Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics: Relations Between Ireland and Irish America in the Postwar Years

NATIONALISM, SENTIMENT, AND ECONOMICS: RELATIONS BETWEEN IRELAND AND IRISH AMERICA IN THE POSTWAR YEARS MARY E. DALY Ireland is a country whose sons and daughters hold her dearly above all, and it is evident in your great country as in others, that their love does not wither because the soil beneath their feet is foreign soil. St Patrick planted more than the shamrock when he came to Ireland—he planted in the hearts and minds of her people a spiritual fire that nothing can extinguish —a fire which still burns brightly in the hearts and minds of Irish men and women and those of Irish descent the world over. St. Patrick’s Day greetings from the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Hawaii, March 19571 Despite many assertions to the contrary, Mary Robinson was not the first Irish leader to reach out to the Irish diaspora.2 W.T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1932, broadcast a St. Patrick’s Day message to the United States in March 1926, several years before King George V began his annual Christmas broadcasts to the British Empire.3 Cosgrave’s first live broadcast in March 1931 seems to have attracted a large audience, judging by the many letters and postcards that he received from listeners throughout the United States and Canada.4 RELATIONS BETWEEN IRELAND AND IRISH AMERICA IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 74 1 National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI), Department of the Taoiseach files, S5683. 2 Helen Burke and Olivia O’Leary, Mary Robinson: The Authorised Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), 189–205. On 2 February 1995, President Robinson addressed both Houses of the Oireachtas, delivering a speech entitled “Cherishing the Diaspora.” 3 NAI, Department of the Taoiseach files, S5111/1, Broadcast Messages by President. King George V made his first broadcast at Christmas 1932. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures : England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 9. 4 NAI, S5111/7, S5111/8. This broadcast was on the CBS network. Cosgrave recorded a separate St. Patrick’s Day message that was broadcast on 15 March by NBC in Chicago; the de Valera continued the tradition of sending St. Patrick’s Day greetings to the United States until 1938, when he relinquished the honor to Ireland’s first President, Douglas Hyde. This is not the only evidence that independent Ireland kept in touch with the American Irish. During the late 1930s de Valera and Eoin MacNeill explored the possibility of establishing Irish cultural centers throughout the United States, so that Irish Americans and other Americans might learn “something about our past and present ,” but the plan was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II.5 In February 1946 de Valera entertained four Irish-American prelates— Spellman of New York, Mooney of Detroit, Stritch of Chicago, and Glennon of St. Louis—in Killarney, when they visited Ireland en route to Rome, where they were consecrated as cardinals. The party included James Farley, who had served as Post-Master General in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet, and Fr. Robert Gannon, the President of Fordham University.6 Visits to the United States by leading Irish politicians became more common in the 1950s, with the introduction of regular trans-Atlantic flights; in 1956 John A. Costello became the first Irish head of government to spend St. Patrick’s Day in the United States, inaugurating a pattern that many later Taoisigh have followed. In the morning he presented shamrocks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House, before flying to New York to preside at the St. Patrick’s Day parade; that evening he was guest of honor at the annual dinner of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Philadelphia.7 Yet, despite evidence of regular contact between the Dublin government and Irish America, there is some validity in the belief that independent Ireland failed to keep in contact with the wider Irish community. This distancing seems to have happened during the 1950s and the 1960s because of changes in the Irish community in the United States, and in political and economic policies in Ireland. This essay concentrates on...