(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Happy Saint's Day from this shebeen to all who came, and to all who stayed behind. To all of them, and all of us, the children of the Irish diaspora, descended from famine, refugees from violence and the inherent cruelty of all empires, we offer, as we usually do on this occasion, the Prayer of St. Brigid, Patron of Ireland.

I'd like to give a lake of beer to God.

I'd love the Heavenly

Host to be tippling there

For all eternity.

I'd love the men of Heaven to live with me,

To dance and sing.

If they wanted, I'd put at their disposal

Vats of suffering.

White cups of love I''d give them,

With a heart and a half;

Sweet pitchers of mercy I'd offer

To every man.

I'd make Heaven a cheerful spot,

Because the happy heart is true.

I'd make the men contented for their own sake

I'd like Jesus to love me too.

I'd like the people of heaven to gather

From all the parishes around,

I'd give a special welcome to the women,

The three Marys of great renown.

I'd sit with the men, the women of God

There by the lake of beer

We'd be drinking good health forever

And every drop would be a prayer.

And also, as part of the essential liturgy of the day, a poem that will be said wherever Irish is spoken, from Jem Casey, The Poet of the Pick. It is called The Workman's Friend.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Permanence!

Anyway, if you're not following Liam Hogan, the historian from Limerick, on the electric Twitter machine—@Limerick1914—you've missed a lively discussion about the Irish historical memory. It played out generally on Thursday, when Enda Kenny, the current Taoiseach of the Irish Republic—and a guy with his own troubles at the moment back home—paid a visit to the White House and, in its own inimitable way, the administration of El Caudillo del Mar-A Lago proceeded to do a lively step-dance on its own dick. First, the president* quoted an alleged Irish saying, apparently gleaned from a GeoCities page, that may have originated with a Nigerian poet.

I mean, I'm all for cultural exchange, but history tells us that you don't have to search the Intertoobz too deeply to find an actual Irish poet. In fact, all you have to do is to sit on a stool at Grogan's on South William Street in Dublin and turn either to the right or to the left.

Anyway, in a piece for The New York Times, Vice President Mike Pence told the story of his grandfather, Michael Cawley, who left Ireland during the civil war that broke out after the Anglo-Irish Treaty that established the Irish Free State. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to see the modern parallels.

With little prospect of work, he fled to England, she said, to earn his way to America. The ship's manifest lists him as a coal miner, with an address near Manchester, and says his brother paid for his passage. In the United States, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment was flaring. A Republican-controlled Congress had passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, a restrictive immigration law strongly opposed by many Irish-American Democratic politicians. Monthly quotas allowed more British immigrants than Irish, who were welcomed as English speakers but faced some suspicion of being radicals. (On the day Mr. Cawley's ship arrived, The New York Times carried news of Irish rebels.)

And, of course, Thursday also was the day that Mick Mulvaney, the ghoul who runs the Office of Management and Budget, made an appearance in which himself—Mick Fecking Mulvaney—did an admirable impression of Lord John Russell during the Great Hunger while discussing the fate of government programs that give aid and comfort to the sick and the poor.

There are a lot of children of the Irish diaspora setting cruel and stupid policies for this administration, which cannot tell a Nigerian poet from an Irish one. There's Mulvaney, of course, but there's also Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, and there's Steve Bannon, senior White House counselor and sole heir to the House Harkonnen. All of them now are combining to make arguments that echo through the history of their people back to 1847. I wonder how many Mulvaneys, Ryans, and Bannons died belowdecks in the coffin ships?

Which is where Liam Hogan comes in again. He finds Mulvaney's linking essential food relief to "performance" or "results" to be deeply resonant with the memory of the darkest days of the Famine. As he writes here, there was a food crisis in Ireland even before the potato crop catastrophically failed. In 1830, in Limerick City, the income inequality was stark and brutal. Hogan quotes a Scottish journalist:

In one which I entered, [I saw] two bundles of straw lay in two corners; on one, sat a bed-ridden woman; on another, lay two naked children, — literally naked, with a torn rag of some kind thrown over them both. But I saw worse even than this. In a cellar which I entered, and which was almost quite dark, and slippery with damp, I found a man sitting on a little sawdust…he was naked: he had not even a shirt: a filthy and ragged mat was round him: this man was a living skeleton; the bones all but protruded through the skin: he was literally starving…Inglis believed that his visit to these homes was representative of the general condition of this class and instead of visiting forty houses in the district he "might have seen thousands."

In 1830, the situation exploded. Starving rioters stole flour from the mills and even hijacked a boatload of oatmeal. They stole vast quantities of butter and salt. Amazingly, as Hogan points out, the British soldiers called in to quell the disturbances did so with remarkable restraint and their commanders expressed sympathy for the desperate poor who'd reached the logical end of their desperation.

His comments followed a heated exchange at the meeting when William Wheeler, a merchant, accused Captain Drought of "cheering on the rioters". After some other speakers credited the Captain with saving their premises, Drought responded that the riot had "predisposed him to weep rather than rejoice" and he explained how he had remonstrated with those rioting, adding "as a Christian, he does not think it was his duty to fire on a multitude of starving people."

How Mick Mulvaney became William Wheeler and not Captain Drought is a conundrum of history.

And Hogan provides even more damning history by linking to this account of the debates in this country over whether to send relief to Ireland during the Famine Years. This is in light of Mulvaney's proudly announcing that the United States is going to cut its aid to the United Nations relief programs to the bone. From History Ireland:

The debate continued through the next day with Senator John Niles of Connecticut leading the opposition. He began his harangue by asking whether the Irish famine was a national concern of the US government. He, of course, responded negatively to his own question and elaborated. The Irish famine was the responsibility of the English government and should not concern the government of the United States. To send relief would make England look weak in the eyes of the world community; thus such action would be 'disrespectful'. If funds were sent to Ireland, he inquired, why not send funds to Scotland, France, and Prussia. Proclaiming 'charity begins at home', Niles rhetorically rejoined why do we send money to assist foreign peoples, when some of our own citizens could use it. Finally, he concluded by declaring that the bill was unconstitutional because it used public monies not in the nation's interest. Such action by Congress could only lead to a tradition promoting 'a dangerous exercise of power'.

Instead of $500,000, the Polk administration and Congress contributed two war-worn vessels. Economic opportunism and a laissez-faire interpretation of the constitution were the key components in shaping the American government's official response to the famine in Ireland. The magnanimous call for charity and the cries of Irish suffering, although heard by American officials, did not take precedence over national interest.

It is true that, in their scramble to become American, the members of the diaspora often lost—or deliberately forgot—their race memories of famine, of being refugees from the cruelty and faceless stupidity of empire, of being despised in their new country when they walked off the boat. They could remember grudges for 700 years, but not the circumstances that had driven them to the boats a decade earlier. Too often, they masked this with what the great Flann O'Brien put into the mouth of St. Augustine, when he noted that there were four St. Patricks in heaven, and that they were all insufferable bores "with their shamrocks, and blarney, and bullshit."

But there are other forces at play as well. In New York on Friday night, there will be an effort to re-energize the power of the immigrant story within the children and grandchildren of the diaspora, and effort that had its message sharpened by the events of the past few months. They will gather at Riverside Church (A Protestant church! My mother would have been horrified.) and will invoke the memories of the famine and the oppression that scattered the Irish around the world.

God bless all here. God rest the memories of Michael and Ellen Lynch, and of the seven shepherd girls from Lixnaw, including the one that came over and settled in Worcester. God rest the memories of Thomas and Ellen Pearse, the shopkeeper from Kilflynn and his wife, and all seven of their children, including the one that came over on the S.S. Cymric and became a cop and married the former shepherd. God save all here and, in the immortal words of Bunk Moreland, play the fcking song, Hugh.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io