By Tom Deignan

Later this week, there should be quite a bit of craic (as the Irish like to say when referring to a good time) to be had at the White House's St. Patrick's Day festivities. Vice president Mike Pence, top aides Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway (nee Fitzpatrick), Homeland Security chief John Kelly, budget czar Mick Mulvaney and even House Speaker Paul Ryan all claim strong Irish roots.

As The Irish News newspaper noted, all of these figures are "at the center of President Donald Trump's new administration."

The vice president, the Irish News added, "has spoken of visiting Ireland many times as a child and said he remembered cutting turf and saving hay in counties Clare and Sligo." Pence even cited his Irish immigrant roots when he said he was willing to support "more relaxed immigration laws."

Boy have times changed!

This St. Patrick's Day, it is an uncomfortable but fair question to ask: Are Pence, Ryan and the rest of Trump's Celtic conservatives betraying their Irish Catholic roots by working for a president who has depicted immigrants as the enemy, who has publicly feuded with the pope, and has been harshly criticized by Irish American bishops, including Newark's Archbishop Joseph Tobin?

What is particularly disturbing about the Trump administration is that it has singled out two immigrant groups - Muslims and Mexicans - whose experiences are very similar to those of the Irish.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, it was not Muslims but Irish Catholics who were criticized for adhering to an "un-American religion" and for supporting political violence.

The president himself, in proclaiming March Irish American history month, cited the accomplishments of Irish immigrant Civil War general Thomas Francis Meagher. What Trump didn't mention was that Meagher was a refugee and radical who, once in America, continued to advocate for violent revolution in Ireland. In other words, Meagher is exactly the kind of person Trump is trying to keep out of America right now.

Many Irish American Republicans -- and there are plenty because a recent poll indicated that the president won 60 percent of the white Catholic vote -- often defend their support for Trump by saying that earlier immigrants were more loyal and willing to assimilate.

Presumably they've never heard of Galway native John Patrick Riley, who came to America and organized The St. Patrick's Battalion, made up of immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere who actually fought against the U.S. in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s.

And a century ago, while many Irish Americans eventually fought for their country in World War I, others openly supported America's enemy, in the hopes that German victory would lead to British defeat -- and freedom in Ireland.

Talk about disloyal.

And let's not pretend there weren't -- or aren't still -- illegal Irish immigrants.

Way back in 1922, New York's top immigration officer said: "The bootlegging of aliens has grown to be an industry second in importance only to the bootlegging of liquor," Tyler Anbinder notes in his excellent new history of immigration "City of Dreams."

According to Anbinder, between "100,000 and 300,000 new undocumented aliens were said to be arriving annually," and The New York Times estimated there were two million illegal immigrants in the country.

And yet, America survived. Some even feel the country was "great" back then.

Ironically, on the issue it might actually make sense for Irish Catholics to support Trump -- abortion -- he may well be out of step. A September 2016 Pew Research Center report found American Catholics to be roughly split on the issue.

In the end, the saddest thing about the Fox News Irish serving and supporting President Trump is that they end up engaging in the same kind of kind of scapegoating and demagoguery that anti-Irish nativists did.

"We must erect a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics," Founding Father John Jay once said, using language that may sound familiar.

But if we'd given into these impulses back then, today's St. Patrick's Day parades in Freehold, Woodbridge, Asbury Park and elsewhere would be awfully quiet.

Tom Deignan (tdeignan.blogspot.com) is the author of "Coming to America: Irish Americans" and a columnist for the Irish Voice newspaper. He is a regular contributor to The Star-Ledger and lives in Woodbridge.

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