It was a brief but revealing moment. As the results came in, a television correspondent asked a jubilant Joe Biden whether he had anything to say to the BBC. “I’m Irish,” replied the elderly Scrantonian, with the air of a man delivering a clever punchline.
What, though, was the joke? It rests on the audience assuming that there is some elemental, eternal hostility between Britain and Ireland. Sure, it was lighthearted, and I don’t think that Biden is actually anti-British. Indeed, during the Falklands War, it was he, already a senator 38 years ago, who moved the resolution telling Argentina to withdraw. The United States, he argued, must make clear “that we are on the British side.”
But his remark wouldn’t work on the other side of the Atlantic, where decades of improving relations culminated in 2011 when large crowds cheered the queen as she visited Dublin and Cork.
Why are Irish Americans so much readier to define themselves in essentially anti-British terms? During the 1980s, for example, when Irish American congressmen, including Biden, mobilized against the extradition of terrorist suspects, there were more republican gunmen in Irish than in British jails.
Part of the explanation is simply that nationalism is exaggerated and simplified in diaspora communities. Armenian Americans are usually more anti-Turkish than Armenians proper. Jewish Americans, including those who lean left in a domestic context, are often more hard-line on Palestinian statehood than Israelis.
That, however, is not the whole story. There are tens of millions of people of Irish descent around the world, including, as you can probably infer from my name, me. But few outside the U.S. define themselves as inheritors of some ancient quarrel. The leader of the Canadian Conservatives, for example, bases his foreign policy around the idea of CANZUK, or a closer union among Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. His name? Erin O’Toole.
What made Irish America different? One of the earliest acts of armed Irish republicanism occurred, not in Ireland itself, but in Maine when, in 1866, a band of 700 volunteers launched a raid on Canada. Why was the U.S., even then, central to the Irish republican cause?
The short answer is that many Irish Americans crossed the ocean during the famine in the late 1840s. That calamity took place while Ireland was ruled from London, and the emigres blamed British indifference. Their foundational text was “The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)” by John Mitchel, a nationalist agitator.
Mitchel is lucky not to have been canceled. Having fled to the U.S. after being convicted by the British authorities, he became an enthusiastic champion of slavery, arguing that black people were “an innately inferior people.” He also opposed giving civil rights to Jews on grounds that it was against God’s will. But his history of the Great Famine still stands as the semiofficial Irish American version, notably in its assertion that the English (assisted by the “Israelites”) had committed “deliberate murder.”
Why were Irish Americans so much more receptive to that message than those who had emigrated to Great Britain or its colonies? For a reason often overlooked by historians: namely, the impact of the crisis on the Catholic Irish gentry. When the potato blight hit, the authorities created a series of relief programs that, even the most critical historians generally allow, worked well. Public works schemes gave income to the unemployed, and maize was imported for distribution. By the end of 1846, more than £110,000 a week was being spent on Irish relief, over a quarter of Britain’s national budget. In 1847, the government borrowed the (by the standards of its time) astronomical sum of £8 million to fund its aid efforts.
But then, interest rates rose, just as a huge deficit was revealed in the budget. It was now that ministers made their catastrophic mistake, seeking to raise more cash for the relief effort from Ireland’s upper-middle class so that, in the phrase of the time, “Ireland’s property might pay for Ireland’s poverty.” The trouble was that Irish landowners had taken a massive hit as their rents dried up. They did not have the cash to pay the new taxes.
Many of them fled their debts. But unlike their tenants, who generally took the easier and cheaper option of migrating to England or Scotland, they did not have that choice because they owed the taxman money. Instead, they crossed the Atlantic carrying with them a burning grievance against a government that, as they saw it, had needlessly bankrupted them. That grievance has persisted ever since, a pebble in the shoe of Anglo American relations, the chief irritant in the alliance that has contributed more than any other to the welfare of mankind.
