Empower the Irish and Scots

By Tim Pat Coogan

WRITING in The Washington Post this month, a former U.S. Navy Secretary, James Webb, called on the American Scots Irish population to “help regain its power to shape the direction of America.”

He pointed to the remarkable number of decision-takers the Scots Irish had given America, ranging from actors to presidents, and backed up his call by declaring, “We helped build this nation from the bottom up. We face the world on our feet and not on our knees. We were born fighting.” 

What Mr. Webb says is correct — so far as it goes. Great as the numbers are of Scots Irish from Northern Ireland who contributed to the making of America, they are minute compared to those of the Green Irish. 

In each of the seven years after the worst phase of the Great Famine of the 1840s, Irish Catholic emigration to the U.S. equaled the existing total of the Scots Irish Presbyterians.

I would like to see Mr. Webb’s call extended to include the Green tradition which also does not “face the world” on its knees, and whose fighting history shines by its own light. A coming together of the two traditions could have a prodigious outcome.

As things stand, whether Irish or Scot, Orange or Green, both traditions have one thing in common in America today —invisibility.

Out of all the voices raised in the current presidential campaign, one of the potentially most powerful has remained conspicuously silent — that of the Irish. In George W. Bush’s America, that silence could yet prove to be the silence of the lambs, but at any time in America it’s a waste of a priceless asset.

Outside of a few East Coast cities and Washington, D.C. itself, most citizens are more concerned with what happens in their own state legislatures than they are with the preoccupations of far away Washington.

The voters of, say, Iowa or Kansas have less influence on, or concern with, foreign policy than the great lobbies — the industrial military complex, the oil interests, supporters of various aspects of the state of Israel. 

For example, the American Enterprise Institute which President Bush thanked on the eve of the Iraq invasion for providing him with 20 of his top White House decision takers supports Ariel Sharon and the policies of Likud.

It is a demonstrable fact that these forces have intertwined to utilize the post-September 11 climate of American public opinion to attack a country which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center atrocity, but everything to do with oil, unfinished Bush family business, and making the world safe for Halliburton.

In so doing they have eroded many of the freedoms which made America great. Sheltering behind such malodorous fig leafs as the Patriot Act, the Bush administration has recklessly and duplicitously embarked on the creation of a new, sandy Vietnam while the name of Osama bin Laden fades from memory.

In the Islamic world, the image of the Lady with the Lamp also fades and is replaced by that of the Statue, not of Liberty, but of the Great Satan.

The Irish in America are viewed with, at best, a fitful interest from Dublin which only stirs into life over an occasional policy of the hour, for or against Sinn Fein for example, and they’re taken pretty much for granted by the American political system. 

That’s not good enough. In the current neck and neck presidential election, an organized Irish vote could sway the result one way or the other. 

The strength of the Irish in America was demonstrated in recent years in two arenas — the securing of green cards for undocumented Irish illegals, and the creation of the Irish peace process. 

Both happened because in the first instance Irish Americans organized, forgot about looking towards Dublin, and looked instead to Washington.

In the second case, many of the same people came together and, by a turn of fortune, in tandem with Dublin, made the vital difference in the peace process.

Now Dublin’s Iraqi policy consists of keeping its head down over the use of Shannon Airport by U.S. troops. Irish Americans have gone into a worried state of pause, unhappy about the way the Middle East is developing but unwilling to be too open about their fears while American soldiers are at war. 

But they’ll be even more unhappy if Bush wins the election and introduces the draft. If he needs a tiny handful of British soldiers to shore up his Iraq invasion now, he’s not likely to overlook the draft option if he gets four more years in power to deal with an inevitably deteriorating situation on the ground.

As Mr. Webb said of the Scots Irish, the Green Irish don’t have to discuss this issue on their knees. To go no further to illustrate their contribution to America than the Twin Towers, consider the symbolism of the fact that the Irish were literally involved in the saving and perishing at every level. 

From cleaners to firemen, policemen, right up to where the Irish had literally made it to the top — to the respected Irish American financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald.

In today’s America there is no need to send to seek for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Irish Americans, and they should not be in any way either bashful or dilatory in answering the call.