Remembering the rough edges
Patricia Maher
This is a story of forgetting and re-membering.
I went to Ireland for the first time in 1994, when I was 40, as part of a delegation of U.S. people to explore the very nascent peace process following the first IRA ceasefire. The delegation was a group of about 10 white people. Some were of Irish descent and some not; many had social justice pedigrees. I had organized a colleague and friend of mine to come with me, the late Renny Cushing, who was a long-time organizer from New Hampshire. Renny and I were the youngest, which lets you know that it was primarily a group of old heads.
I’m Irish on my father’s side, but I did not have a strong sense of Irishness growing up. We wore green socks on St. Patrick’s Day, my father hated the British, and Bernadette Devlin was a hero to me because as a teenager I was moved by her ferocious stand against colonialism. But I only knew superficially about Ireland’s struggle. So when invited to be on this delegation, I had to go. It felt like an important passage to turning 40, and besides, Pluto was inching very close to my Sagittarius Sun which I intuitively knew had to do, in part, with lineage.
I had no idea before going to Ireland how Irish I am. I was not at all prepared for the way I saw myself reflected in the Irish people I met, the way I would see my sister’s face in theirs or hear the lilt of my grandfather’s voice in their speech. I was especially not prepared for seeing my own passion, intensity and relentlessness reflected back at me. I also had no idea that in true Plutonic form I would be transformed by being there, and that the next ten years of my life would be devoted to organizing in Ireland for peace with justice.
I was also not prepared for my lack of knowledge about the fight against colonization that Ireland had been waging for 800 years, nor for the way Northern Ireland was militarized by the British. I thought I was well-informed; after all, I had been involved in international human rights issues. When I scanned the famed gorgeous countryside of Northern Ireland just months after the first ceasefire, it was covered with military hardware, with British spy towers scattered among the hills and glens, mechanized metal fences separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods (ironically called “peace walls”), and hidden cameras on tree branches along one-lane country roads. Needless to say, the police and military ran roughshod over Catholic communities while singling out and punishing people who organized for Irish freedom.
While on this delegation we met with community organizers who were fighting for basic human rights. I will never forget meeting mothers in Crossmaglen, County Armagh, who were organizing to stop their children from being strip searched by the British military on their way to school. We heard many stories of unchecked violence and harassment by police and Protestant paramilitaries, as well as ongoing discrimination against Catholics from every system. I was deeply affected by this – heartbroken, angry, outraged – and I couldn’t believe I had known nothing about it.
My friend Renny and I spent hours in pubs after the official meetings, getting to know the organizers, sharing stories, having good “craic” – the Irish term for enjoyable conversation. The Irish organizers were critical of Irish American politicians who traveled there, who made statements about Irish equality while voting repeatedly against the rights of Black people, people of color and women back in the U.S. The Irish liberation struggle had deep connections to other anti-colonial movements in South Africa and Palestine, and also to the liberation struggles of Black Americans. As organizers we discovered that we had a lot in common with each other, many shared values and a deep commitment to justice.
The community members we had met with in West Belfast and in County Armagh told us they wanted us to tell their stories back in the U.S. They insisted the U.S. was the only country that could influence the British government. On the plane trip home Renny and I started scheming. We considered whether it would be useful for us to return with a multiracial, multigender group of community organizers from the U.S., to get educated about what was happening in Ireland, and to share how it related to inequality and social change organizing in the U.S.
As soon as we were back in Boston, we reached out to the Irish organizers to talk through this idea. Their answer was a resounding “yes.” So Renny and I began to organize, to spread the word among people we knew around the country who were working on a range of issues – economic justice, racial justice, etc – and invited them to go to Ireland with us. The result was a group we called PeaceWatch Ireland. For about ten years we worked on projects the Irish needed us to work on, such as documenting state violence against Catholic communities and supporting their organizing around women’s and queer issues. With our good white progressive instincts, we invited many Black and POC organizers to participate in our work – and they did, immediately seeing the connections between systemic racism in the U.S. and the colonization of the Irish.
A few years into PeaceWatch Ireland’s work, several of us made a request to meet with Bernadette Devlin. Devlin had been a leader in the freedom movement in Ireland since the 1960s. She had played many key roles and was known for taking a seat in the British Parliament in the 60s and raising hell during Bloody Sunday and the Hunger Strikes. She had traveled to the U.S. in 1969 and had met with the Black Panthers in California and, like other Irish radicals, she was very familiar with the realities of racism in the U.S.
When our group met her in 1999 or 2000, she was living in her hometown in County Tyrone, organizing in her housing project around economic equity. The meeting took about ten minutes, barely enough time for a cuppa tea. We introduced ourselves. She immediately said to us: what are you doing here? You need to go back home and work on racism.
The Irish in Ireland are a people who know about accountability, after all. They are a people who know about history. There’s nothing like being held accountable by someone you idolize.
I was shocked, and thrown off kilter by her response. She was pushing us to think about power and our positionality, especially as white Irish Americans, and she made it clear the Irish did not need to be rescued. My own commitment to liberation as a woman and lesbian had come out of my understanding of oppression and victimization. Bernadette’s response had made me face a difficult truth. Some of my passion about the Irish struggle was because I could identify with their victimization.
If I was to deal with racism in the U.S., I would have to deal with my relationship to power and history, something I had never had to do. It was easier for me to take cover in those identities that marginalized me than to deal with my whiteness.
In subsequent years I came to learn that it is the Irish here in the U.S. – including me – who have forgotten about accountability and history in our process of becoming and being white. Even though PeaceWatch Ireland was doing good work, even important work, with as much integrity as we could, still, Devlin was right. Working against racism is the work for us white people in the U.S., whatever lineage we have.
Years later, when I was still fairly new in my anti-racist journey, I traveled by van with colleagues from Boston to a national meeting in New Orleans held by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Along the way we stopped at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama – a museum created by a local organizer because of the lack of official recognition of Black people’s historic struggle for citizenship and human rights. I was reminded of all the unofficial memorials to assassinated civil rights workers and organizers that dot the landscape in Northern Ireland, and how moved I was by their ability to claim their history in the face of systemic erasure by the Northern Irish and British governments, and even by the Irish Republic’s government.
How had I not known the depth of U.S. history? How had I not realized that white supremacy has erased so much from the record? As I began to study U.S. history from the perspective of anti-racist scholars in my middle age, I recognized that when I did the work in Ireland, I somehow knew that in order to have integrity I needed to throw myself into studying their 800 years of struggle. I learned the names, dates and birthplaces of the significant Irish organizers and movements, just as I had learned the histories of women’s and queer liberation leaders and movements in the U.S. But I had never bothered to learn about anti-racist history in the U.S., even as I thought I was doing good work with Black people and people of color. I thought that solidarity was enough, that my sense of understanding what it means to experience oppression was enough to make me anti-racist.
Somehow my being white has meant that I have been taught to forget on so many levels. To forget my family’s past, and the past of this country. Being white has also taught me not to see what is right in front of me, which is that as Irish as I am, in this country, I am white. My Irish forebears had to give up a lot to get the protection of whiteness as they assimilated into U.S. culture after migrating here. Generations later, there is no real remembering what it means to be Irish but those green socks. Generations later, there is no real recognition of the history of racism in the U.S., which allows me to float in an altered reality and not see the power, access and protection that whiteness gives me. Nor does it allow me to easily see what whiteness takes away from my humanity, including my Irishness. That’s what I mean about forgetting.
Since that first trip to Ireland in the 90s I have been excited to discover my Irishness. But how do I hold it? How do I come to terms with this kaleidoscope picture of contradictions in being Irish? The intense and unrelenting fight for freedom in Ireland; their strong connection to the struggles of Black people in the U.S.; their deep anti-colonialism; and yet at the same time their internalization of anti-Black racism as an anti-immigrant, white-dominated country hugely affected by Britain and the U.S. And then there is our story as Irish Americans who have assimilated into whiteness to the degree that we are the enforcers of it, from being police to Supreme Court justices to Presidents. Being Irish is all of that.
I come to terms with it by deeply exploring the rough edges of where my Irishness runs up against my whiteness, by sitting with that, and in doing so, not dodging my whiteness, not hating it, but accepting that U.S. history has dealt me a particular hand. I hold all my identities and honor all of them in their complexity. It is a process of reclamation. As I claim my Irishness I find firmer footing. I ground myself in the earthy spirituality of Ireland and know that it is no accident I am an astrologer, since you scratch the surface of anyone Irish and there is a strong connection with unseen worlds.
The Irish are incredibly relational – that’s part of why I love being there. In those years when I was back and forth to Ireland a lot, I found that I was relational when I was there, and then the minute that plane landed back in the U.S., my white ways took over. Gotta get the work done, gotta rush, gotta do do do. So I am learning to slow down, to put relationships over agendas and to pay attention to my ancestors. I light candles for them, talk to them, listen to them. When I think about my lineage to those ancestors I have never met in my family line and to those I do know from my time in Ireland, I see myself in them, and I love the connection and feel nurtured by them and as a result, I feel more whole. It doesn’t matter that they are far from perfect!
My great-grandfather John Joseph Meagher came to the U.S. in 1870, and without many options, what he could do as a very young man was join the U.S. Army. It was a time of “no Irish need apply.” He fought in the U.S. Military’s “Indian Campaigns” – the war against the Sioux in what is now known as the Dakotas. What was that like for him? Leaving Ireland after the British-induced famine and struggles against British tenant farming policies, to then be part of a military operation against Indigenous Lakota people? I imagine that his indoctrination into whiteness began then and there. I do not condemn him, although I have plenty of opinions and feelings about the U.S. military then and now. I am glad that his spirit has appeared to me. He comes with a strong smell of horses and the skinny cigars he smoked. He has a kind of kick-ass personality, not unlike my own.
I welcome the spirit of my great-great-great grandmother Margaret MacDonald who has come to me as her witchy self with instructions about making a protective circle with a hawthorn stick, and a buckthorn one when I need an extra dose of protection.
And there’s my father, Michael Francis Maher, whose spirit told me to put his ashes in the water at our favorite beach at the Jersey shore (I knew exactly which beach he meant), instead of in a grave. So I took those ashes to Island Beach State Park and dumped them in the ocean. As I dove under the waves, I remembered the delight he had in being in the ocean. I celebrate my father, whose humor and verbal acuity are so, so Irish, yet who had become distant from it and grappled all his life to find meaning, while pushing me to express myself and find purpose and joy in everything I do.
I feel held by these spirits, even in their complexity and imperfection.
And I am grateful for meeting and knowing Bernadette Devlin, Caitriona Ruane, Marie Mulholland, Rosemary Nelson, Donna Griffin, and so many other fierce women I worked with in Ireland. I see that the truth-telling, powerful, funny and badass parts of me are also in them and of them. When I re-member to carry their spirits with me, I am more effective and humanistic in my organizing. And I can bring myself more fully into the world, without shame and with connection.