Sir, As the principal scholar at home working on the history of the Irish diaspora in the United States, might I comment on the matter of the major inquiry and impending legal cases touching upon the exhibition on the New York Irish to be mounted by the Museum of the City of New York?
There was no effective history of the New York Irish before the late James McHugh (of Queen's College), William Griffin (of St John's University) and Marion Casey (then archivist at the Metropolitan Opera) set up a seminar and research system upon it, partly an offshoot of Columbia University Irish Studies seminar, in the mid 1980s. They won backing from community sources as well as academic reputation. They publish an academic journal they have produced a major bibliography, and stimulated a collective, 25 contributor history, The New York Irish, from Johns Hopkins University. In 1850, almost half the entire artisan population of the city was Irish born. By 1900, with 595,000 people of Irish parentage, about half of them born in Ireland, the city had more Irish than Dublin, Cork and Galway combined, as well as a raft of already distinguished Irish rooted universities and colleges. It had 95,000 middle class Irish families, the largest aggregate in the US, and dwarfing the hard pressed gentility of Dublin, still struggling with its ranking (beside Calcutta) as the poorest city of a wealthy empire. The New York Irish, not least in their famed "machines" thus pioneered the inter class collective improvement which, after independence, became the public stance of our own leading parties. Listening to their rambunctious and diverse communities, not filtrating them with hauteur, was the effective style of this democracy social as well as political. Unlike anywhere else in the US (where the history of the community is a matter of graduate dissertations, soon shelved and forgotten), that history thrives in New York because it combines rigorous standards with community support.
I am at loss to grasp how the Gaelic Gotham programme could have alienated even part of this reality why every major historian of the American Irish from Ron Bayor and Kerby Miller outside the city support (as it were) the aggrieved party, as, more quietly, do the visiting Irish scholars at Ireland House NYU why so few scholars are ranged with the City Museum side. Could it be there is something to the case made by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the AOH, the NY 69th vets etc? My inclination is to agree with lawyer, Frances Walsh, of the Columbia seminar "It's a sorry day when the New York Irish are about to be given their due, that we should rush to judgment prematurely." Yet there is no question that the battle over symbols is crucial to community memory. It is unnerving that the only subject before now fully covered in NY Irish history was the draft riots of 1863 (six major monographs in the academy), and that stereotypical and unexamined pieces on the "machines" have remained in print for decades. The "constructive ordinariness" of this great population, which taught so many others in turn, was largely neglected until the Roundtable was set up. There is a tendency to mobilise exhibits around extant "easy answers" and cliche, and even for a community itself to take these over, grateful for any notice. To re educate general impression takes time, space and scholarship. They go together. That so much of the fresh scholarship apparently demurs at what is going on is not encouraging. One must wait and see.
A part of New York Irish history has been itself a struggle against prejudicial put down masking injustice. It would also seem extraordinary if an exhibit about this history itself rested upon an unjust expropriation of the life's work of its chief instigator, which is the burden of a letter to you (March 25th) from 14 concerned New Yorkers". There may be overkill in their letter yet we should be careful here lest we are influenced by what the late and knowledgeable Dennis Clark of the Samuel Eels Fund noted of the relations of the NY Irish and ourselves "More than the city of Dublin. . . New York would represent the opportunities and achievements of the common people of Ireland, the democracy, and further, the achievements, of those who had been rejected" . . in another Ireland than ours today.
Let us hope that amity, justice and full scholarship produce a rethink in this sorry tale. The opportunity for a major memorialisation of our diaspora in the HQ of both the UN and of much international business, will hardly recur. Yours, etc., Department of History, University College, Dublin 4.