Archive for March, 2011
“My heart leaped up with so much joy”: Happy St Patrick’s Day!
Thursday, March 17th, 2011Every St Patrick’s Day, I am reminded of my favourite book, The Hard Road to Klondike, and Micheál MacGowan’s poignant story of St Patrick’s Day in All Gold Creek in the Yukon. In case you’re not familiar with the book, it’s the translation from Irish of the oral memoir of Donegal native Micheál MacGowan’s adventures in Montana and the Alaskan Gold Rush. It’s wonderful.
I love the story of this impromptu St Patrick’s Day parade (probably Alaska’s first!), not least because it’s true. MacGowan’s tale captures the camaraderie, fun and poignancy of a good St Patrick’s Day celebration far from home. The story opens early on St Patrick’s morning with our hero, high in the hills, five miles from the nearest village, gathering a can of snow to melt for water for his breakfast.
As I stood there, suddenly I thought I heard pipe-music in the distance. At first I thought it was a dream but in a short while I heard it again. I straightened up then so as to hear it better but as luck had it, didn’t the piper stop playing as soon as I was in a position to listen properly. It was some time before he started up again but when he did he seemed to be closer and the music was clearer; and wasn’t the tune he was playing ‘St. Patrick’s Day’! I’d say that by then the piper was three or four miles away up in the hills behind us; there, then, was I, three thousand miles from home but, in the time it would take you to clap your hands, I fancied I was back again among my own people in Cloghaneely. My heart leaped up with so much joy that I was sure it was going to jump out of my breast altogether.
I ran back into the cabin and told my friends what was happening. They came out and when they heard the music, they were so overjoyed that one of them rushed around with the news to all the Irishmen in the neighbouring cabins. They too got up and when they also heard the pipe-music coming towards them they nearly went out of their minds. They went roaring and shouting around the place so much that you could hear the echoes coming back out of the mountains and valleys surrounding us. Everyone waited there until we felt the piper was coming near to us and then we all went out to meet him. Nobody was fully clothed and half of us hadn’t eaten at all but our blood was hot and despite the frost none of us felt the cold a bit! When we met him, we carried him shoulder-high for a good part of the way back. He was brought into our cabin and neither food nor drink was spared on him. And it was still early in the day.
When everyone was ready, he tuned his pipes and off we went four abreast after him like soldiers in full marching order. There wasn’t an Irish tune that we had ever heard that he didn’t play on the way down the valley. Crowds of people from other countries were working away on the side of the hill and they didn’t know from Adam what on earth was up with us marching off like that behind the piper. They thought we were off our heads altogether but we made it known to them that it was our very own day—the blessed feast-day of St. Patrick. On we marched until we came to the hotels and we went into the first big one that we met. Without exaggeration, I’d say that there were up to six hundred men there before us—men from all parts of the world. We were thirsty after the march and, though we hadn’t a bit of shamrock between us, we thought it no harm to keep up the old custom and to wet it as well as we were able.
We had a couple of drinks each and, as we relaxed, I stood up and asked the piper to tune up his pipes and play us ‘St. Patrick’s Day’ from one end of the house to the other. The word was hardly out of my mouth before he was on his feet…
The men drown the shamrock exuberantly at the town’s hotels, their day only briefly disrupted by the violent dispatch of an Orangeman who didn’t appreciate the celebrations. (We’ll skip that bit.)
As night fell, we all gathered ourselves together again and set off up the hill along the way we had come until we reached our own cabins again. We were tired out and it wasn’t hard to make our beds that night. The piper spent the night with us and next morning he bade us farewell and went off to the back of the mountain where himself and two friends of his were working.
A loyal good-natured Irishman, like thousands of others of his race, he left his bones stretched under frost and snow, far from his people, out in the backwoods, where none of his own kith would ever come to say a prayer for his soul. We heard that he had been killed in one of the shafts shortly after he had come to us to keep the Feast of St. Patrick with his music in All Gold Creek.
A bit of a sad ending there, but MacGowan himself had a much happier one. He went home to Donegal in 1901, travelling first class with the fortunes he brought from the Gold Rush. “I had seen enough of modern times in America; and it was like a healing balm to find myself under the old rafters again.” He decided to stay in Donegal, fell in love, married, and raised a family – and MacGowan, one of Ireland’s greatest emigrant adventurers, declared he would rather see one of his eleven children “gathering rags” than heading for America.
Happy St Patrick’s Day – I hope you’re parading where ever you are!
- You can read a full book review I wrote several years ago over at the Emigrant.ie website.
- I also wrote the entry on Michael MacGowan in Ireland and the Americas.
- You should probably buy the book.
Are we being too optimistic?
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011A recent edition of the Economist published an interesting graphic showing inward and outward migration based on both historic data and on forecasts from the Economic and Social Research Institute.
The graph, however, shows that the ESRI is predicting a strong downturn in outward migration starting this year, and a similarly significant upsurge in immigration. This is curious – there was much media panic over the forecast that a net total of 100,000 people would leave Ireland between April 2010 and April 2012. At the time I didn’t understand the hullabaloo, as outward migration was already running at about 65,000 a year. But this graph is a pretty vivid demonstration that the ESRI’s forecasts are likely to be too optimistic, as there’s no apparent change in economic circumstances on the horizon likely to be strong enough to drive such a reversal.
Another note on that Economist article: it takes a fairly balanced view on emigration overall, with some emotive talk of how emigration is “a trauma formed by economic wounds inflicted decades ago that still runs deep in the collective memory”, while also noting the more positive aspects of emigration that have not gone unnoticed by policy-makers:
Still, many argue that a population willing to move to where the jobs are is exactly what a country in Ireland’s predicament needs. Historically, labour mobility has helped to keep a lid on unemployment. And there have been other benefits: the diaspora, particularly in the United States, has proved a useful asset for Ireland, politically as well as economically. Moreover, a move abroad today is hardly the one-way ticket it was for many in the 19th century. When Ireland started to boom in the 1990s many émigrés returned home, bringing with them much-needed skills and capital.
While any rational assessment of the impact of emigration on Irish society would have to point out the diaspora’s positive economic benefits, I believe the last two sentences of that paragraph are too optimistic. They echo many statements made by politicians and comfortable business executives in recent months, as well as the hopes in the heart of many young people who are going away. But it’s a line that is being fed to us by a political class that doesn’t want to face up the enormity of the fact that for many of this generation, emigration will be a one-way trip. We will need Celtic-Tiger-job growth to drive Celtic-Tiger-style return rates, and that doesn’t seem likely right now – if ever. (Not to mention the fact that I don’t believe anyone has crunched the numbers and actually determined how many of those who left in the 1980s and 1990s ever returned. We know it’s significant, but with 800,000 Irish-born citizens abroad, it’s safe to say many of them remain overseas.)
Plus, the last boom was both a tech boom and building boom, which offered opportunities for both those with high-tech skills and tradespeople. Another building boom in the next decade or two seems highly unlikely. And even if a new tech boom starts, today’s emigrants who might like to return will be competing for jobs with the highly skilled, multilingual workers of Europe in ways they didn’t have to in the pre-accession days of the early Celtic Tiger. It’s highly likely that any future inward migration will be comprised of a broad range of nationalities, as it was during the last years of the Celtic Tiger, and returning Irish emigrants will have no monopoly on future opportunities.
I would like to think that those individuals who are most highly motivated to return will do so, but it’s unrealistic to believe that it will be an easy task to lure this generation of emigrants back after several years of a severe economic downturn. There’s really no evidence to suggest that emigration won’t be a one-way trip for most of our young people, and we should stop pretending otherwise and start dealing with reality.
Read the article on the Economist website: Ireland’s crash: After the race