The Irish in Obama

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“It was a characteristic of Protestant emigration that it was looked at enthusiastically in the U.S., which contrasts sharply with the Catholic experience. If you look at the folk memory of the Catholic Irish there’s a great deal of despair and negativity at the whole notion of emigrating,” MacDonogh says.

When the Kearneys arrived in America they simply did not face the discrimination or the hostility that their Catholic neighbors did.
“What fascinated me is that I had never heard this story told in an Irish context. Like most people I had bought into the narrative of the post-Famine experience,” says MacDonogh.

“But the truth is the majority of Irish Americans are of Protestant ancestry rather than Catholic ancestry. And they found themselves being swiftly absorbed into mainstream American life.”

The Kearney family may have had a well-off branch. One of their people was the Bishop of Ossory in Co. Kilkenny, but most of them were shoemakers and wigmakers. When that industry began to falter due to the mass return of the upper classes to Britain in the early 1800s they made the decision to emigrate.

“Obama was unconscious of being Irish when he was growing up,” says MacDonogh. “That’s one way in which he’s characteristic of the Protestant Irish in America in that he’s not so concerned with his Irish background.

“And also in his career he hasn’t played sectarian politics in that way. Many politicians have milked ethnicities for votes, but I don’t think Obama has that view of politics or wants to be involved in playing one sector off another. He didn’t grow up with any consciousness of his Irish background at all.”

Pursuing his research here, MacDonogh discovered that many Americans still don’t share Obama’s rather open-ended view of who is and who is not an American, though.

“When I was in Kansas and Indiana and Ohio I made a point of talking to ordinary people in bars and cafes and wherever I found them. I must say that almost all of the white people I met in these places were almost all in shock that they had a president with a black face,” he says.

MacDonogh is reluctant to call people names partly because he thinks it’s inaccurate as well as being impolite, but right wing American opinion, he says, is informed by racism more than any other characteristic.

“It doesn’t mean that every individual is racist, but conservatism tends to suggest that if you’re not white you’re less American,” MacDonogh says.
“The greatest blight on America is the history of racism and slavery. That’s the historic baggage it carries with it. Even to this day you have golf courses whose history is associated with thorough antagonism to people who are not white.

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