FORMER House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s complaint that the then Irish government advised against Irish American politicians getting Ireland an exemption in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was highlighted in this column a few weeks back.

At the time Ireland had an annual quota of just over 17,853 visas a year, but when the act was enacted the number of Irish emigrating had dropped to only 267 visas for the first six months, as the new act removed the old European quotas.

An official at the Irish Embassy remarked before the Irish quota was removed that immigration quotas were “outmoded, unjust and should be revised.”

The reason given by the government at the time and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Sean Lemass was that Ireland needed to keep its people at home.

After our article ran a few weeks back we received a fascinating article written for Eire/Ireland in 2002 by Professor Mary Daly of University College Dublin, a leading historian of the period. Daly studied the Irish government/Irish America relationship at the time and came up with some fascinating nuggets.

It runs against the grain to report some of them. The widely assumed flood of Irish who came to the U.S. in the mid part of the last century turns out to be somewhat of an illusion.

Only 62,400 Irish moved to America in the 10-year period between 1951 and 1961. During that period, the Irish filled less than 50% of their 17,853 quota every year but one.

A big part of that was the sheer distance from Ireland to America before regular air travel. In the same period about 350,000 Irish moved to Britain.

It was not a time when Ireland ranked very high in the estimation of many Americans. When the Irish government extended citizenship in 1956 to the descendants of Irish emigrants only 100 people per year picked up on it.

No Love Lost

DALY’S article is also fascinating for the insights it provides into the relationship between the Irish government and the Irish American community.

Partition, of course, was a major problem in the relationship and Irish Americans felt the Irish government was not doing enough. In 1958 Irish Consul General John Conway in New York reported that relationships between the New York county clubs and the Irish government were very cool because Mayo-born lawyer and community leader Paul O’Dwyer had adopted an attitude towards Dublin that was “unfriendly and at times even offensive.”

Conway clearly had no great love for the community, saying the Irish-born had “little political power, little social status, little financial or economic worth ... the leadership of the principal Irish organizations seem neither skilful enough nor dedicated enough to arrest the decline of our influence here.”

Conway certainly didn’t believe Irish Americans were much better. “Irish Americans have not quite reached the top political rung,” he said, and he predicted that John F. Kennedy was “unlikely to become president.”

Besides, Conway noted, “our contact with Irish Americans is so limited that we are in danger of losing any real connection with them.”

Other Irish agencies felt likewise. Bord Failte, the Irish Tourist Board, believed the ethnic market was limited and declining, while the Irish Trade Board stated that Irish and Irish Americans had no interest in Irish products.

In 1952 a group of American consultants were asked to select 10 Irish products that could be marketed in the U.S. They failed to identify even one product.