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."

"The Irish were looking for survival. They built political machines and out of those machines came the first social welfare system - the use of public funds to support citizens. "Little or no effect" - how wrong that was. Yet I was going to a Catholic high school in the Bronx in the 1960s and I'm told to read this book and it goes unchallenged."

Why was that view not challenged?

"I think so much of Irish-American experience is getting on with it, not stepping back to take an honest look at it. Until very recently the main concern of the Irish-American was just taking the next step. The Irish peasant society dissolved when the people came over here. All those institutions that we take for granted - the Catholic parishes, the labor unions - are all embodiments of efforts to survive that trauma. So we didn't look back. We created parallel social institutions.

"The Irish responded to the ferocious anti-Catholicism they found in America by saying, 'We're forming our own schools. We're not letting you form our children. We'll form them in their own culture, then they'll go into America.'

"My parish in the Bronx, St. Raymond's, had a church, a boys' grammar school, a girls' grammar school, a rectory, a brothers' house, a convent. The amount of money that people poured into those institutions, as well as womanpower and manpower - so much volunteer labor. This tremendous outpouring to create their own hospitals, their own schools is a pretty amazing story. "My mother went to Holy Angels Academy in Fort Lee, New Jersey and the nuns there got their master's degrees at Columbia - women, in 1920. Think of it."

Then the numbers that went into the religious orders were stunning. Certainly there's been a lot of scandal and abuse and all sorts of problems with the system, but there were so many good people in it. I think it'd be a tragedy if they were totally forgotten. Where are we now?

"The diaspora experience that formed in the Famine lasted really from the 1840s until, I think, John F. Kennedy's election. And then the breakthrough began. The Irish were no longer threatened. Their religion wasn't threatening anymore.

"So those very strict schools, the solidity of party loyalties weren't necessary for Irish survival anymore. We're at the tail end of the post-Famine Irish-American experience. I'm not saying it's over, but it's not going to be the same."

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Nster.com