Touring Irish America

Mary Pat Kelly writes about encountering Irish America readers on her tour to promote her historical novel Galway Bay.

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Irish dancers at the Chicago Irish Festival.

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So thanks, Trish, for sending me to visit the oldest Hibernian hall in the U.S. in Charleston, South Carolina, and printing that first article about the 300,000 American servicemen in Northern Ireland during World War II which would become the topic of two books, two documentaries and a feature film.

But I’m most grateful for what I share with you, readers: a new sense of where my family fits in the sweep of Irish-American history. Every issue I read opened new vistas and inspired me to finally tell my family’s story in Galway Bay. And the wonderful reward is to meet you in person, the audience we’ve written for all these years. In the final chapter, Honora Keeley Kelly, the character based on my great-great-grandmother, looks out on the dark prairie from the top of the Ferris wheel at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and thinks, “Irish people are scattered over the length and breadth of you, Amerikay. Have you swallowed us up whole and entire?”

My tour has proved what we believe at Irish America magazine. The Irish didn’t disappear. We’re everywhere in the U.S. asserting our connection to Ireland and each other. It doesn’t matter how many ancestors are Irish, or if we’re Irish by choice (“IBM,” one man’s tee-shirt in Minnesota read –  Irish By Marriage), or drawn by the love of the music and literature. The two women singing along with Tommy Sands who knew every word of his song “Roses” at the Milwaukee Irish Fest were Japanese-Americans with memories of childhood in the internment camps.

So many of these Irish Festivals began about the same time as Irish America magazine did. It seems as if something shifted during the last quarter century to encourage us to seek a deeper understanding of our identities. Interest in genealogy has surged as well and every festival offers help in tracing your ancestors and a booth where you can order your family’s coat-of-arms.

Now there are close to 100 Irish Festivals across the country: big – 130,000 attended last year’s Milwaukee Irish Festival – and more intimate – by the end of the Long Grove Irish Days I knew many attendees by name. All the Fests offer a great mix of music, cultural exhibits, talks by writers and historians, food (Do you like homemade brown bread?), vendors of Irish-themed gifts and clothing and wonderful Irish dancing by our amazing children who carry pride in our heritage into the future. And all this on warm summer weekends with carnival rides and cotton candy. “We’ve nothing like this in Ireland,” the young Irish fellow working at the booth beside me at Chicago’s Gaelic Park said as the crowds came through our tent. “It’s more fun being Irish in America,” he concluded.

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