On St Patricks Day, a friend remarked that they were sick of men drinking Guinness and calling themselves Irish because of a single grandparent. After all, no one likes to brag about their Irish ancestry any more than a white guy who’s never left Australia. However, my friend’s words also stung me a little: I have a single Irish grandparent, my Grandpa, am partial to a pint of the black stuff on occasion, and happily call myself Irish at the first opportunity. However, I don’t have any knowledge of Irish politics or history. I haven’t grown up in Ireland, I haven’t been taught by their school system, I can’t speak Irish (Gaelic). In many ways, I am Irish by passport, and nothing else. In that moment, I felt like a fraud, a coloniser, seizing a history I didn’t belong to.
In the weeks following the initial pub chat, I attended an artist talk with contemporary Asian-Australian artist Louise Zhang. She spoke about the Asian diaspora, and her experience as a ‘third-culture kid’, a term originally coined by US Army Expats for US Children who grew up on foreign army bases. Not knowing how to speak Mandarin to her family in China or engage with Western culture. Feeling like a tourist in both worlds, too white for China, but too Asian for Australia. This resonated with me, as the journey she talked about was one I felt I was grappling with in my relationship to my Irish heritage.
When my great-uncle Michael died, we drove my Grandpa down to Melbourne for the funeral. There, for the first time, I met a cacophony of relations whom I had never seen before in my life. It was overwhelming, I felt out of place, I didn’t know what to do or what to say, or who to say it to. The only thing I may have uttered to my mum was “we all have the same nose”. And we did. The Boland family nose, everyone had it, and it felt a bit like a bond, stringing us together. Later, we went to Michael’s son Keiran’s house. 40 people crammed into a tiny room, conversation flying everywhere. It was the most I’d seen my Grandpa talk in years, and it felt incredibly comforting in a way that I didn’t quite realise I needed. It felt like being dipped into a heritage I hadn’t known I’d lost until I found myself missing it.
When my Grandpa dies, it feels like my heritage will slide away from me. Of the eight siblings my Grandpa had, half moved to Australia, and the rest stayed to tend the family farm. Those who stayed in Ireland never married or had children. They lived a tough life and weathered all for their work and their livelihoods. There are no ‘Irish’ children, and the grandchildren (me included) are half a world away. Part of me wants to give up everything, move to rural Ireland and ensure a heritage that generations of the Boland clan lay claim to isn’t lost. But I cannot go and take over the farm. I don’t know how to toil, how to work, how to get up before sunrise and spend all day in a field. In his poem, Digging, Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote
An important part of understanding what it is to be Irish is to understand Ireland’s
relationship with the English empire. As a country, Ireland is defined by colonial
oppression: first through Cromwell’s invasion and the restrictive laws which resulted in
the Great Famine; and more recently the Troubles, with an active Republican movement
and Pro-IRA sentiment still being fostered throughout the country. This violent past has
seen some scholars describe Ireland as being aligned more closely with the ‘Global
South’, with a close connection being formed between Ireland and—for example—
Palestine, due, in part, to their shared colonialism at the hands of the British. Speaking
to NPR about the support for Palestine, prominent podcast David Chambers said
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man
…
But I’ve no spade to follow men like themBetween my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Speaking to the New Yorker magazine about immigration, Irish author Colm Tóibín talked about how, in the 1960s, a great number of the students who got into Oxford and the big universities were the first in their family to do so. Children would leave, go to the city, and come back changed. The education, the lifestyle drove a wedge between the old world and the new, the city and the town. To me, this chasm between me and my heritage was one brought about not just by distance, but also by personage. I am a white, privileged, inner west Sydneysider. I live in a world that is utterly alien to my family in Ireland, and they live in a world that is alien to me.
An important part of understanding what it is to be Irish is to understand Ireland’s relationship with the English empire. As a country, Ireland is defined by colonial oppression: first through Cromwell’s invasion and the restrictive laws which resulted in the Great Famine; and more recently the Troubles, with an active Republican movement and Pro-IRA sentiment still being fostered throughout the country. This violent past has seen some scholars describe Ireland as being aligned more closely with the ‘Global South’, with a close connection being formed between Ireland and—for example—Palestine, due, in part, to their shared colonialism at the hands of the British. Speaking to NPR about the support for Palestine, prominent podcast David Chambers said
A lot of the brutality of the British Empire was practiced on Ireland first… When we [Irish people] see what happens in Palestine — people shot dead while waving white flags — that’s an immediate cultural memory… We can’t turn away from this. It’s our grandparents.
Irish support for Palestine in recent years has been overwhelming; Belfast rap group KNEECAP have vocally chanted for a free Palestine since forming, artisans are crafting joint Irish/Palestinian football jerseys, and the country is now being cheerfully referred to as ‘Paddystine’. This support extends into the Irish diaspora as well. Having attended pro-Palestine marches over the last year and a half, it has been a heartwarming experience witnessing the amount of vocal Irish support towards another group experiencing genocide at the hands of a colonial invader.
Maybe this is the Irish history, remembering to protest, to fight, to stand up, offer a hand, and be there. Maybe it’s celebrating the language, the culture, acknowledging the destruction that colonialism has wrought and looking to pause it even as it continues. Maybe it’s remembering the language is Irish, not English, and clinging tight to everything that marks you as separate from an invading powerhouse that took land, rights, and innocent lives from generations of people. If that’s not something worth standing up for, I’m not sure what is.
I’m not sure if I can call myself a third-culture kid. I also have heritage that can be traced back to convicts on the second fleet, but my Grandpa is an immigrant, who left behind his friends, family, and community to live in a country he didn’t know, without the money to get back the other way. I have an identity that stretches back hundreds of years, a family farm that has weathered oppression and disease.
Recently, I’ve started looking to learn Irish Gaelic, and though I don’t know how to pronounce Tiocfaidh ár lá, I’m trying to. I’m pulling in family and trying to get the stories my Grandpa wouldn’t tell me at home. Sometimes, to connect to a past, you’ve gotta grab it by the scruff of the neck and drag it into place until you can make it part of you.
