Finding strength in our ancestors

The First Word

 “There’s no sense of entitlement, no sense of placement, it’s all a sense of you’ve got to go out and work hard to get there. It doesn’t all break your way all the time, so you’ve got to just power through it. I think that’s deeply imbedded in the culture of the Irish.” – Brian Moynihan, whose ancestors left Ireland in 1850.

 I am remembering a day around this time of year in the early seventies. My mother is driving me across the county to retrieve a suitcase I had loaned a friend.

We are silent for long stretches as my mother navigates through the country roads of Tipperary passing from North Riding into South. She is never comfortable driving, always has both hands on the wheel as if propelling the car forward by sheer force of will. It’s beautiful farm country, lush green fields, and roads that had still to be widened with EC money. There is little traffic. Ireland back then had a sleepy quality; those who had jobs went about them quietly – those who didn’t, emigrated – there was no hint of the industry that was to come.

“There’s nothing for you here,” my mother said as if reading my thoughts, giving me the final push out of the nest. She had brought us up with the maxim that “travel broadens the mind,” and I was about to begin my journey.

And so it was on July 4, 1972 that my brother Henry and my cousin John picked me up at J.F.K airport.

Home became a basement apartment in the Bronx that I shared with Nora and Philomena, two sisters from Mayo.

It was next door to The Ranch, the local bar that was the center of our lives. It was here we stopped after our shifts as waitresses and bartenders, construction worker and sandhogs. It was where we got news of home and heard of work and received advice on how to navigate our way.

I had never traveled much outside my own county, but here I met lads from Connemara and girls from Cork and a girl whose brother was interned in Northern Ireland. You could say that in New York I truly came to know Ireland.

By the end of that year, I would also come to know Irish America.

As that first summer drew to a close, I bought a Greyhound bus ticket for $99 that allowed unlimited travel for three months. You could get on and off wherever you liked in the United States and Canada, and three friends and I did just that. We went to Medicine Bow, Wyoming because I had a crush on Trampas (Doug McClure) from the TV series The Virginian. We danced the two step with real cowboys in Montana and had our

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