‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity

Abstract

Popular culture has conveyed a narrowed image of Irish-Americans in respect to their ethnic, cultural, and religious roots: they are generally depicted as descendents of the Celts, as Catholics, and as victims of the Anglo-Irish (Protestant) landlords' insatiable greed for land, or of the Great Famine. It is true that the Catholic Irish immigrants into America of the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of whom were unskilled labourers, were socially disadvantaged. The majority of Irish Catholics arriving in America in the second half of the 19th century were confronted by the Protestant Irish with the same kind of colonial condescension as they had been by many Protestant landlords in Ireland. However, before the Catholics' mass-arrival in the wake of the Great Famine tens of thousands of Scots-Irish Presbyterians had set sail for America – their “Canaan” across the Atlantic – as early as at the end of the 17th century. According to the latest U.S. Census, the great majority of today's American-Irish are Protestant. As mirrored in letters and literary texts, each population group looked critically at their Irishness – embracing, un-embracing or re-embracing it.