September Sundays a real cure for homesick immigrants
And French Church Street, Half Moon Street, the Glen even.
Upstairs at the Upper East Side’s Ryan’s Daughter, a definitive New York ‘neighbourhood bar’ if ever there was one, a production of Conal Creedon’s 2005 play The Cure was being performed by Cork-born actor Michael Mellamphy.
A tricolour fluttered gently outside the window but it was pure Cork inside the dimly-lit space.
My fellow audience members and I formed a sort of guard of honour for the mesmerising Mellamphy as he interpreted Creedon’s incredible lines, lurking around the beautiful city one grim morning, haunted by demons and eventually simply himself.
Word had filtered through from back home that the Blackrock minor hurlers had won the Premier County for the third year on the trot, overcoming that same Glen through which the grandfather in The Cure had followed his nose to work.
I’ve written about this before — how I can’t help myself sometimes; not even close to a patriot but certainly missing my parish and my city. The hurling was bad enough a week and a half ago so I have every sympathy for the Mayo exiles who probably won’t sleep between now and Sunday (and hopefully a couple of nights beyond that, too).
Professor Miriam Nyhan, a Wicklow native and a historian at New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House all the way down at the foot of Fifth Avenue, has based much of her research around the county loyalties that cross the Atlantic Ocean.
A renowned expert on immigration out of Ireland, September’s All-Ireland finals annually provide case studies which help the academic understand the evolution of the émigré.
“This is always fascinating to me, this time of year, when you start to see the young people fall into their county identities in a significant way.
“It really goes to show the strength of the GAA and especially how strong certain counties are in celebrating those bonds. When I did comparative studies, the consensus is that when it comes to identities that lie below the national level, the further you get from the capital, the stronger those identities are. Mayo is a great example of that. Kerry and Donegal too.”
For centuries, Mayo has seen the biggest emigration to New York. The descendants are numerous and often successful and their County Association was always one of the bigger groupings.
This is Dr Nyhan’s specific field — an exhibit she helped curate. ‘The Fifth Province: County Societies in Irish America’ just completed a run at the National Library in Dublin and will open at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast next March.
Whereas in the past, county identity was organised along numerous fronts, the GAA has in recent years emerged as the primary outlet for expats desperate to retain some cultural parity with home.
The GAA and the County Associations still have a symbiotic relationship, believes Nyhan, but it very much depends on the profile of the immigrant.
“The young fella who has just come over and is playing up in Gaelic Park, he’s probably not going to the County Association meetings. Simply because he’s training, he’s working, he’s going out, meeting the lads, he’s busy. Maybe in 20 years time, when he’s not as actively playing, he might take more of an interest in the County Associations.
“The jury is out as to how they’ll continue in their current format. The younger Irish immigrants aren’t gravitating to them as much. Irish identity has changed. I think that pull to county identity is less than it was, just because the world has changed so much.
“When immigrants left in the 40s and 50s, the furthest they had been was the nearest big town. Now the new immigrants have been all over the world and increased communication has slightly altered that world view so they’re slightly less inclined to gravitate towards the traditional county outlets available to them.”
Between the mid 60s and mid 80s, Dr Nyhan explains, there was almost a complete drop-off in immigration from Ireland which had a massive impact on institutions like the GAA.
“There was a break in the migration flow that had been constantly replenished in the decades before that,” she added. “So you see a significant generation gap between the immigrants that arrived in the 50s and those who arrived in the late 80s. To see Irish immigrants still gather and come together along those lines and show that sort of support is really reassuring. Of course people will say it’s just a drinking session. But there’s something about that loyalty which is so strong in Irish culture. So for me, to see Mayo playing Dublin on Sunday and see how excited people are getting about it over here, it really feels good.”
*johnwriordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
