In his beautiful, poignant new book, My Father Left Me Ireland, Michael Brendan Dougherty reveals the truth about the things we don’t, or can’t, talk about. Longing for a father, longing for patriotism, wanting to believe in something, and finding these things difficult in our jaded world, Dougherty’s memoir resonates because loving your father and loving his history isn’t unique to just some people and some places. We all want these same intangible things Dougherty so deftly describes.
Dougherty’s parents, an Irishman and an Irish American mother, had broken up before his birth, and Dougherty was raised by his single mother in the suburbs of New York. Dougherty’s father was mostly absent from his life, and that absence informed the way Dougherty viewed his Irish heritage.
Dougherty writes of the heartbreak and pain of his father living an ocean away. “Already, the pattern of these partings was established. You leave; I cry. Then my mother tries to pick up the pieces.”
Despite the name of the book, the irony is that in so many ways it was actually Dougherty’s American mother who left him Ireland. She instilled in him the love of Irish music, Irish language, and an Irish cultural heritage. His father, though an Irishman living in Ireland, had a much more modern take on his Irishness. Dougherty writes of his Irish half-siblings that they “could be or do anything and some residue of Irishness would stick to them and to all they do.” But for Dougherty, being raised in America meant he and his mother had to be committed to being Irish. And so she learned the Irish language, sang the ballads, wore the Claddagh ring, and took Dougherty to Irish-themed weekend retreats.
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Throughout the book, Dougherty intersperses his own history with that of Ireland. Writing about the Irish push for freedom, Dougherty notes, “I see in the Rising that a nation cannot live its life as a mere administrative district or as a shopping mall; nations have souls.”
There’s so much in the book about what a nation is and what it could be that it’s impossible not to draw parallels to what is happening in America and around the world today. People are hungry to feel that soul Dougherty describes.
Trump’s vacuous “Make America Great Again” tagline resonated because it at least implied that America had, at some point, been great. Love of country is important and too often treated as something embarrassing. That schmaltziness of patriotism gets scoffed at by the elites, but there’s a reason athletes kneeling during the national anthem provoked such an emotional response. We want to love our country and be open with that love. I knew Britain was going to vote yes on Brexit when a British leftist friend of mine, urging people to vote no, posted on his Facebook page that there was nothing special about England. People aren’t made to be so untied from their nation’s soul.
Dougherty found that embarrassment in Ireland just the same. It’s why his mother was able to be openly patriotic of a place she wasn’t from while her father treated his Irishness as a side note. Dougherty writes of trying to speak Irish at the airport in Dublin and the reaction he got for it. “When I have tried my few words of Irish at Dublin Airport, I get the distinct sense that the people working there would rather that an American try to sneak a gun past them than a few words of Irish.”
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Dougherty also draws the connection of the lack of that patriotism to its darker cousin, nationalism. He writes, “Nationalism usually does not spring from the meatheaded conviction that one’s nation is best in every way, but from something like a panicked realization that nobody in authority or around you is taking the nation seriously, that everyone is engaged in some private enterprise, while the common inheritance is being threatened or robbed.”
This cavalier treatment of that common inheritance is part of why we feel so disconnected from each other and why we are so often at each other’s throats. There’s no sense that we’re in something together or that we have a common bond that is worth defending.
Dougherty doesn’t have a call to arms in his book, but the takeaway is that humans have the insatiable need to be tied to something real. As marriage rates continue to decline and more children are born outside the stability that marriage provides, we’re finding ourselves adrift. That we lack patriotism is collectively damaging to us as well.
The book charts Dougherty becoming a father and what effect his life will have in his daughter’s. Dougherty’s father left him Ireland, but he already seems poised to leave his daughter so much more.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post.
