An Epic Story of the Famine Irish

Peter Quinn, the acclaimed author, talks to Mary Pat Kelly about the new edition of his groundbreaking book, "Banished Children of Eve."

"My experience of writing is that there is no one way. What I think you have to do is make the time, a time when you show up. You don't know if you're going to get one page or two or nothing, but you're there for them. The rest is mystery."

How did this mystery affect you?

"The deeper I got into 'Banished Children of Eve,' the more I saw that the Irish Famine immigration was an epic story of the movement of agrarian people who moved into cities - which is still going on all around the world. My family had been part of this. And I said if I get everything wrong, but people come away with a sense of this epic dimension to Irish-American history, then I'll feel I have succeeded.

"We take so much for granted: Our ancestors came over and built all these schools, churches, hospitals, the unions, the Democratic party - a whole world. But they had to build it all from nothing. There were a lot of reasons why they should have fallen apart or just disappeared. You know, if it were just a matter of skin complexion they could have become Protestants, but something deeper and more complex was going on."

Could you talk about the complexity?

"Once the immigrants stepped off the boat in America, they were no longer just Irish. They had to deal with a whole different society. The culture of the diaspora is not the same as the culture in Ireland. It's rooted in that but it becomes something else when it comes here. An urban culture is created.

'Looking for Jimmy' is the non-fiction handbook to go along with Banished Children. In the book, I say one of the reasons the Irish were able to have such an impact on the urban experience was because they had to make it up. They didn't come over with useable habits or customs. Everything they'd come to know in Ireland was useless in New York and Chicago. So the whole thesis of 'Looking for Jimmy' is that they're making up an urban personality because they don't have anything else to fall back on.

"The Irish felt safe in cities. My ancestors never wanted to see the land again. They came out of the worst agricultural trauma in 19th century Europe. A million die and two million leave? Get me to the city. Yet they found a deeply ingrained prejudice in Anglo-American society towards the Irish. They weren't taken seriously.

There's a line by Samuel Eliot Morison in the 'Oxford History of the United States,' published in 1961, I believe, that I read in high school. It said, 'The Famine Irish made surprisingly little contribution to the economics or culture.' Yet look at popular entertainment: They made a tremendous contribution, beginning with the minstrels theater and traveling shows. And the economic contribution - who does Morison think dug the canals, the reservoir; who dug the Erie Canal? Yet a leading American historian could write that the Irish almost didn't exist.

​
Nster.com