How to get to Ireland via SFO, BOS, JFK and DUB - An American understanding Ireland

Getting to grips with my knowledge of Ireland and the idea of identity

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LAURA BRYN SISSON,

IrishCentral Staff Writer

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Laura Bryn Sisson rocking out in a field in County Sligo

Photo by Laura Bryn Sisson

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In contrast, the Republic of Ireland is actually a country unto itself - and a hard-won one! Perhaps what I envy is what I see as the sense of national and cultural identity in the Republic of Ireland. 

You can lampoon me as unpatriotic for not seeing the same sense of unified identity in the United States - I think it’s because I grew up in California. I love my state, but it’s a newly-developed one. Most of our architecture was erected within the last century. Most of my friends’ parents, and my own, were raised elsewhere, and moved to the Bay Area as adults. My state, to me, doesn’t have a shared identity, at least not yet. When I think of the differences between my state and the forty-nine others, the United States seems even less ‘united.’

Of course, Ireland’s unity is a debated topic as well.

Maybe it’s just hard for me to see the United States as having a unified culture because I’m looking from within it. I focus on the divisions in political parties, in state cultures, the West versus East versus Midwest versus South. Last night I overheard half (symbolically enough) of my roommate’s heated phone conversation about the racial problems and divisions that persist in the United States, addressed in simultaneously the most academic and emotional terms -- the far-away mixed with the all-too-close.

It’s as hard for me to understand what it means to be American, which I am, as it is for me to understand what it means to be Irish, which I am not. They’re difficult for different reasons: understanding American culture because I’m too close to it, grew up with it, and understanding Irish culture because I’m too far from it, so I’m inevitably absorbing something that’s oversimplified and stereotyped.

I know I loved the stereotype I developed from afar, as a child, and loved the more nuanced picture I developed living in Dublin last year. I loved adding more information to that framework of understanding through working in Irish news this summer. But I suppose what I’ve learned through my search to understand Ireland is that it’s difficult to fully understand any culture - even my own.

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