Jennifer Horgan: My children will never see America as I did — the romance is over

Once the dream destination for Irish students, America now feels distant and disillusioning — and our cultural ties are fraying

Newport in Newport County, Rhode Island. Twenty-four years since my American romance, my country’s relationship with America couldn’t feel more different.

I met Jimmy in the summer of 2001 in a bar in Newport, Rhode Island. I was on my J1, four months stretching ahead of me — a glorious sense of summer.

It was a love affair wrapped inside a love affair. The cultural romance between Ireland and America back then created a separate, magnetic attraction. He loved Irish girls, just as I loved American boys. Star Wars style, the force was with us.

Who didn’t love an American boy back in July of 2001? Eight years before Estelle’s hit single, America was the ultimate ‘boy’, a great catch, the good guy, the debonair, romantic lead. America was still Clark Gable. Richard Gere. Denzel Washington. It was wholesome and handsome — as was Jimmy.

We met in the final weeks of my reliance on fake IDs. I remember the long bar strewn with brown bottles of beer and one-dollar bills. The gang of us Irish girls, spilling down from our white wooden house on a hill, all short tops and reddish tans, high on J1 freedom — our bellies quickly filled with tinned soup, rushing through our days to live the nights.

It was his smile — he had these amazing, incredibly masculine dimples — like John Travolta or Kevin Spacey but without the creepy. He was a sailor, smelling of sea salt, rope handling his bottle of beer, and me. God, I fell hook, line and sinker.

We even ‘dated’ during the day — a sure sign of commitment. He brought me to meet his American buddies. We lunched in an American diner — a diner for him, but for me — well, I was floating around a film set. The entire summer felt like make-believe: the liquor store; dimes and nickels, the 7/11, Macy’s.

I was Irish after all. My childhood, like most Irish childhoods, was built on American culture. Throughout my teenage years, I feasted on the stuff. Beverly Hills 90210. Dawson’s Creek. The OC. Friends. Living in America for four months felt like getting a bit part in a soap opera. Once Jimmy arrived — I was centre stage, and it was intoxicating.

As with all good things, both the intoxication of Jimmy and the heady atmosphere of the place, came to an end.

Terror attacks

I worked in a catering company that summer. The head chef, a drug-taking Bostonian, saw the first plane hit and wheeled his television into the main kitchen. Convinced it was terrorism, he predicted the second attack. Naïve to the last, I thought it was just more of his coke-infused paranoia.

 A jet airliner targets a World Trade Center tower in New York om September. 11, 2001. 

My memory of that morning runs like a scene from a Spielberg film, even on that day, such a strange day, I was on set. The street was deserted. There was a van with a radio blaring, and the few faces I saw looked grief-stricken, as if their family homes had been blown asunder.

Ireland was grief-stricken too, mourning our injured romantic lead. We sat centre-stage, chairing the UN Security Council after the attacks. September 14 was declared a day of mourning here. Bertie Ahern announced his condemnation and queues formed outside the America Embassy. Irish people lined up in silence to sign a book of condolences.

Twenty-four years since my American romance, my country’s relationship with America couldn’t feel more different. The economic impact of Trump is often discussed, but little is said about our emotional divorce, and what it means for our kids.

Yes, we laugh at Americans claiming their Irishness in booming voices across our summer tourist spots, but we’re fooling ourselves if we don’t own up to being part of the same romance. We have always been emotional partners. We have always loved America. We turned from Britain towards it. Who will we look to now?

Fintan O’Toole captures it perfectly in his book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, tracing Ireland’s social and economic revolution back to 1958 when TK Whitaker decided we needed to loosen our ties to the past and look to the future. A great deal of that meant looking to America, to what Brian Friel refers to, in his emigration play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, as “a profane, irreligious, pagan country of gross materialism?” Everything 1950s Ireland was not.

Now, the romance has ended, or, at the very least, has turned terribly sour. Under Trump, students are afraid to travel as I did in 2001, worried that their social media feed might land them in hot water or bar their entry altogether. As Jess Casey reported in this publication, in April, Union of Students in Ireland (USI) urged students to be “cautious and informed” of the potential impact activism could have on their visa status.

Trump is busily dismantling the education system in America. The bedrock of the J1 Visa is education, dating back to 1961, and Senator J William Fulbright. Cultural exchanges are not top of Trump’s to-do list, miles below his plans to convert Gaza into the Riviera. A reduced number of Irish students heading to America this summer will hardly come as sad news to the man.

But it’s sad news to me — that loss of innocence, that dead romance. It’s another thing I had that my children won’t have

Besides these practicalities, Irish children are growing up in an entirely different climate. The romantic pull of America has disappeared. They are far from being brought up to love America as we were.

Certainly, my children will grow up thinking of America, its government, as a bully, cosying up with other bullies, to pile on top of the marginalised and the oppressed. I grew up associating America with JFK, with peace marches, freedom, and justice. I couldn’t wait to get onto a plane to America, knowing I’d be culturally embraced.

Now, my teenage son doesn’t show any interest. He knows about the budget cuts, the rolling back of foreign aid, the children dying. He is far more likely to travel to Europe or indeed, to any other continent. Will Ireland find a new romance elsewhere? Whatever about an economic ally, who will be our emotional one?

My children will never see America as I did in July 2001, however foolishly, however naively, understanding little of their aggressive foreign policies — and that is a considerable loss. It is a loss for our children, and one worth registering.

Fewer Irish students will travel to America on a J1 this summer. It’s very real — that emotional, psychological severing. Our students are actively avoiding a country we once adored, and if my son were a few years older, I’d be telling him not to go.

In truth, the romance has been fading for years. In 2015, over 8,000 Irish students participated in the J-1 Summer Work and Travel program. By 2019, this number had more than halved, partially in response to a new requirement for Irish students to secure employment before travelling. Then came covid.

But the blocks to future connections are mounting. Irish students these days are right to be worried about their social media feed. Their concern for Palestine could be construed as antisemitic. America, simply put, is not on our side anymore. There is no cultural embrace, only suspicion

How the world has changed. My summer with Jimmy happened entirely offline. There are no photographs, only memories of a brief romance, shared here and nowhere else.

Jimmy looks filled out and happy on his Facebook feed. His life is his two sons, his wife, baseball games, yard sales and holidays. His America feels terribly, terribly far away. It no longer has anything to do with me, or Ireland.

He still lives in Rhode Island — where we met in 2001, during a long hot summer that ended in a broken heart. He still sails.

The rest, our union, like our countries’ union, is history.

This article was originally published on May 9, 2025.