become so ubiquitous that this St. Patrick’s Day seems almost redundant. In the years since the extraordinary success of “Riverdance,” American pop culture has been thoroughly seduced by the penny whistle, the fiddle and that lilting brogue. Never in the history of their race have the Celts occupied such a position of cultural influence, filling the world with Irish movies, Irish music, Irish memoirs, novels and poems, Irish dancing, Irish jewelry, Irish documentaries.

Among Southern Californians, vacationing in the Republic has become so popular that Aer Lingus last year inaugurated its first direct L.A.-to-Dublin / Shannon flight. The Claddagh ring--with its two hands clasping a crowned heart--has become a widely preferred wedding band alternative, names like Aidan, Eamonn, Fiona and Siobhan fill birth announcements from Newark to Newport Beach, and Irish step-classes are fast becoming a must among the Gymboree set.

Certainly, the U.S. involvement in the Good Friday Peace Accord, and the subsequent still-unsettled negotiations, has kept Irish politics on the front pages for the last two years, although as with Israel, the creation of a free and unified Ireland has always found a base of economic support in the States.

For those of us who grew up in homes where the front doorways stood surrounded by the triumvirate of the Irish blessing, a crucifix and a picture of either Our Lady or His Holiness, this Celtic explosion is at once exhilarating and discombobulating. As if that beloved but undeniably eccentric uncle had suddenly become president or a rock star or something.

Even I, with a third-generation genealogy that includes such diversity as McNulty, Fitzgerald, Hayes and Halloran, find myself gaping at this ever-increasing infatuation with my heritage and wondering: Why is everyone so crazy about the Irish suddenly?

“No wave comes out of nowhere,” says Thomas Cahill, author of “How the Irish Saved Civilization” and “Desire of the Everlasting Hills” (both Doubleday). “Americans have always had an attachment to the Irish as free spirits, as people who seemed to enjoy life more than others.”

Especially in American literature, he says, the Irish have represented the strong-willed, unconventional character.

“Look at ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” he says. “Why would Margaret Mitchell, in an attempt to write the Iliad of the South, choose an Irish American woman as her main character? Scarlett is completely unrepresentative of Southern culture, but she’s much more interesting. More outsized. Or look at McMurphy in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Aside from his tripping, [Ken] Kesey is essentially a Midwestern Lutheran and yet he chose an Irishman for his protagonist. Because the feeling is, if you’re stuck in a mental institution, it’s better to have an Irishman around to make it fun.”

Yet the true Irish experience has been anything but fun, as recent additions to the oeuvre, including “Angela’s Ashes,” “The Irish in America” and “The Butcher Boy,” have made very clear. From the time of Cromwell’s invasion in the middle of the 17th century until the creation of the southern Republic in 1922, Ireland was essentially a country enslaved, its language, religion, even its music and dance declared illegal by its English rulers. By the late 1700s, Cahill notes, all the Irish gentry had fled to Europe, “leaving behind a dispirited peasantry. Made even more dispirited by the subsequent famine.”

The Potato Famine, which lasted from 1846 to 1853, decimated the Irish people--more than a million died of starvation and disease, and another million emigrated, many to the United States. The emigration did not end with the famine; by the end of the century the population dropped from 9 million to 4 million.

“It is the largest social catastrophe of the 19th century,” says Bob Hughes, a screenwriter whose movie, “St. Patrick: The Irish Legend,” will air on the Fox Family Channel tonight. “But most Irish Americans don’t know what happened or how they got here. Because when the Irish arrived in America, they were a raped people. Imagine a rape victim who never gets counseling. They didn’t want to talk about it. Many felt ashamed, because they had left family behind.”

Traditions Left Behind

Hughes, who is now writing a drama for Fox about the famine, says this silence extended to much of the Irish culture--Irish immigrants simply wanted to forget what they had left behind, and so for at least a generation, many traditions went into hibernation.

Not that the Irish are a silent people. Despite their history of oppression and poverty, they have produced some of the finest literature in the English language at a rate amazingly disproportionate to the diminutive size of their population. And the lyricism has ever been entwined with the politics--would the world have paid so much attention to the seemingly unending Troubles without the words of Yeats to turn bloody turmoil into “a terrible beauty”?

Perhaps it is this image of the Irish as the ultimate underdog rebels, fighting the historical enemy of American freedom--the British--that captures our imagination, especially now that it would seem the underdog has won.

“The Irish have finally circumvented the British,” Cahill says. “By entering the European community, they have renewed confidence. They are no longer economic outsiders, yet they still maintain that Old World charm.”

The prosperity-fueled confidence, and productivity, of the newly dubbed Celtic Tiger has occurred at a time when many Americans, strung out on technology, are seeking something a bit more substantial, a bit more ancient.

In North Hollywood, the Celtic Arts Center has seen a 30% growth in the past year alone. Angelenos of all ethnic backgrounds flock to the center’s Monday-night programs of Celtic language and dance held at the Raven Theater, seeking community and something more. (While the term Celtic most often refers to Irish, Scottish or Welsh culture, it also includes those peoples of Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Brittany and Gallia.)

“People identify with the simplicity of the life, with the agrarian roots,” says Thom MacNamara, vice president of the center. “Even with the recent prosperity, the Irish have a tether to the past that people here want. Modern society has lost its connection to the spiritual world. In Ireland, it’s right there, in the culture and especially in the music.”

The music, with its striking combination of haunting, melancholy airs and defiantly exuberant jigs and reels, has provided the most popular bridge across the Atlantic. Celtic tunes find their way into almost every movie soundtrack and longtime Irish stars like the Chieftains and Mary Black are suddenly on the U.S. charts; even this year’s New Age Grammy went to Paul Winter and Friends for “Celtic Solstice.” Irish music has always been popular--where would Bing Crosby have been without it?--but lately it seems to be taking over the world.

“Basically, it’s just great music,” says Cait Reed, an Irish fiddler and chairman of the Celtic Regional Arts Institute of California--CRAIC--in Redondo Beach. “It’s very grounded in community. In Gaelic, ‘craic’ means ‘fun,’ but fun from enjoying each other, gathering around the fire for conversation, with one person reciting a poem, others playing and singing.”

The music, dance and language also became a strong symbol of nationalism; the Irish used what they could to keep their traditions alive, a process Reed believes helped preserve the old ways.

While Reed welcomes the sudden fascination with what she has been doing for 20 years, she and her cohorts at the institute want to make sure that the feeling of community is not lost in the frenzy.

“It’s all really about participating, not just observing,” she says. “The one thing I don’t like about putting it on the big stage is that it moves away from people gathered around the fire.”

The popularization of Irish culture also runs the risk of relying on stereotypes rather than a true reflection of what it means to be Irish, says state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), author of “Irish Hunger.”

“The cultural upsurge in all things Irish represents an American desire for richer roots,” he says. “There is an overwhelming creativity in the Irish, magic remains in the consciousness, even the English language is made enchanted by the Irish inflection. The danger is that if we only learn the sentimental history, we will feel a distance from the current immigrants [from other countries]. We cannot let our whiteness distance us from the gangs and urban poor.”

Prejudice Can Still Be Found

The Irish, he says, were considered drunken, barbaric subhumans from the moment they set foot on our Eastern shores, and that prejudice is far from extinct.

“Just a couple of years ago, the Stanford Marching Band staged a show at Notre Dame making fun of the Potato Famine. Yes, they were condemned, but can you imagine if that had happened to the Latino or black community? If [the band] had made fun of slavery?” he says.

“Now, any ethnicity is entitled to make fun of themselves, but for the whole of society to do it is belittling. We need to reclaim St. Patrick’s Day,” he says.

For all its rolling hills and bleating flocks, Ireland is a country that for more than a century has captured the world’s attention with bombs and bullets. Even in the now-peaceful south, where the shooting of a member of the Garda, the Republic’s police force, occupies the front pages for weeks, the landscape remains scarred by its own history--shimmering fields and hedgerows of blossoming gorse are broken here by ruins of abbeys and churches burned by Cromwell and his troops never to be rebuilt, there by the remains of cottages abandoned by death or immigration during the famine. Much of this land’s beauty is steeped in sorrow, sorrow and the stubborn refusal to surrender.

Perhaps this is what draws the admiration of our still-adolescent nation--the aching grace and bravery of endurance and survival.

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.