The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

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The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 17, 2012 1:07 pm

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Published on Thursday, March 15, 2012 by Common Dreams
The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools
by Bill Bigelow
"Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
What is not often taught in schools or known by the many who routinely celebrate St. Patrick's Day, is that throughout the Irish 'Potato famine' there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

Sadly, today's high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O'Connor's haunting rendition of "Skibbereen," which includes the verse:

... Oh it's well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that's another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal's U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to "The Great Potato Famine." Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a "horrible disaster," as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin's The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the "ravages of famine" simply on "a blight," and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as "famished and ghastly skeletons." Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history -- they exemplify much of what is wrong with today's curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books' dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today's textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone's life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it's important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato -- during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly." But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy's Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry -- food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the "Great Famine," we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System: "Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight."

Patel's book sets out to account for "the rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on -- reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th-century Ireland to 21st-century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland -- that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that "we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital." The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion -- that's nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, "Hunger on Trial," that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Ore. -- included at the Zinn Education Project website -- students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let's honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let's make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish -- and that are starving and uprooting people today.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Mar 17, 2012 1:39 pm

Textbook publishers are not in the education business.

I like the sentiment but this is a lot like criticizing a SEAL Team for treating people rudely.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Nordic » Sat Mar 17, 2012 7:58 pm

I really bothers me that we're supposed to celebrate all things Irish today by getting blind stinking drunk and laughing about it.

My wife is basically 100 percent Irish by blood which means my kids are half. What am I supposed to tell the kids today when there are drunks all over the place "celebrating" Irishness?

Shit is fucked up.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Mar 17, 2012 8:08 pm

Textbooks might not work but music still does.

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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby peartreed » Sat Mar 17, 2012 8:54 pm

At least the Irish have a history of survival and a tradition of sweet revenge.

My Irish ancestors moved off the farm during the potato famine and migrated to the coast where, during storms, they built huge bonfires and, with lanterns, lured and guided passing ships onto the rocks, where they then salvaged the wrecks for the precious food and goods that the English Lords were exporting.

My Great Grandfather and Great Uncles then found work in the Belfast shipyards where they became steel platers, building the Titanic. After the sinking, my Grandmother still had the courage to cross the Atlantic to Canada as a Lady’s Companion, and married the English Lord’s landscape gardener there. They raised a family of four on the produce and proceeds of that estate, acquiring a subdivided portion of the land when the nobleman died. Apparently he died of drink, but not before my forebears finessed his signing a generous will while previewing his wake.

So today I raise a Guiness to the indominatable spirit of the adaptive, surviving souls.

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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 17, 2012 10:01 pm

Hy-Brassil: Irish origins of Brazil


By Roger Casement (1 September 1864 - 3 August 1916)

Edited by Angus Mitchell (*)

The name Brazil could only have come to the Portuguese from the Celtic legendary name applied to the 'islands of the blessed', the Tír na nÓg of the land of the setting sun, which the Galway and Mayo peasant still sees in the sunset just as the Galician and Lusitanian wayfarers in Cabral's day dreamt of it before their eyes had actually fallen on the peaks of Porto Seguro rising from the western waves.

Introduction
Image
Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresques,
showing Hy-Brassil west of Ireland, 1375
(Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris)

This lecture, held in the National Library of Ireland Ms. 13,087(31), was written by Roger Casement during his time as a British consul in Belém do Pará at the mouth of the Amazon sometime during 1907-1908. [1] In broad terms it puts forward an argument that the origins of the name Brazil derive from the mythical Hy-Brassil. This imagined island, located to the west of Ireland, is variously described as a 'promised land', the island of the blesséd - Tír na nÓg - the land of the setting sun, and features most largely in the voyages of St Brendan. [2]
In arguing such a root, Casement was current with Irish historical study of the day. He believed that Hy-Brassil was a name derived from the legends of the Atlantic sea-board, with Celto-Iberian origins dating from 'Atlantis and the submerged mother-land of the early Irish, Iberians and possibly Phoenicians'.
The name Brazil as a surname is current and common to both Ireland and Portugal today and in Irish place names such as Clanbrassil. Certainly 'Brazil', in a number of variant spellings, can be found in several ancient Irish manuscripts. 'Breasail' is the name used for a pagan demigod in Hardiman's History of Galway. Another possible derivation is from St Brecan, who shared the Aran islands with St Enda about 480 or 500 and was originally called Bresal. The name appears to have been built upon two Gaelic syllables 'breas' and 'ail'.
On a number of medieval maps Brazil also appears as the name for a land south west of the Skelligs. Elsewhere, it is one of the islands of the Azores, possibly Terceira. The earliest map is one drawn by Angellinus Dalorto of Genoa in 1325, where Brazil appears as a large disk of land to the south of Ireland. But on many later Italian and Catalan maps the name frequently reappears. [3]

Geraldo Cantarino's Uma ilha chamada Brasil: o paraíso irlandês no passado brasileiro
(2004) is the most authoritative recent work on
the subject of Hy-Brassil.

Before setting out for America in 1492, Columbus is alleged to have said, when pointing at the Isle of St Brendan on Toscanelli's map: 'I am convinced that the Earthly Paradise is on the isle of St. Brendan, which nobody can reach save by the will of God.'
In looking at how the Irish origins of Brazil had been written out of the history books, Casement was able to show how the Anglo-Saxon interpretation of history had obscured and corrupted the history rooted in a more ancient Irish origin. It gave him the chance to analyse the orthodox view of 'discovery' history and a group of historians who, he felt, had neglected the Irish influence in Atlantic culture through their ignorance of the Irish language and their denial of a more ancient and mystical source of knowledge.

Angus Mitchell

--------


The name Brazil is probably the sweetest sounding name that any large race of the Earth possesses. How this musical name came to be assigned to the great country of South America did not interest me until after I had landed at Santos [4] in the autumn of 1906. We accept the names of countries and of places as we find them on maps without question taking them as a matter of course just as we accept the Atlantic Ocean or Asia. The name seems a part of the country and if a very inquisitive mind should ask the origin of the name itself, reference is made to a school geography, where the new-comer may find a probable commonplace origin.
Thus it is with the name Brazil.
Image
Map by Dalorto (1325), including Hy-Brassil and Daculi islands

The beautiful name that we are told came from a dye-wood used in the commerce of the middle ages. Whether it be the individual Brazilian we ask, the school book we turn to or the encyclopaedia we appeal to, the answer is the same - brief, unexplanatory and precise - the country was named from the abundance of the dye-wood that was soon exported from its shores after the discovery. It was first called Terra de Santa Cruz - Land of the Holy Cross - by Cabral, [5] its discoverer, a baptism that the King of Portugal his master confirmed. But in spite of official and royal recognition the dye-wood prevailed over the wood of the true cross. Such, in brief, is the universal reason assigned to the naming of Brazil. No writer has even got beyond this: altho' a few have been on the threshold of the truth without knowing it. For there is no doubt at all that in so deriving the name Brazil the country from the dye-wood of medieval commerce, the school book, the individual Brazilian, the encyclopaedia and the dictionary are astray.
They have been satisfied from the first with a half truth only, and not seeking further, or not knowing where to seek they have stopped short with a reason that not only gives no meaning, but leads the mind astray.
One or two of the writers who have dealt with the origin of the name have been quite in sight of the truth, but the limitations of European learning which had been shut off for centuries from the one literature that could have made things more clear.
Strange as it may seem, Brazil owes her name not to her abundance of a certain dye-wood but to Ireland. The distinction of naming the great South American country, I believe, belongs as surely to Ireland and to an ancient Irish belief old as the Celtic mind itself.
It may be asked how it is that none of the standard works upon the discovery of the two Americas contain an inkling of the truth. How comes it that authors, who are claimed as classics, have all failed to trace the origin of a name that covers one of the greatest dominions of the two continents to whose history and professional development they have devoted the genius of their pens and the erudition of great minds.
The answer can only be that the name of those who have undertaken the task have realised that Ireland played a more important part in the life of medieval Europe than later day records assign her, and that her influence on the minds of men was not confined to religious questions, but extended very largely into the commercial and intellectual life of the times. Far from being a remote "island beyond an island" she had fleets on many seas and her speech and shipping penetrated the western and southern seaboard of Europe from Antwerp to Genoa. Her mariners were in every port and while her traders had collected at Lisbon and along the coasts of Spain in numerous and important communities her own ports were for centuries the rendez-vous of Spanish, French and Italian shipping, as in earlier days they had been of Roman.
Some of the evidence on their head has lately been given an abiding place in literature by Mrs J.R. Green [6] in her Ireland from 1200-1600. A writer to whom Mrs Green has accorded her grateful recognition, Mr J.R. Kenny, has also in a series of articles, which have appeared in the columns of the Irish press, given us a glimpse of the vast field of international activity - whereon Ireland played so large a part. None of these things were known to the modern authors Washington Irving, [7] or Prescott, [8] or Robertson, [9] or Southey, [10] who have dealt with American discoveries for the English-speaking world. To them Ireland was a name that denoted a land steeped in poverty and ignorance - the back woods of Europe, a reproach to England it might be, but a people having nothing to offer the scholar. Her only language was unwritten, untaught, unknown beyond the confines of the cabins where a race of senior barbarians lived in squalid misery without parallel in civilization, and of such repute that the great world of thought and culture might deplore. With a vicarious sympathy it dismissed from serious consideration the people and the country where such a condition was known to prevail.
When these scholars came across some reference to Ireland in their researches through Peninsular records their minds were blank by reason of prevailing prejudice, the child of ignorance, their very knowledge of their Ireland of their own day but broadened already a wide range of misunderstanding. What could Ireland possibly offer the scholars who sought the beginning of European thought in its western striving quest for a New World? Clearly nothing. It is thus that we find so delighted an author as Washington Irving confronted by the record which, had he known it, would have unlocked much to his imagination, passing over with contemptuous misreading the story of St Brendan. [11] So ignorant indeed was he of the origin of the story, while admitting that Columbus [12] must have been acquainted with it that he speaks of St Brendan as "a Scottish monk" with no perception of the meaning that attached to the word "Scot" or "Scotia" in the early middle ages. In this he doubtless sinned unwittingly not as Hallam [13] who, with that true quality of British meekness which seeks to inherit the Earth, writes of Duns Scotus [14] as an Englishman.
Image
St. Brendan's search for Paradise
(West to the Garden)

The Hallams indeed we have always with us.
It is sufficient for an Irishman to be distinguished in any walk of life for him to be at once annexed.
When Washington Irving wrote his history of Columbus the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind was being invented. Its cult has widened from a variety of motives; its rise synchronised with a far less laudable minor cult which today finds frequent expression in American historical records. I refer to the term "Scotch-Irish" to designate the pioneers who, in the early days of Indian border fighting, or later revolutionary strife, did so much to build up the fabric of America. I am not sure if Washington Irving may not be held largely responsible for the term Scotch-Irish. In his later literary development of the "Scotch-Irish" ancestor of the innumerable Murphys, Sullivans, MacDonalds or O'Tooles, he assigns their ancestry to a hybrid whom neither Ireland nor Scotland claims. Certain it is that his Scotch monks allusion to St Brendan has been amplified by American ignorance until in a work published in 1892 to commemorate as "an absolutely complete Colombian memorial (1492-1892)" the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America; we find the Bishop of Clonfert, born and bred in Kerry taking his place among the legendary Scotch-Irish of the revolution.
I refer to a monumental work issued by the Syndicate Publishing Co of Philadelphia entitled The Discovery and Conquest of the New World, which among other gifts to the American people, offers them in Chapter II "the fable of St Brendan, a Scotch-Irish priest who was accredited with first having discovered America in the sixth century". On turning to the body of the work dealing with the episode it becomes clear that the compilers of the modern work have merely copied from Washington Irving's pages the scanty references wherein he dismisses the Brendan legend. This modern American work was offered to the American people with an "Introduction by the Hon. Murat Halstead. Most Renowned Journalist and Colombian student of Both Americas" and in this gentleman's introduction we are told that to "properly introduce to the multitudinous readers of this book the subjects, authors and illustrations seemed a task of such gigantic proportions as to create a feeling of awe in the breast of the most intrepid."


It must assuredly create regret in the minds of the most sympathetic that the multitudinous descendants of illustrious Irishmen in the United States should have offered to them as history in 1892, the statement that the Bishop of Clonfert in 563 "was a Scotch-Irish abbot who flourished in the sixth century and who is called sometimes by the foregoing appellations (St Brandon or Borondon) sometimes St Blandanns or St Blandanus."
Moreover England assiduously spread the tale. Just as when she first began her civilizing mission to Ireland in Tudor times, the Lord Deputies of Elizabeth were careful to provide that those "German Earls", who had come from the Courts of Christendom to visit Ireland, should "see as little as might be" of the great Queen's regenerated kingdom beyond the walls of Dublin. So to the modern European questions England had turned a face of firm benevolence, with uplifted deploring hands, and regretted while she double-barred the door, that the condition of her turbulent patient still precluded the visits of enquiring or possibly sympathetic minds. The Irish of the early nineteenth century were as effectually beyond the pale of cultured thought as their language was beyond the ken of the scholar.
Speaking, as Young wrote a generation earlier, "a despised language", with no school wherein their tongue was taught, with no printed book of their language, with no means to make their thought known save in the half-speech of their conquerors; the oldest people in Western Europe, whose unknown literature in truth revealed a character of lofty consistency and high ideal, were ranked with the African slave and at best could offer nothing but a "kitchen midden" to research. The shafts of wilful ignorance that was then a part of English international statecraft flashed wherever the pen of the writer or the soul of the scholar might for a moment have been drawn to Ireland. These shafts indeed are still often bared, but while today impotent to daunt or blind the gaze of the Continent, they play their malicious part in English party strife and in the columns of the English Press. It was but four years ago in 1904 that the Morning Post, certainly one of the most cultured and generally best informed of the English journals permitted its leader writer to liken the study of Irish in the schools of Ireland to the teaching of "kitchen kaffir" in South Africa.
The Statute Book of Ireland still makes it a punishable offence in 1908 to report in any newspaper in Ireland, any proceedings in an English Law Court in any language but English. When this Act was passed in 1740, the language of the whole of Ireland, outside a colonist aristocracy and their immediate dependants was Irish - and no proceeding in a Court of Law could have been carried to an issue save by a continuous appeal to that language in which there must on no account be made public or recorded.
The thing was not tomfoolery - it was all part of the great plan for wiping out the Irish mind. It had nearly succeeded.
The scholar today is beginning to realise that the Irish mind has something to reveal in the only tongue that ever gave it expression, or can give it expression. No historical student today would dream of writing a history of Ireland without reference to Irish records. In years to come international scholars will not dream of a complete scholarship which ignored the Irish language.
But when Washington Irving wrote his history of Columbus few scholars knew that there was an Irish language and very few Irishmen themselves believe that their language, although the language of our childhood and of all their fore fathers, has anything to offer even to Ireland that was worth recording or preserving. An ignorance more complete, more dastardly, more debasing never assailed a whole people - and its baneful fruit has been the bread on our school-boys lips for how many generations? If this was the condition of Ireland in say, 1820, what wonder that the student of European records took no thought of her when he turned to medieval times, or if when he found her name recorded, he passed it over as of no import or even, as Irving did, assigned the very name itself to another country and another people. Brendan the Kerryman in quest of Hy-Brassil, is to Washington Irving and millions who have read him, a Scottish monk.

For Washington Irving's ignorance of the true significance of the Brendan legend he had found Columbus studying there is every excuse. He wrote, as Prescott wrote, at a time when much that later research has given to the world was still withheld from the scholar or locked up in the archives of Continental libraries. Just as Prescott knew nothing of the gigantic discoveries in Yucatan and elsewhere in Central America which have since revealed so much to our historical gaze of the past of the Indian peoples, so when Irving compiled his delightful works upon Columbus no historian dreamed that Ireland could offer anything worthy the contemplation of scholars, seeking mid-Continental records to throw light upon that medieval mind which first invented and then discovered a New World. And yet nothing is more certain than that Ireland was the home of the legend which for centuries had turned men's minds westward in search of that fabled land, and that the very name by which the earliest Irish records, called that region St Brendan set out to find, was the very name by which, when the discovery came, the discovering people themselves decided by popular will and all pervading prior use to confer upon this new found possession. That Brazil owes her name to Ireland - to Irish thought and legend - born beyond the dawn of history yet handed down in a hundred forms of narrative and poem and translated throughout all western Europe, until all western Europe knew and dreamed and loved the story, and her cartographers assigned it place upon their universal maps, I think has been made clear enough in the forgoing article.
Legends die hard - and doubtless the legends of the dye-wood's origin of the name Brazil, resting as we have seen on no historical proof and abundantly disproved by antecedent application of the name no less than by the clear and continuous Irish record of the land, the locality, the search and the name, will die slowly. The "Scotch-Irish" origin of so many of the American people already shows signs of failing vitality. As the study of Irish records becomes more general those who today are still ashamed to claim descent from the "mere Irish" will discover that a truly Irish origin may even be fashionable. That it has always carried with it a storied value to the discerning, an inspiration to the brave, and an immemorial claim upon the generous and high souled has been hidden from men's minds, not by the faults of Irish character so much, as by the wanton obscurity in which the home of that people has been plunged.
That darkness was not a chance cloud, and now that it is lifting others besides Irishmen and their multitudinous descendants in the western world, may learn from the enduring legend of Hy-Brassil, to prize the records of a race who have given much to mankind, besides the historic facts of ancient fable and who are destined, if they will still honour their own past, to discover fields of thought and action for "the dauntless far-aspiring spirit of the Gael."

Roger Casement
Belém do Pará, Amazon River, c. 1908
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby eyeno » Sun Mar 18, 2012 1:47 am

seemslikeadream you are the most under appreciated asset this forum has. i love you.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby crikkett » Sun Mar 18, 2012 1:07 pm

There's lots of Irish to teach your kids.

Image

What kills me is how the local bar has the Highland Pipe band play for them every year.

Uilleann pipes
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Nordic » Sun Mar 18, 2012 1:26 pm

Yeah, I'm just annoyed because yesterday my kids witnessed a lot of grown people, down on Main Street in Santa Monica, displaying egregious acts of severe public drunkeness while dressed in glittering green party hats and whatnot. They were disturbed by this. As was I that my kids had to witness it.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby crikkett » Sun Mar 18, 2012 1:36 pm

Damn. That is a shame.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Nordic » Sun Mar 18, 2012 1:40 pm

Yeah. Its like celebrating a "Native American Day" by putting on headresses and drinking ourselves sick. Really seems a bit racist to me. But wait, Irish is white, so I guess it can't be "racist" right?
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Mar 18, 2012 2:10 pm

Article on Brazil was an eye-opener, thank you. Quite tasty indeed.
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby AlicetheKurious » Sun Mar 18, 2012 2:29 pm

peartreed wrote:At least the Irish have a history of survival and a tradition of sweet revenge.

My Irish ancestors moved off the farm during the potato famine and migrated to the coast where, during storms, they built huge bonfires and, with lanterns, lured and guided passing ships onto the rocks, where they then salvaged the wrecks for the precious food and goods that the English Lords were exporting.

My Great Grandfather and Great Uncles then found work in the Belfast shipyards where they became steel platers, building the Titanic. After the sinking, my Grandmother still had the courage to cross the Atlantic to Canada as a Lady’s Companion, and married the English Lord’s landscape gardener there. They raised a family of four on the produce and proceeds of that estate, acquiring a subdivided portion of the land when the nobleman died. Apparently he died of drink, but not before my forebears finessed his signing a generous will while previewing his wake.

So today I raise a Guiness to the indominatable spirit of the adaptive, surviving souls.

peartreed


I like that. Slainte!
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby AlicetheKurious » Sun Mar 18, 2012 2:42 pm

Also, too bad schools don't teach How the Irish Saved Civilization.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
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Re: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

Postby Luther Blissett » Sun Mar 18, 2012 3:44 pm

Nordic wrote:Yeah. Its like celebrating a "Native American Day" by putting on headresses and drinking ourselves sick. Really seems a bit racist to me. But wait, Irish is white, so I guess it can't be "racist" right?


No, my girlfriend is a dual Irish citizen, a non-drinker, and really, really hates this holiday. I think that people also expect certain behaviors or personality traits from her because she has green eyes, red hair, and freckles. It's at least egregiously discriminatory.
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