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The Global Irish are finding a home on the Internet

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The sons and daughter of that little island in the sunlight have spread to the four corners of the world, and the Internet is helping them reconnect

Last night I was sitting by the fireside in my old farmhouse in rural West Cork. The wind was rustling in the trees and I could hear the stream gurgling under the old stone bridge outside my front door.

The fire crackled softly, a candle was lit, and the baby was contentedly asleep upstairs: peace. As it was St Patrick’s Day, I was treating myself to a glass of whiskey: perfection.

Yet there I was, in a quiet corner of County Cork, in conversation with people in Tennessee, New Orleans and New York about our shared Irish heritage.

The Internet has changed our world in many ways. For the Irish Diaspora, it may yet prove to have very far-reaching and very positive consequences. Since journalism moved online, many writers have expressed mixed feelings about the ability of readers to instantly post comments. Some comments are very insightful, but others just vent spleen.

Yesterday, the advent of online commenting proved its worth to me. For St Patrick’s Day, I had written a short reflection on a moment in NYC a few years ago when my wife and I stumbled upon the Irish Hunger Memorial in Manhattan. [LINK] I was deeply moved by the comments posted from America:

An elderly Irish-American lady recalled: “my mother came as a servant girl and my father came as a laborer in the mines of Pennsylvania and the tunnels of New York. They taught us to love the United States and respect our Irish heritage.”

People from North Carolina and California told their family’s stories. Many had ancestors who arrived just after the famine. The emotional depth of the connection between the two countries was expressed succinctly by one American who said “my eyes did a bit of sweating upon touchdown at Shannon on my first and only trip to Ireland.”

Another spoke of visiting Cobh, Country Cork and imagining what her grandmother felt when the ship pulled away from the quayside there, taking her away from her beloved homeland forever.

 What a privilege to be able hear all these people’s stories on St Patrick’s Day, even as I sat by my fireside, thousands of miles away in Ireland.

After my own grandmother passed away, we found boxes of beautifully written letters from her family members who had emigrated to America decades earlier. She missed them so much, but never saw them again. Carried by ship, those letters took weeks to arrive from across the Atlantic. A whole season would have passed by the time the reply came. Nowadays we can communicate instantaneously and New York City is only five hours from Shannon by plane.

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