Irish President Mary Robinson

Mary Robinson (right) served as the seventh, and first female president of Ireland (1990-1997); she was appointed the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002). In her memoir, Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice, she writes of her pioneering work on behalf of women’s rights, the separation of church and state, and world peace. Mary Robinson's social advocacy also includes Oxfam, the GAVI Alliance, vaccinating children worldwide, and the Council of Women World Leaders, and she is one of the “Elders,” led by Nelson Mandela dedicated to bringing peace and justice.

What Mary said: everyone matters—that the individual is capable of changing society, the the world. Law and morality. Very empowering. Got a chance to chat with Mary at the end. Someone took a photo of us together, lovely. Thanks to Jane Bark for driving me to Book Passages!

That makes two Irish presidents I've met—Mary McAleece. I will have to dig up my notes (make that three as I later met Michael Higgins at Stanford.) We also met the, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the inimitable Mo Mowlam at UC Berkeley ca. 2000—she was a real firecracker. I have NOT, however, met, nor will I ever wish to meet Margaret Thatcher. Not in heaven, nor in hell.

My grandfather knew Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, Ireland's first president of Dáil Éireannm and met him in San Francisco during the Irish War of Independence. Somewhere, there is a lost photo of them together, leaning on a car. We have a photo of Liam Mallows in our lower field.

Remembering Jim Duran, (Séamas Ó Direáin)

I first met musicologist and linguist Jim Duran (Séamas Ó Direáin) with harpist Sharon Devlin of the traditional Irish group, Sheila na Gig at the Treasures of Early Irish Art exhibit at the San Francisco De Young Museum in the mid-'70s. We were listening to the group singing Irish tunes my granny knew. I was shocked when he came over afterwards and spoke to my grandmother in Irish and she answered him right back.

My grannie was the only one there who could actually READ the Book of Kells, so we drew quite an audience! Someone came up and asked if she could read it...she snorted, "Of course I can. It's in Latin!" As if everybody could read Latin. 

My grannie, Jane Walsh Reilly probably hadn't spoken to anyone in Irish since the 1930s as there were few Irish speakers in San Francisco, but she kept up her Irish studies her entire life. Daily she was nose deep in Dineen's Irish Dictionary looking up words. 

My grandfather was instrumental in founding the KRB club in SF: Knights of the Red Branch. Among other things, they organized Irish cultural events, Irish language classes (and ran guns too, but that's another story. The photo of Liam Mellows in our lower field is proof enough of those IRA connections).

Despite holding a PhD. in linguistics from Stanford, Jim Duran was the most pragmatically practical from the Of course you can gung-ho just do it school. He was the one who encouraged me to study Irish Gaelic. He was one of the few people I knew who was fluent in Irish but then, he was fluent in many languages. How many languages does the man speak anyway? Eleven?

At first I thought he was putting me on. But then he slew my ears with polyglot tongues, in languages I didn't even know existed.... Why on earth would he learn Angolan, I thought. But then I remember him telling me he was at the Fort Ord Language Institute and spoke several African languages as well. Angolan. Oh the government... But that was the days of the Black Panther Movement, Stokley Carmichael, Angela Davis, Symbionese Liberation Front, Patty Hearst, etc. Angola was in the headlines a lot.

One of the last times I saw Jim was at LAX. We were heading out to Guatemala and El Salvador. Or was it Cabo? We ran into him at the luggage carousel. Weirdly, my boyfriend John Oliver Simon also knew him—as Jaime! At the same instant we both shouted out to him: Seamus! Jim! Jaime! and did a quadruple take and laughed. So it was a double meeting of the minds.

Jim organized a poetry reading and book party, Falling to Sea Level, (Aldebaran) for us at Angel's Gate Poetry Reading Series in San Pedro. I remember standing by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway with Jim along the cliffs just north of San Pedro Harbor mouthing a few words in Irish, when he began to unfold snippits of his life, it was pretty fantastical. I thought he was jiving me, but I later found out it was all true...

Last I heard he was teaching at the University of Cork. Someone else said, No, he was in Galway. I recently found a paper of his online—in Irish—on dialects of the Aran Islands, so I couldn't make heads or tale out of it—well maybe donkey's tails—in that I could make out a few words here and there, follow the gist, conjugate a preposition or two, but that was about it....

Because of Jim, I redoubled my efforts and I got my grannie to teach me what she could of the old Hibernian Club Gaelic League Irish from her Grammars, but speaking it was another matter.

I want to do a shout out: Hey Jim,wherever you are, I finally learned some Gaelic. I thought it was impossible. I studied Celtic languages at UC Berkekey with Joe Nugent, Breen O Conchubhair, with professors Kathryn Klar and Linguistics Chair, Dr. Gary Holland...Old, Middle and Modern. Irish, some medieval Welsh too. 

It was impossible, but we translated the Tain Bo Cuailaigne, the Tain Bo Fraoch, and the Mabinogi... But after ten years lying fallow in the back fields of the mind, and with no one to speak it, I now know enough to know that it's truly impossible and that I don't know enough in order to read your papers on Irish linguistics. (chun: in order to)

Last summer, however, I was surprised to find that I could slog my way through a Manx story (only if I read it out loud), I was able to translate place names while in the Hebrides and I'm slowly building my repertoire of Irish and Scots Gaelic music...that's where I came into this crazy circle, wanting to learn Irish and Hebridean mouth music...such a long, long time ago.

Go raibh mhaith agat a Shéamas, wherever you are!


Laguna Poets reading

Letters to Paul Evans

Paul, obsessive ramblings, Lughnasadh, Aug. 2, 5 AM, 1996

Have you ever had the experience of making mental notes to say this or that to someone, some thing terribly important (or at least half-way intelligible) and in their presence (either in person, or via the phone), despite best intentions, you turn featherbrained on yourself, betrayed by a cheesecloth-that-stands-for memory/mind: whatever thoughts you had, driven clean out of your head, only to re-emerge at the oddest hours—say, at 5 AM, in a strange flat (and country) not your own—even the cats have deserted you because your tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminds them of the bilious sea, and water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved. (As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the public, it was piss versus fuck. As if piss were preferable to fucking. You tell me why San Francisco society (or my computer dictionary) was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended (Madame Butterfly), there she was in a peacock sequined gown, brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, with a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

In my case, this mental indulgence is exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, and ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. Hence, the letter format. The good news is that I don’t write them often—who has the time to write to anyone—I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one.

Letter to Ira Rosenstein

Dear Ira,

Dear friend of a friend

So you ask me if I love life? This is to ask if I also know death—the flip side of the coin. You speak of being held at gunpoint, & question where that passion comes from—if I’d ever had a similar experience because I live in a rural area.

This morning my uncle died, in less than 48 hours I leave for Russia for an unspecified amount of time, and I thought because my uncle tried to sell my grandmother’s house and land out from under her without her permission “for her own good” because I was growing up too wild and untamed (unfit for society’s restrictions) and he made her cry, bullying her with his first-born male energy—that I was somehow exempt from grief.

A son is a form of God in an Irish (or Jewish) family. My grandmother was a strong woman, stronger than most people of any/either sex and I inherited some of that strength and passion—what comes with the territory is the white-hot rage and anger—another socially unacceptable trait. 

I attacked my uncle, a 12-year-old who wanted him dead, and so now he is dead, and I’m surprised to find myself depressed, in a fog, suffering from grief—because I discovered that blood is thicker than intellect or emotion—no matter how disfunctional the family. 

I remember his wife washing my mouth out with soap and sending me to the bedroom for some minor infraction—she was unaware of the deeper mine of wrath and anger below the volatile surface. She labeled me as “child” but perhaps like Athena, I was born fully formed from my grandmother’s brow.

Do not assume that because we grew up in different circumstances that I led a ‘sheltered‘ life; it’s not that cut and dry. 

Growing up rural is a strength that has allowed me refuge from the traumas that followed my family. I’ve faced death both in a global and a personal context. 

No, I have never been held at gunpoint, other than at a roadblock deep in the Guatamalan jungle—with no witnesses. We were lucky and escaped with our lives. 

No, I have never been held at gunpoint, but I watched the campesino sleep with studied indifference as the soldiers practiced kickboxing with uzis slung over their shoulders (a sweet US/Israeli deal—arm the army). 

The other side uses AK-47s. I’ve seen both. 

And in Peru, we came upon the body of the lawyer dumped in front of the Chorillos tunnel in Lima—his crime, a good lawyer for the other side. 

No I cannot shake the larger images of war from my mind, it wasn’t my own life I was worried about, but the perpetual genocides committed by both factions in the name of liberty—for whom? 

The passion is genetic. I am the grand-daughter of a revolutionary. My (IRA) grandfather, while working for the city jail, shipped suitcases of guns from San Francisco to New York to Ireland during the Rebellion, and knew Parnell and Liam Mellows first-hand. 

And was there when India struggled for independence—anything to be on the side opposing the English. When Indians weren’t considered human, not allowed to own land, he sponsored them, bought land under his name for them. 

Recently I came across the engraved invitation from the Indian Consulate dated 1945, inviting my family to the Independence celebration in San Francisco. Another letter from Seamus (James) Mooney, the famous longshoreman and political prisoner of the ‘30s who killed someone during a union riot (I was surprised to hear a lawyer, speaking of ethics, refer back to the Mooney case). 

My grandfather took the city on, suing them and winning (he was his own lawyer) when they discriminated against him, firing him to give his job to someone else. It's down in the lawbooks as a landmark case. Reilly vs SF. To fight is to survive. My family emigrated to America after the Famine, so, genetically speaking, we know no other way than passion to survive.

My second cousin, a mathematician, was whisked off right out of high school to a PO Box address in New Mexico. When she died of cancer, the story came out. Manhattan Project. Fermi Institute. 

In Santa Fe, I stood at the bridge where the Rosenbergs were captured, and shivered in the sunlight—born during this age of Light, I have no choice but to weave the stories. 

Nor could I stop crying at Los Alamos—what we’ve done in the name of an idea. Remember the Bay of Pigs? The scars go deep, and I cannot stop writing about it. Bearing witness—it is this writing I cannot get published because it’s too dark.

Yes, I too am uneasy about the new Russia, as I am about the new Latin America. Now that we’ve had our cake, we (who really do see the other side of the coin) have the audacity to tell them they can’t have it—when we’ve set up the wish list of ultimate attainment to begin with. 

I know we can’t convince the Olegs of the world—they are incapable of seeing out of the trench of their miserable lives, and there’s something in the Slavic character, that will continue to hold them there—the root word “slave” speaks volumes and needs no interpretation. 

Need I say that what I admired in Oleg while we were in the Ukraine evaporated on American soil? Oleg’s limited vision and inability to look inward for root causes is a microcosm of the whole; have we deluded ourselves into thinking that the ideals of communism (vs. anti-capitalism) or another system could overcome some basic human traits?

Of course, no matter the country, it’s the same old story—war between the sexes, only I’m no one’s footstool. I love life because I love my art—and every man, no matter how enlightened, seems to want that space for himself. 

Yes, I learned the term “foetid’ from Durrell’s description of an abortion in the Alexandria Quartet— Brit. spelling, but then Durrell’s Irish, as I am. Did you notice the hidden word “foe”? And having been the victim of men’s basic inconsistencies—love/mysogeny, pregnancies/abortions, I too know first-hand about death, having long-term infections that nearly killed me for my decisions to take life. 

You see, I was the product of a divorce; I saw my mother go crazy (and the suicide attempts that followed), an aunt and drunk husband & co. where violence and poverty is second nature to breathing. I knew better than to leave myself at the mercy of society as a single mother. I’ve been the psych wards and have no intention of becoming an inmate.

I love life because I know first-hand how easy it is to abdicate—the way my 17 year-old cousin did at 4 a.m. in downtown Santa Rosa on a Harley. Maybe drugs were involved. I don’t know. 

But when someone close dies, I am usually there in my dreams with them—and I never want to wake up to hear the news. I dreamed the darkness, the fog, and the red light of my cousin’s death—only we’re not supposed to remember these things during our waking hours. My mother banging on the door to wake me with the news, but I refused to waken, because waking was worse than the nightmare. 

There are things I tell no one, but it comes out in my poetry; sometimes I worry about there being too much death in my work, but I am a witness, and this is my most foetid art!

Eileen Mavorneen! (Rosenstein). What a great name. And what’s she doing with an IRISH first name, pray tell? Is it the Black Puerto Rican, or the Jewish side? 

You know of the Irish kids kidnapped and shipped to the Caribbean by the thousands by the British? This is why most Blacks have Irish in them (or Irish last names) I haven’t time to properly introduce delectable British forms of genocide, but suffice to say, centuries later, they continue to practice on the Irish. 

I know Eileen’s disappointment—looking for the bright ones—and the despair that follows when whole classes show nary a shining star. I wonder why the hell I’m bothering to reach them—but ultimately I have faith. (Faith: something scientifically unproveable). 

Then my faith in humanity is restored when a little 2nd grader, Trevor Yeats (great-grand-nephew to WBY) writes to me: 

“This body is to ask

this question of the mind: 

Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?

Is the hole in the ozone layer to stay as big? 

Tell me, tell me, where is the answer? 

This is the breath, to breathe this air.”

         Trevor Yeats

Well, since my work overtakes me, I’m not so sure I can write in sonnet format It has its own thoughts & forms—probably why I hated poetry as a kid was because it rhymed! 

Well, I’ve got to go miles and miles—to the other side of the earth—before I again sleep—and I still have to pack all this shit, or I’ll weep ere the morning comes, and have a fit of despair, with all this packing to do, or go nowhere at all, except deeper into the mystery. 

Maureen

PS Give my love to Edwin too.

10/91

Anim Chara

The cats formed semi-colons at the foot of my bed: intensity overwhelms those who don’t understand the Celtic temperament. As if it were my fault, I dream of people before I meet them. A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable.

I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements—influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s. Then, my grandmother also spent her free time wandered about the house muttering curses to Cromwell, the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat.

When I was a child, I thought they were swear words. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. Who we are, where we came from. And when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. It’s a rare and pleasurable thing to meet like-minded souls.

At 20, I knew I was different than others. . . I‘ve learned that the doors of perception don’t open for everyone: if so, forgive my trespass. There’s an Irish word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).

To sleep, to dream. . . Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine: people live in one another’s shadows. I dreamed I had to memorize 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down, when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence of another language in my head. Perhaps this is the Welsh poet Paul Evan’s parting gift to me. Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms.

Once Vins van Neervan and I went to Leuven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering Marika's city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel.

To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. We found the gates to a college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.

The Celts are going, the Celts are going at last. Hurrah! Soon a Celt on the streets of Dublin will be as rare as seeing an Indian on the streets of Manhattan.—British Government, ca. 1847.

In my family, we eat sodabread with tea, croon Irish songs when the uisge beatha gets the better of us: Oh the praties they grow small. . .

My grandmother, Jennie (Sínead) Walsh Reilly, never let us forget our history: 1 to 4.5 million dead from the Famine Years. We managed to hold onto our farms: the Walshes, and Sullivans of Bantry—at Coomb an n-Or; Gort na Sgrena; the Reillys and Duffys of Long Kesh, Fioragh and Drogheda on my grandfather’s side.

They came to America in 1919 and 1904, respectively. They were active in the Gaelic League, my grandfather was one of the movers and shakers of the Knights of the Red Branch in San Francisco, the IRA gunrunning story I’ve told before.

When Lord Russell said: the famine is good, teach ’em a lesson, the Choctaw Indian nation collected something to the tune of $212 for food; they sent us maize. Too late. Coffin ships to America. Slavers to the Barbados. From the Celtic Fringe to the Celtic diaspora. All those children sold in slavery: this is why so many Blacks have Irish surnames, blue eyes and freckles.

They say there was enough food in Ireland to feed 20 million. Instead we fed the British with our bones. Their sheep replaced us. But we survived. Sínn Fein: Ourselves, alone, she said, Never forget. Use their language against them, she said.

This, my inheritance. Slainte Gael macushla mo chroidhe. During the famine years, ships filled with Irish cattle and grain sailed for Britain while we died with grass stains on our teeth. Béal na blát: from the mouth of flowers. I am allergic to both corn and potatoes (as well as hazelnuts—the kernel of knowledge).

My father’s history I know very little of: Joseph Hurley from County Cork. There’s a Rebel Cork connection, but my paternal grandmother, Viola Heaney was born in San Francisco. Something about Lace Curtain Irish, that may be a rumor, but I have a sideboard of heavy Irish crystal.

Odd that I might be distantly related to Séamus Heaney. . . At Poetry International in 1993, I told him of this connection, he laughed, called me coozin, giving me a big smacker. We sang Irish songs, lifted our glasses high.

I told him of my grandfather’s IRA connections, I was surprised to learn he knew of my grandfather’s friend Liam Mellows. And of course, Parnell. All this fragmented history, my grandmother literally cursing Cromwell till her dying day.

Something struck me about our having a racial lack of confidence—rang a bell: my grandmother said similar words to that effect. The fighting underdog. I wish I knew more about our Welsh connections, other than Strongbow, and the Norman Invasion: Hibernius ipsis Hiberniores.

My grandmother maintained we got the name Walsh because we came from Wales—what, 1000 years ago? A bit distant. My great-grandfather Michael Walsh raised fast horses, drove cattle between bonfires at Lúgnasadh to ensure fertility. Ironically Walsh/Welsh means foreigner in the Germanic, wealas. An Anglo Saxon appellation?

One of Alexander of Macedonia’s generals during negotiation of a peace treaty, queried a Celtic chieftain: What do Celts fear most? The Gaul replied in formal address: That the sky should fall upon our heads.

Slogan: sluagh garim, a Celtic battle cry, furor is to blood-summon. How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart). I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war. Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.

My anim is Maureen/Little Mairi/Mara/Maura (bitter herbs or small rebellion) not the more common Muire (mother of God). I prefer my crib-Irish: she of the sea.

Mor could be translated as great, or muir/ sea, depending on the fada. The Mórríghan is great goddess of the sea. Rí is royalty. The shapechanger war goddess Morrigu isn’t exactly milquetoast, there are others I’d prefer to emulate. At least she doesn’t lie.

© 1997? Maureen Hurley (Originally a letter poem to the Chilean poet Waldo Rojas Serreno)

An Uneasy Truce: family

My publisher asked if I loved life, for he was held at gunpoint, & he questioned where all that passion came from. I’m not sure which passion he was referring to, living, or the taking of a life. The question came on the eve of my uncle Bill’s death, his funeral was on the day I left for Russia, I didn’t cancel my tickets, I wrongly assumed I was exempt from grief because he was an enemy. He once tried to sell my grandmother's house and land behind her back “for her own good” because she was “getting on, and I was growing up too wild.” 

My uncle Bill made her cry, bullying her with that first-born energy. My grandmother was a strong woman but a son is next to God in an Irish family. In a white-hot rage, I attacked my uncle, pummeling him with my small fists, a skinny 12-year-old who once wanted him dead. I felt nothing when I heard the news of his lung cancer. Now he’s dead, and I was surprised to find myself in a fog, suffering from grief because I discovered that blood is indeed like the cliché—thicker than reason or emotion—no matter how disfunctional the family. I will learn this lesson again when my parents die.

I’ve never been held at gunpoint, other than at a roadblock deep in the Guatemalan jungle—with no witnesses. Does that count? We were lucky to escape with our lives. I have never been held at gunpoint, but I watched the campesinos sleep with studied indifference as the soldiers practiced kickboxing with Uzis slung over their shoulders. I did count how many. 

Back home in the safety of America, I will have nightmares about snipers. In Peru, we came upon the body of a lawyer dumped in front of the Chorillos tunnel in Lima—his crime, he was a brilliant lawyer for the other side. I cannot shake the larger images of war from my mind, it wasn't my own life I was worried about, but the perpetual genocides committed by both factions in the name of liberty—for whom?

I am the grand-daughter of a revolutionary but I keep an uneasy truce with those roots. My grandfather, while working for the San Francisco city jail, shipped suitcases of guns to Ireland during the Rebellion, he knew Parnell and the executed Liam Mellows first hand. We have photos of him and Mellows in the field below our house in Forest Knolls. Did he know Michael Collins? Probably. My mother’s cousin is named after him.

My grandfather and my grand-uncles met in safe basements, filed serial numbers off the guns confiscated by the police force, and shipped them to a contact in New York. To Liverpool, and then onto Cork. A grand-uncle missed one serial number in the muzzle, and the shipment was traced back to my grandfather. When the feds tried to intimidate my grandfather into a confession, he said, just try and prove it, for he knew his law. Some vow there will never be peace in Ireland until the fifth field is no longer in British bondage. My aunt Jane helped airlift Irish kids out of Belfast so they could experience a normal life, if only for a summer.

My grandfather was a thorn in the side of the English. When the Germans fought the British in WW1, he was an acting German Consulate for San Francisco. We don’t know the details, he was a closed-mouthed man. When India struggled for independence, he was involved. When Indians were not allowed to own land, bought Fresno farmlands for them. 

A grateful Jahn Singh (Singh means lion) sent us crates of oranges and raisins every Christmas. My grandfather must’ve sent guns to India too. I came across an engraved invitation from the Indian Consulate dated 1945, inviting my family to the Independence celebration in San Francisco. A thank you letter from (James) Seamus Mooney, an infamous political prisoner of the ’30s who was held responsible for the death of a longshoreman during a union riot (I was surprised to hear a lawyer, speaking of ethics, refer back to the Mooney case). 

My grandfather took the city on, suing them and winning the landmark case (he was his own lawyer, having “read” the law, the Bar didn’t exist) when they discriminated against him, passing him up for promotion to High Sherriff in favor of someone else. My family emigrated to America after the Famine, so, we know no other passion, other than to survive.

My second cousin, a mathematician, was whisked off right out of high school to Chicago, to White Oak, Tennesee, to Alamagordo, then to a PO Box address in New Mexico. When she died of cancer, the story came out.  They said Manhattan Project. Fermi Institute. In Santa Fe, I stood at the bridge where the Rosenbergs were captured, and shivered in the sunlight, Born during this age of Light, I have no choice but to weave the stories. Nor could I stop crying at Los Alamos—what we've done in the name of an idea. Remember the Bay of Pigs? The scars go deep, and I cannot stop writing about it. Bearing witness—it is this writing I cannot get published because it's too dark.

Yes, I am uneasy about the new Russia, as I am about the new Latin America. Now that we've had our cake, we (who really do see the other side of the coin) have the audacity to tell them they can't have it—when we've set up the wish list of ultimate attainment to begin with. I know we can't convince the Olegs of the world—they are incapable of seeing out of the trench of their miserable lives, and there's something in the Slavic character, that will continue to hold them there—the root word “slave” speaks volumes and needs no interpretation. 

 

What traits I admired in Oleg while we were in the Ukraine quickly evaporated on American soil. Oleg's limited vision and inability to look inward for root causes is a microcosm of the whole; have we deluded ourselves into thinking that the ideals of communism (vs. anti-capitalism) or another system could overcome some basic human traits? He seem to think America owed him something, he could sit back and take life easy.

No matter the country, it's the same old story—war between the sexes, only I'm no one's footstool. I love life because I love my art—and every man seems to want that space for himself. And having been the victim of men's desire, I know first-hand of death, having nearly died because of the babies I gave back. I was the product of a divorce; I saw my mother go crazy (and the suicide attempts that followed), an aunt and drunken husband & co. where violence and poverty was second nature to breathing—to know better than to leave myself at the mercy of society as a single mother. I've been the psych wards from the inside and have no intention of becoming an inmate.

I love life because I know how easy it is to abdicate—the way my 17-year-old cousin did at 4 a.m. in downtown Santa Rosa on a Harley at full throttle. Maybe drugs were involved. I don't know. But when he died , I was there with him in my dreams—and I never wanted to wake up to hear the news. I dreamed the darkness, the fog, and the red light of my cousin's death—only we're not supposed to remember these things during our waking hours. My mother banging on the door to wake me with the news, but I refused to waken, because waking was worse than the nightmare. There are things I tell no one, but it comes out in my poetry; sometimes I worry about there being too much death in my work, but I am a witness.

Perhaps that’s why I teach poetry in the schools. I search for the bright ones—and despair when whole classes show nary a shining star. I sometimes wonder why I bother, the work is so exausting, but ultimately I have faith. The brilliant gift of a 2nd grader, Trevor Yeats (great-grand-nephew to William Butler Yeats) sustains me:

This body is to ask
this question of the mind:
Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?
Is the hole in the universe to stay as big?
Tell me, tell me, where is the answer?

Where is the answer to lie in today’s hands?
This is the breath, to breathe this air.

Trevor Yeats
2nd grade,
Higham Family School
Santa Rosa, Ca

© 1996 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

Family history paper for History 495

For 750 years, Ireland has struggled and fought against the oppression of foreign invaders… “Those were the centuries, when the British Raj in Ireland attempted the systematic eradication of the Irish language, music and song, poetry and literature.”

In 1649, Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland. A religious zealot, he slaughtered 3000 men, women, and children in the town of Drougheda, shipped the surviving women and children to the Caribbean to be sold as slaves, and wrote afterwards, “it has pleased God to bless our endeavors at Drogheda. I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God, alone, to who, indeed the praise of this mercy belongs.” Letter to John Bradshaw, 1649

During the reign of Elizabeth I, 10,000,000 acres of the best Irish arable land was stolen from the Irish, and given to the English and Scottish Protestant settlers of the north.

In the early 18th century, the Penal Laws were enacted to secure the Protestant Ascendancy and remained in effect for 125 years. These punitive laws deprived Irish Catholic citizens of any legal rights. The most crippling of these laws was the one forbidding Irishman from leaving their farms to one son when they died.

In Ireland, under English law, there was no primogeniture, the land had to be equally divided amongst all the sons, and the end result was the utter destruction of the Irish countryside. Farms became smaller and smaller with each passing generation, and were increasingly devoted to substance farming of potatoes, while the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy built their great mansions on stolen land.

(Beginning in the 1690s, the English had imposed on Ireland the infamous Penal Laws (e.g., a ban on Catholic education, either at home or on the Continent; the expulsion of priests; bounties on priests who remained; and a complex of vicious de jure discriminations in employment, intermarriage, and property), all in an apparent effort gradually to extirpate Catholicism.) —Miracles and Sacrilege, ch. 3 

An unintended side effect of the Penal Laws was the Great Famine (an Gorta Mór was a form of genocide) coupled with a series of droughts from 1846 to 1851, which was followed by a potato blight, brought from North America, which destroyed the entire potato crop three years in a row. More than half the population of 8 million were entirely reliant upon potatoes for food; when the potatoes died, so did the rural Irishman. 

Some 1,500,000 peasants died and another million immigrated. Meanwhile, the great Anglo-Irish landlords of Ireland exported Irish beef, pork, lamb, and grain to feed Great Britain that might have otherwise saved the starving Irish. 

(Listen to Christy Moore’s long version of The City of Chicago, at 2:30, he recites a ship’s manifest of what was shipped out of Cork Harbor on a single day, on the 15th of September in 1847. 186 barrels of flour, 286 barrels of barley, 334 barrels of wheat, 96 casks of ham, 486 boxes of eggs, and 219 head of cattle. There was plenty of food in Ireland during the famine, just not for the Irish.  YouTube)

Alexis deToqueville who visited Ireland in 1835, said after hearing tales of the times of Cromwell and William of Orange: “whatever one does the memory of great persecutions is not forgotten, and who sells in justice sooner or later reap the fruits.” —Miracles and Sacrilege, ch. 3

The British finally were able to reap their bitter fruits when a rebellion broke out on Easter, Monday, 1916, with guerilla warfare lasting until 1921. Most of Ireland had finally achieved independence and was almost free from bondage, except for the province of Ulster which remained under British control.

The populace of Ireland immigrated to America for numerous reasons. They had been long taught to look upon America as a refuge of their race, the home of their kindred. Their feelings towards America were those of love and loyalty.

But when they landed, their great expectations were somewhat checked… “The roots of the agitation and disturbances, which have convulsed Ireland, and shaken to England, were also to be found in America.” The American, Irish, and their influence on Irish politics, Philip Bagenal, 1882.

The Irish came to America in droves because America was perceived as the land of political and religious freedom. They came to escape the British Pale. They thought America offered a chance at a better life.

My grandmother, (who was born in Bantry, County Cork in 1893), said, “I came here to get away from English rule. I found that the Anglo-Saxon propaganda was worse here than in Ireland. Fact is, they were beginning to ease up a little when I left home. Of course, they were still draining money out of Ireland… “

She found that America stood, not for the American ideal, but America emulated and admired British thoughts and ideals.

I asked my grandmother why she immigrated to America she said, “I wanted to get away from Ireland more than anything else, I couldn’t see any sort of life for me back there. We actually lived in an “easy” period. The Penal Laws were abolished, the Catholic Church was no longer persecuted after 1870, but there was no future for me there. The push to immigrate was strong. My aunt May, my mother’s youngest sister, came out to San Francisco earlier, and she kept writing to me to come out. When she sent me my fare, I came, and that was that.

She continued, “Uncle Jim Sullivan came over first. He brought out Aunt May, and she, in turn, was to bring out another member of the family. One member of the family always paid the fare for the ones back home. I brought out my sister Kitty and it cost over $100.”

I asked her about the trip over, “I came over on the SS Lusitania, it was her maiden voyage. It took five days to cross the Atlantic, and the whole ship was vomiting, except me. The seamen had a job cleaning it all up. Berths were comfortable and we had plenty of hot tea.

When we went through immigration at Staten Island, New York, the customs man, he was Irish, and he said to me, “and what have we here acushla?” When I showed him my suitcase, he didn’t even check my luggage. I had some Irish whiskey, Irish tea, carrageenan moss, and a Blue Willow platter in my case. In those days you weren’t allowed to bring those things into the US.

“I already had gotten my visas and my passport in Queenstown, Cobh/Cove of Cork. Everyone there was helpful because they were immigrants too. I took the Staten Island ferry to the train station, and said goodbye to my brother, Joe, who had made the trip with me, but didn’t have enough train fare ($5) to go to San Francisco. He stayed in New York, just long enough to earn his fare, and out he came. (He got a job on a ship and sailed to Galveston.)

“It took me six days to reach the West Coast. I thought I’d never get here. I was on the Northwestern Pacific. I arrived in San Francisco on June 21, 1912, Midsummer-nights day, and it was sunny! It took me quite a while to adjust. I lived with my aunt May and Uncle Dick (I think she meant Dan) on Moultry Avenue.”

For 12 years my grandmother was a domestic engineer and a tailor. She worked for several Jewish families—all of them doctors (including the Rixfords)—until she was married in 1924.

During her first 12 years in San Francisco, she joined several groups for women. She said that The Young Ladies’ Institute was particularly boring. Nothing ever happened. So she joined the Gaelic League and the Irish Liberty League, both of which supported the cause in Ireland.

From 1916 to 1922, she was deeply involved in supporting the Irish rebellion. When she was with the Irish Education League, they conducted boycotts of English goods. They patterned their protests after the Suffragettes. They marched up and down Market Street with banners, similar to our anti-war protest rallies during the Vietnam war.

People were sent out from Ireland to collect money and guns. They received advance notice of speakers arriving from Ireland, the likes of Eamon de Valera, Con Kellagher, and Liam Mellows, and organized town hall meetings, and handed out leaflets advertising the speakers.

The Irish Americans were great supporters then as they are now for the cause in Ulster and Belfast. After the lectures, money was gathered up in wicker baskets, and was either sent to Ireland, or was used to buy guns here which were shipped to Ireland. My grandfather was a member of the Knights of the Red Branch.

“I was there the night Woodrow Wilson came to speak at the League of Nations,” my grandmother said, “we did much to smash it. We did much more to smash it than anyone else.”

De Valera said, “we are willing to accept the responsibilities… which inclusion into such a league implies,” but he found that “It simply meant an association to perpetuate power for those who had got it, and to keep forever in slavery those who had been kept in slavery by international rules, as they are called, but which were simply the rules of thieves were regulating their conduct among themselves.” Eamon DeValera, a Biography, Earl of Longford, and Thomas O’Neill, 1971.

What the Irish and the Irish Americans so strongly objected to was Article 10 of the League of Nations covenant; members undertook to preserve existing territorial boundaries of member nations, which meant Ireland’s wishes would have been ignored completely.”

“De Valera came here three times, fighting for Ireland’s freedom. He asked for recognition from the Congress to acknowledge the Irish Republic. Congress did nothing. He requested President Wilson to recognize Ireland’s demand for independence. Wilson turned a deaf ear. De Valera decided to come to the US and appeal directly to the people above the head of Wilson.“ She continued, “the league of nations would not accept Ireland’s proposal for independence.”

“When Dev came here in 1921 to sell the Irish bonds, we all bought them. We were too involved in fighting for Ireland to notice what was happening here during World War I. The Irish didn’t want to hurt the US but they were more worried about what was happening in Ireland.”

She continued her story, “The IRA was a well respected organization in those days. My brother, Joe Walsh (who was a police captain in the Richmond District), was able to pick up guns at pawnshops, and (my husband) Barney was able to get guns from the Benicia Armory with a judge’s signature, and there were plenty of Irish judges. The guns were shipped to New York in suitcases, and only one was ever confiscated.”

She continued, “Liam Mellows came out to see your grandfather before he was shot.” She said that Liam Mellows was later imprisoned, with others, who were considered political prisoners of war against Britain, and held without charge or trial, and then executed six months later. They became martyrs for the cause of an independent Ireland.

Con Kelleher, Liam Mellows, Bernard Reilly at DeLacy’s in Lagunitas, 1920.

My grandfather, Deputy Sheriff Bernard Reilly, was very active during this time as well. He, like my grandmother, Jenny, immigrated in his teens. He arrived in San Francisco in 1904 when he was only 16 years old. He was employed by the city as a postal workers and then became superintendent of County Jail number 1 in San Francisco and, later a guard at San Quentin penitentiary.

My grandparents were married later in life, an Irish tradition, in 1924. My grandmother saved and managed the money in the family. They lived in apartments in San Francisco when the babies began to arrive.

When the Depression struck they hardly even noticed it. Since my grandfather worked for the city, he was employed during the Depression. A rarity. Two days after my oldest aunt Jane was born, came the stock market crash. By then they had four children. Grandma said, “if you had money there was never any problem getting food.”

They had bought the Forest Knolls house one and a half years before the Depression, and were living in Marin County part time. My grandfather commuted into San Francisco on the Northwestern Pacific train, and then caught the Sausalito Mill Valley ferry to San Francisco, until 1935, when the train system was scrapped.

I asked my grandmother if they had a victory garden. She snorted said victory gardens were for city hicks. They did some gardening, but most of the produce was brought once a week from the veggie man from Novato, who peddled his wares from the back of a truck.

Milk and eggs and big wheels of jack cheese were gotten from a neighbor, Mary Bianchi. My uncle Bill, unfortunately got tuberculosis from their milk so the milk had to be boiled. My grandfather brought meat from San Francisco. He knew of a butcher friend there. (Also, porterhouse steaks were purloined from the city jail.) I think they ate better than we do now. My grandmother made most of the children’s clothing and bought overalls and shoes through Sears catalog. She told me we got “we got by. We never were rich.”

A cousin of mine (a first cousin, once removed), John Budgick was a carpenter, during the Depression, he was out of work. But he found work through the WPA and he designed and helped lay the cement road for Sir Francis Drake Highway that runs from San Quentin to the Point Reyes lighthouse. (There’s a section of road near Crystal Springs, now paved over, where he signed his name in the wet pavement.)

During the prohibition, John’s mother, Ellin Budjick, who was my grandfather’s sister, ran a speakeasy in her home on Hammer Street in San Francisco. (My grandmother’s, aunt May, and her husband Dan Forbes also made corn whiskey). But one day the revenuers came in and she grabbed the whiskey jug and put it between her and the baby as if she was taking a nap. They never thought to look there. Dan got rid of his corn mash by flushing it down the toilet (but the toilet backed up). And they were never caught selling or making liquor. (Clients included priests and policemen.)

A friend of my grandfather’s wrote from Tennessee:

“Hello old timer,… I’ve been looking around for a jug of good corn for you, and one for Mike since repeal, all bootleggers go to Kentucky and haul in the bonded stuff, and that makes corn, so cheap, it don’t pay to make it good, but I may run into some private stock. If I do, look out for a brainstorm… Well, old friend, as this is the first I have written since I last saw you, I’m getting writer’s cramp, so will close for this time…

As ever, your friend, Earl Stanfield
Chattanooga, May 24, undated

When World War II came along, our family wasn’t really affected by it. My uncles, Bill and Miles joined the Navy, the others were too young. Bill got tuberculosis and Miles got cancer, so both were discharged from the Navy. When I was born in 1952, we were all living together in San Francisco, as my grandparents had moved back in 1935 for his work.

I lived with my grandparents and their family. Of my aunt and uncles, only the aunts remained at home. Two of my uncles were married and my uncle John was in the army. I remember him coming home from Korea.

Feilim, my grandmother‘s favorite, had died when he was 17 of a ruptured appendix so there were at least eight or nine of us living in a nuclear household. There was plenty of room for all of us in the three-story Victorian at 333 Third Avenue. I was born the first grandchild of the family, so I received lots of attention.

When I was four, my grandfather died of esophageal cancer, and my grandmother and I moved back to Forest Knolls. I was on loan to keep my grandmother company, or busy, for a while, so she wouldn’t get so lonely after my grandfather‘s death. The “while” has now been 19 years since I began living with my grandmother. My parents got divorced soon after my grandfather‘s death and I stayed with her until things got settled. They never did.

I grew up here and went to Lagunitas School, Drake High School, College of Marin, then San Francisco State, and Sonoma State colleges.

Ever since I can remember, at a subconscious level of thought, I always felt a vague antagonism and hostility from my WASP classmates, and I never understood why. I couldn’t explain it, I could only feel it. My Catholic classmates must’ve felt it too, because we all bonded together in a clique during grade school and maintained those bonds in high school.

Now in college, I’m beginning to understand why we, as kids, felt this nonverbal antagonism. I’ve discovered America has a K in it, and a long-standing love affair with anything British, since the colonial days, and our entire culture is so overlaid with millions of subtle digs and hatred of anyone not WASP.

I am Irish, and I was raised to be proud of my heritage. I am Irish first, American second, and I struggle to maintain my Irish identity in this WASPish sheet of ambiguity.

When writing this paper, I found that a lot is written about Irish Americans, and how they were viewed in the eyes of their Anglo-American neighbors, but not much is written, explaining why they were clannish, rebellious, etc. We must look at Ireland’s history from an Irish point of view, and then turn our eyes inward, and understand Irish Americanism for what it really is, not what it seems to be from the outside.

My grandmother said, “the Irish here banded together to protect themselves. The Knights of Labor, the unions were created to protect the little guy. Sure, there were your so-called undesirable Irish, there were undesirables from every immigrating group. The stigma of the drunken Irishman was both permanent, perpetuated and encouraged by the canal and railroad bosses. They should’ve paid the Irish laborers more money instead of giving them a pint and a half of whiskey a day, and a $.50 wages. My God, they never saw that much whiskey at once back home. No wonder they were drunk and rebellious and the conditions they worked in were deplorable. No wonder they drank.”

NOTE BENE: Of all the books listed in my bibliography only somewhere helpful. William Shannon‘s book was and I quote Thomas Brown… “A brilliant book that for the first time lifts the story above the level of regret and recrimination, and makes it important to cultural history.” Both Thomas Brown and Carl Wittke’s books were too limited, dealing only with the second half of the 19th century.

We, that is, my family, read all of them, and we found the two authors to be the worst offenders of WASP whitewashing. In the future, I would recommend William Shannon‘s book, The American Irish, for anyone doing an Irish family history project, his was the most inclusive, and the least bigoted book.

Some of the above mentioned authors actually seemed to gloat over the American Irish “loser” virtues. Every group of people has its vices, and I think it is important to understand why they were corrupt, to amend and compare that to their downfall with other ethnic group subjected to the same conditions and see the similarities between them.

But most of all, it is important to see how they contributed to our society and how we benefited from their labors. I’m a little sensitive when someone, however indirectly, points of finger at me says, oh you, Irish accusingly.

And in answer to Carl Wittke’s closing paragraph in The Irish in America… The Irish question has faded into the background… No anglophobia among today’s Irish Americans… “

I beg to differ. No, we have not been assimilated into the mainstream of America, the WASP culture. The Irish question has not faded into the background and nor is it likely to as long as Britain still insists upon keeping and controlling Ulster. As the song goes:

I have four green fields
one of thhem’s in bondage.
My fourth green field 

will bloom once again
said she.

Four Green Fields, Irish Songbook collected by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem 1965

Liam Mellows in Lagunitas ca. 1920.

Addendum: a friend of my grandfather’s, Liam Mellows bravely fought for Irish independence. In 1913 he organized Fianna Éireann, whose goals were “to reestablish the independence of Ireland.” Before he was executed by the agents of the British Crown, he said, “I have no regrets, for the future of Ireland is assured… We died… For the cause of human liberty.” He was shot on December 1922. 

another martyr for old Ireland,
another murder for the crown,
the British laws may crush the Irish,
but cannot keep their spirit down.

—from the song, Kevin Barry
The Wolfe Tone Annual, 1939 Brian O’Higgins; Colm O Laughlin, Three Candles Press, Dublin.

Addendum: While Ireland was fighting for freedom, the Indians were also fighting for their independence to get out from under British rule. My grandfather Bernard met Indians in San Francisco who were trying to garner support for their cause. They were classified as a white race, and granted US citizenship. But when they started to fight for their independence, the US canceled and denied those citizenship.

Jian Singh Dhandah was one of those men. When you’re not a citizen and are denied citizenship because of your race, you can’t buy land, or vote, among other things. My grandfather took the responsibility of signing for land when Jian saying wanted to buy land. In return, Jian sent our family care packages every Christmas as repayment for our sponsorship.

Addendum: During 1916, a Labor Day parade turned into a mass riot in San Francisco against US involvement during World War I. Among the multitudes was longshoreman, Thomas Mooney, a member of the IWW. A bomb was thrown, and people were killed, because he was head of the IWW in San Francisco, they needed a scapegoat, and he was framed for the incident with false evidence. This is one of several letters from Tom to my grandfather, who was superintendent County Jail number 1 in San Francisco.

The IWW wanted the Irish organizations to join their cause, but the Irish had one goal in mind, and that was to free Ireland. The Irish Americans didn’t want to dilute their power with conflicting interests. Besides, the IWW was very socialistic, and the Irish groups felt the affiliation with the IWW would harm their cause.

note bene: I got a B+ from Dennis Harris—for a few small typos—after he inadvertently dropped me from his class. We did not see eye to eye. He used folksongs to explore American history which was right up my alley, but I found some of his interpretations off, and probably said so in class…out loud.

He said, “An obliviously passionate account, one of which is little pretense of objectivity. but nonetheless, fascinating, well written, and informative. You could’ve done more by working with, rather than rejecting your sources so that you could integrate your family’s experience into the general history. But, well done. B+.

information in parentheses was added later after I scanned this paper. I made a few small changes to correct floppy verbs and adverbs and cleaned up punctuation. And, of course, being able to add links to the texts used was a delight. MH 

Bibliography.

The Irish in the US, John Duff, 1971

The American, Irish and their influence on Irish politics, Philip Bagenal, Kegan Paul, 1882

The Irish in America, Carl Wittke, 1956

Irish American nationalism, Thomas Brown, 1966 

Irish immigration in the United States, Jeremiah O’Donovan, 1969, first published 1864

The Irish songbook piled by Joy, Graeme, 1969 

Eamon de Valera, a biography, Earl of Longford, and Thomas O’Neill, 1971

The American, Irish, William, Shannon, 1963.

Generations, Jim Watt and Allan Davies, 1974.

The shaping of the American, V. 2, Robert Kelly, 1975

Wolfe Tone annual, 1939, 1962, Brian O’Higgins

Irish Street ballads, Colm O’Laughlin, 1937 

My grandmother was also a valuable reference, book or an inventory, made in Ireland 1893