All Irish travelers are ambassadors

I have been conducting an informal experiment in Paris.

My French is serviceable but accented in a way that is difficult for the French to attribute to any specific non-French-speaking country:  Polish?, German? Ukrainian? So new acquaintances ask the innocent enough question: "Where are you from?"

When I answer "I'm from the United States," the response can be jarring. The scrunched face. The Gallic lips lifted up and somehow simultaneously downturned. A French shrug can express pity as well as disdain, frequently both at once. To their credit, French people instinctively distrust their own political leaders (even the ones they voted for) so they accept that being an American does not necessarily mean one is in agreement with whatever is currently going on. They make allowances. But it is not exactly a warm welcome.

So, just for fun, I tried something else. When the question came: "Are you from England? Poland? Germany? I hear an accent." — I answered with the truth, if not the whole truth: "We just arrived from Dublin."

Oh, my. What a difference.

It was like Christmas morning. "We love the Irish! We love Ireland! My sister is studying there. I once visited Connemara, why would you ever leave?" The transformation was complete and instantaneous. Literally night and day.

Boston Irish readers will not be entirely surprised by this. We know the emigration story as our own. We grew up with it. But we also know, at least intellectually, that the Irish went everywhere and that everywhere they went, they left their mark. We think of Charlestown, Dorchester, Southie (or Eastie in my family), of the Kennedys and the famine ships. But when a stranger in a Paris café lights up at the word "Dublin," it puts a finer point on something: the Irish diaspora is the largest in the world. (The Lebanese are second.) The French woman who visited Connemara once is part of this Irish story, too.

The Irish diaspora did not confine its contributions to Boston, New York or Chicago. Admiral William Brown, born in a cottage in Foxford, County Mayo, founded the Argentine Navy. Stephen Moylan, a Cork man serving as aide-de-camp to George Washington, was the first person to write down the words "the United States of America" — six months before they appeared in the Declaration of Independence. The Irish didn't just help build America, they named it. From the founding of nations to the winning of wars, the Irish have been present and consequential on nearly every stage in the world, usually without sufficient credit.

It must also be said, to avoid hagiography, that not every contribution has been for the good. Senator Joe McCarthy comes to mind as do certain prominent Fox News personalities who have weaponized a performance of Irish-American identity while doing things that would make their ancestors weep. But on balance, the Irish diaspora has done its homeland extraordinary credit, integrating into every society it entered while maintaining, against long odds, its own sense of Irishness.

The French stranger who has never set foot in Ireland but feels warmly toward the Irish has absorbed something real, something that the Irish, in their travels, their music, their literature, and their relentless conviviality, have transmitted to the world over generations.

It is worth noting that the warmth the Irish enjoy today was not always there. It was not given. It was earned.

The Irish who arrived in Boston in the holds of coffin ships were met not with open arms but with signs reading "No Irish Need Apply." In England, they were caricatured in the press as subhuman — simian figures in Punch cartoons, dirty, violent, irredeemably foreign. Their Catholicism was treated as a papal conspiracy against Protestant civilization. In America, the Know-Nothing movement made opposition to Irish immigration a political platform. The Irish were, in the language of every era's nativism, the wrong kind of people.

They changed that perception by demonstrating character. In the mines and on the railroads, in the firehouses and police precincts of Boston, on the battlefields of the Civil War, in the parishes and schools and union halls of a hundred cities, the Irish wore down the suspicion and replaced it with admiration. The French café owner who today embraces a Dubliner with genuine warmth is the beneficiary of that long, patient work. The reputation was built. It was not inherited.

We know this story well. It is, in many ways, our story, which is why that transformed face in the Paris café feels like something more than a personal anecdote more like a report from the front.

The Irish who first came to Europe in large numbers went to England. They were laborers, navvies, the men and women who built the roads and railways of a country that had done catastrophic damage to their own. They sent money home and kept their heads down.

Then came the European Economic Community, and a new generation arrived with different intentions: students, restaurant workers, young people hungry for adventure, for a life not defined by the old shame of emigration. They came to Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Berlin — not fleeing, but choosing.

Now comes a third wave: executives, entrepreneurs, actors, people operating at the highest levels of global business and culture. The Collison brothers left County Tipperary not because Ireland had nothing to offer them but because Silicon Valley had the venture capital to build something at planetary scale. The result is Stripe, one of the dominant payment processing companies on earth. These are not men who came to dig a ditch. They came to reshape how the world moves money.

Paris has always held a particular place in this story. Long before the EEC generation arrived with their Eurail passes, Irish writers and artists had claimed the city as their own. Oscar Wilde died here, a broken man but still writing witticisms. James Joyce wrote much of “Ulysses,” his great monument to the Dublin he had left behind, in a series of rented rooms on the Left Bank. Samuel Beckett lived here for decades, wrote some of the most important works in the history of the theatre in French, and when he won the Nobel Prize, stayed in Paris sending a friend to collect it in Stockholm. Brendan Behan thought of himself as a house painter until his Breton innkeeper in Paris said “Non, Brendan, you are an author!”  It changed Behan’s self perception forever. Shakespeare and Company, the beloved English-language bookshop on the banks of the Seine, has for generations been a gathering place for Irish writers and readers, a small embassy of the literary imagination and the original publisher of Ulysses. The current manager, Niamh, is from Crossmaglen, County Armagh.

It is into this tradition that Glen Hansard steps every time he plays Paris.

I saw Hansard perform in Paris recently at the opening concert of his new tour. He is in some ways the perfect emblem of the new Irish diaspora: a man who began as a busker on Grafton Street, who has slept rough, who knows in his bones what it means to have nothing between you and the street. He brought all of that with him to fame, to “Once,” to the Oscar, to the stages of the world. As a former busker, he long ago internalized the fragility of life. You can be performing with Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sheeran one minute and penniless again in the blink of an eye.

Hansard also brought his gift for assembly. His annual fundraising concerts for the homeless in Dublin have gathered some of Ireland’s most gifted singers and musicians: Sinead O’Connor, Hozier, Bono, Dermot Kennedy, Imelda May, Paddy Reilly.  Irish music is a gravitational force, pulling the great ones in and continuing the tradition of the session, of music as a communal act of generosity.

Near the end of the night, Hansard sang a Pete Seeger song called "Passing Through." BostonIrish readers of a certain vintage will know it:

“Sometimes happy, sometimes blue, glad that I ran into you. Tell the people that you saw me passing through.”

It was magic.

We saw two other Irish performers in Paris whose work has stayed with me for reasons that run deeper than entertainment.

Andrew Bennett gave a performance built around Claire Keegan's “Small Things Like These” — reading the novel aloud, live in the chapel of the Irish Cultural Center. The book (also now a film with Cillian Murphy) is the spare and devastating story of a man in a small Irish town who discovers, in the weeks before Christmas, what is happening behind the walls of the local convent. The Magdalene laundries, the mother and baby homes, the women hidden away, the children taken. Bennett's performance was poignant and funny in the way that only the Irish can manage, finding the light precisely because they are not afraid to sit in the dark.

Dara O'Briain is one of Ireland's best-loved comedians, internationally famous and consistently brilliant. O'Briain is also, as it happens, adopted. His show “‘re creation” wove the story of his search for his birth mother in his fifties. A child of Ireland's own system of managed shame, O’Briain stood on a Paris stage and made people laugh until their bellies hurt.

These evenings, taken together, said something about the Irish diaspora that no celebration of Stripe or Springsteen can quite reach. The wounds of the forced adoptions and the mother and baby homes have not yet healed. They are still being processed and turned — with extraordinary courage — into art.  Dara O'Briain made Paris laugh. Andrew Bennett made Paris feel. They were here. They passed through.

There is a reason why Irish soccer fans are remembered, wherever they travel, for singing lullabies to children in town squares — while the fans of certain other nations are remembered for something considerably less charming. There is a reason that the French woman's face lights up at the word "Dublin." There is a reason that from Boston to Buenos Aires, from Montmartre to Montserrat, Irish place names and family names are woven into the fabric of the world, not as relics of empire, but as the living legacies of people who showed up, worked hard, kept their warmth, and never forgot where they came from.

We are all ambassadors. Every Irish person abroad carries, without particular effort, something of what that stranger in the Paris café responded to: a particular quality of welcome, of wit, of sorrow worn lightly. Glen Hansard, standing on the Olympia stage in Paris, understood this, his voice filling the room with Pete Seeger's plain and devastating words.

Sometimes happy, sometimes blue, glad that I ran into you. Tell the people that you saw me passing through.

The famine Irish were passing through. The Magdalene mothers were passing through (though Ireland tried for decades to pretend otherwise). Joyce, Beckett, and Wilde were passing through. The Collison brothers are passing through. O'Briain, Bennett and Hansard are passing through. You and I, readers of Boston Irish, with our own Irish thread in our American story, are passing through.

But we make sure people know we were here.

Timothy Kirk writes Letter from Dublin for BostonIrish. He was, on this occasion, writing from Paris.