I was in the United States last week. Every time I spoke someone would say, "Why! You're Irish!" and they'd ask me how things were going in the Emerald Isle. "We hear you folks are getting peace there now," they'd say amiably, or words to that effect. Or if they were Irish-Americans they'd say much more anxiously something like "What's the story with this peace deal, then?"
It occurred to me that Ireland is on its way out of the international spotlight. If there is a peace that brings an end to the Troubles, the rest of the world will hardly know how to say a personalised hello to an Irish person, any more than to a Dutch person or a Dane. And also, that the very large constituency of Americans who identify with Ireland's difficulties is now disenfranchised. Their sympathy was solicited by all sides when it was needed. Now, they are being left behind.
On a trivial level this has implications for things like Fianna Fail's fund-raising dinners. How will wealthy Irish Americans impress each other and help the old country if words like "republican" change their meaning for good? Will they endow hospital wards and public parks and art galleries, as American Jews do in Israel?
Much more importantly - what about the not-wealthy, who may have clung to a tragic account of Irish history as an explanation or a consolation for their own sadnesses? I was on a late-night phone-in radio show in Washington. Kathy from Florida rang in. "My poor father was made to get out of the bed by the Black and Tans and they put a gun to his head and they made him walk this way and then walk that way . . ."
The message was: don't end your quarrel with England because it is at the heart of my family piety. On a show in Wisconsin a man rang in to say that Time magazine had had a piece on the demographics in Northern Ireland which showed that there would soon be more Catholics there than Protestants. "Why give in now," this man asked, "when we're so nearly there?" Useless to talk about the futility of a new majority doing to a new minority what the old majority did in its day.
Vague impressions abound, because the detail of the Belfast Agreement is not easily available. "We only get the BBC," a girl in the Irish shop in Saint Paul in Minnesota said, "and the BBC is biased." The shop was busy with people buying Lyons' tea and Crunchies and CDs and books from home, and they gathered to chat about this as if at a village pump. They all agreed that "the media here aren't interested." They all wanted peace. But since most people who have been in America for a while haven't much idea why there has been war in the first place, they have no way of being judicious about any peace proposal.
IT is different in Washington, a town so political that an interior decorator I happened to meet there, a man with no links to Ireland, informed me that he'd read the agreement text on The Irish Times website. "And this is George Mitchell's town, too," someone remarked, "So we're all very involved."
At Capitol Hill level, plainly, everyone supports what they helped to shape. But in New York there were ads everywhere for meetings to be addressed by Bernadette Sands McKevitt or Bernadette McAliskey. Neither of those wants a settlement on the present terms, to put it mildly.
In a bar on Second Avenue there were cries of "Saoirse!" as Saturday afternoon became evening and the musicians started tuning up. There were a few reticent young men with northern accents, and older ones with strikingly pallid complexions. It was not an SDLP stronghold.
But at a more upmarket bar and restaurant the Irish manager was at least as typical when he said that he works so hard that he didn't know the details of the Belfast Agreement or any other agreement. When he wasn't working he was sleeping. He was practically killing himself, he said. But he was making lots and lots of money.
Young people like him are hard to imagine as Irish-Americans when they are older. Not of the kind, at any rate, evoked by the little newsletter which the Irish Cultural and Heritage Centre in Milwaukee publishes. It is probably representative. It thanks the local Ancient Order of Hibernians for a grant towards a genealogical archive, and it tells how the statue of St Patrick has been away for mending, and how the pianos were in constant use on St Patrick's Day.
Milwaukee Irish Arts, an ad says, will be presenting a one-act play ("Two IRA members meet in a `safe house' for lunch and to discuss old times") and the play, at Cardinal Stritch College, will be followed by an Irish brunch. Local Irish dancers have done well at the World Championships. The Celtic Women International will be hosting a conference with Welsh and Scots and Manx women.
Are these gentle pursuits what the vigorous yuppie emigrants of recent times will turn to, when they move to the suburbs of American cities and start raising their children? Or is the future of Irish-American self-consciousness as much in flux as our own? A man who edits a small Irish-American newspaper had said almost that to me. He said, about the agreement: "Our challenge is the same as yours".
It hasn't been Irish-America's fault if it has been 40 shades of nothing but green. Until recently, unionists never explained themselves to outsiders.
And even if they had, it could never have been the case that the question of Ireland would respond to reason - not while emigrants from the south felt themselves to be in forced exile. A radio host said to me last week, as if it were a normal remark in a contemporary political discussion: "But didn't the English export food from the ports of Ireland at the very same time the Irish were dying in the potato famine?"
How will a deep strain in Irish-America express itself if Noraid and the like wither away? How will situations be found in which the emotions generated by governing myths, like the Famine ones, can be, as they need to be, rehearsed?
It isn't easy to re-educate the feelings of a whole culture. The politics came from the feelings. Not much writing has caught the pain of the first Irish-Americans - a pain covered up by a silence on the personal level as eloquent as the laments for Erin on the public level.
But one unforgettable essay, based on his great-grandfather's tragic history in Philadelphia, can be found in the poet Micheal Coady's recent collection, All Souls. The epitaph to the essay is a quotation from T.S. Eliot. "This is the use of memory," it begins,
"For liberation -
Not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past."
Perhaps we must accept that liberation, now.
