1969: A crazy year for Irish America

The year that exploded myths and time-worn stereotypes

And that was not the only loss Irish America suffered that fateful year. An aspiring author with the all-too-fitting name of John Kennedy Toole killed himself in March.

Toole’s mother made it her mission to turn her son’s grimy manuscript, about an Irish New Orleans misfit named Ignatius J. Reilly, into a published novel. That novel, of course, was A Confederacy of Dunces, for which Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.

 

John Wayne and McSorley’s

True, 1969 wasn’t all about death and conflict.

Famed actor John Wayne (born Marion Morrison) spent his career making classic films with fellow Irish American John Ford, among them The Quiet Man. In 1969, Wayne finally won a Best Acting Academy Award for his role in True Grit.

But mostly, 1969 was the year Irish America faced disorienting change. If events in Northern Ireland didn’t make that clear, then events at a humble pub with sawdust-covered floors, on East Seventh Street in Manhattan, did.

It was in 1969 that a group of women challenged the century-old policy of allowing only men into what is often described as America’s oldest Irish pub, McSorley’s Old Ale House.

What a year. Even Samuel Beckett could not have made this stuff up.

By far, the biggest news in Irish America was the explosion of violence in Northern Ireland in 1969. The hot summer turned bloody in mid-August during the annual Apprentice Boys march in Derry, which was seen as a celebration of Protestant domination. Catholics and Protestants clashed, and when the Royal Ulster Constabulary intervened, the infamous Battle of the Bogside ensued.

The battle was just one episode during the year that spurred nationalist Catholics to organize and fight their status as second-class citizens.

Not surprisingly, Irish America mobilized behind the North’s Catholic civil rights movement.

 

Bernadette Devlin tours America

Irish America had always played an integral role in the fight for justice in Ireland. And so, just as John Devoy and Eamon de Valera did in the past, a new generation of Irish nationalists toured the U.S. to drum up support for their cause.

​
Nster.com