Tag Archives: Irish diaspora

We, Irish Americans

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to conclude what I’ve been saying.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D “Signs,” Wednesday Blog 1.10.[2] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.[3] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation.
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This week, what does it mean for my community to call ourselves Irish Americans?

When I was applying for universities for my undergraduate studies, I was thrilled that one university allowed me to write in my own answer for “race or ethnicity.” I took out my pen and wrote down “Irish.” That university, Rockhurst, is the one which I chose and attended throughout my undergraduate years, and it remains the one that I list today before the others. Rockhurst holds a special place in my heart because it is so intrinsically linked with the Irish American community here in Kansas City, and it is one of those anchors that’s tethered me to this community where I’ve been able to make my own impact and presence.

That adjective I chose to write however is perhaps more complicated. I am not Irish by birth but by descent, though one generation too far removed to qualify for Irish citizenship in that manner. Still, Irish is a better descriptor of me than the generic American white, a category which my people were only accepted into for the sake of preserving the flimsy-footed tableau that is racism in America. When I moved to London, I was surprised to be confronted with three categories of white to choose from rather than the monolith I was used to. I technically qualified for all three: I have both Irish and British ancestry, yet I am from a country other than those two. I marked the box for White Irish as long as I was living and studying there because it felt the truest to my nature. Yet again, I am not Irish per se; rather I am Irish American, a member of one of the larger camps within the diaspora created out of the centuries of trouble caused by English and later British colonialism in Ireland. In this perspective, my people are victims of colonization, yet here in America we are the colonizers. So, amid all these tangled webs of identity and nature what are we, Irish Americans?

It is notable to me that in France there is no particular legal sense of identifying oneself as anything other than French. Trevor Noah put this well when he spoke about an immigrant who was granted French citizenship by President Macron after a tremendous act of heroic bravery in saving the life of a child. Yet when I’m in France, I find that if people are confused about my name I go toward my heritage to explain why it’s not your typical Anglo-American name, that my family comes from Ireland instead. I hear a similar tone from the varied generations of nativists in this country, even in the writings of President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who I overall admire a great deal, who wrote in opposition to us persisting as “hyphenated Americans.” This country ought to be a melting pot where all of the immigrants and their descendants shed away their own national and ethnic trappings in favor of becoming one people with one common identity. Yet again, I find this perspective runs contrary to my own lived experience.

To be an Irish American means to remember the place where our ancestors came from, and to remember their struggles as they sought to live their lives first at home and later in this place their newly adopted home. To be an Irish American is to remember that we too were the immigrants not that long ago and to offer a warmer welcome to the newcomers than our ancestors often received. For me, to be an Irish American is to have roots in two countries, better reflecting the interconnected and global nature of our world. Yet at the end of the day, we are Americans. In Ireland, I refer to myself as “an American cousin,” with a slight nod to that infamous play of 1865. The Ireland that many of us know is the Ireland of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the Ireland of the revolutionary generation and the twentieth century when our families left to come to this country. The Ireland of 2025 is still the same country, yet it has grown with the last generations into something that many of us find incongruent with our expectations. It is less an island than ever before with more outposts of the global world on its shores.

Our experiences greeting this global world are different because we encountered it here in America rather than in Ireland. We relate to all the peoples of the Earth through our friendships, rivalries, and mutual circumstances with the other diasporic immigrant groups in this country. I’ve wondered for a long while, including in this outlet if we are slowly with each new generation becoming less Irish Americans and more deeply rooted in other tribes in this country. We tend to be more religious than our cousins in Ireland, and as there are less Catholic schools and parishes that are explicitly Irish are we then becoming Catholic Americans more than Irish Americans? Or are we contributing to a general secularization of that larger white American demographic resulting in both our ethnicity and our religion fading into the background of our identities as ordinary Americans trying to survive in an ever more chaotic world? The key here is that our community is diversifying between political persuasions and regional identities and an overall willingness to remain connected to the lives and histories and passions of our ancestors.

I for one have kept in touch with all of that because I believe it is intrinsic to understanding who I am. My Dad grew up under the same roof as his grandmother who came to this country from Mayo in 1920, and the fact that my parents chose to name me Sean demonstrated to me that this history was an important part of who I am even before I really began to understand what it all meant. For the record, I decided to add the fada to my name (Seán) when a little before my 10th birthday I learned that’s how it is spelled in Irish. I’ve devoted a great deal of time to learn the Irish language even though it’s not all that useful here in America because I know that it’s what my family once spoke, and in order to better understand them and by extension myself as well, I decided I ought to use one of my talents and learn it.This week we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with our usual parades here in Kansas City. I marched in two this year, the warm-up parade on the Saturday before here in my neighborhood of Brookside and the big parade down Broadway in Midtown Kansas City on the holy day itself. Normally, I end the big parade and the holy day itself rather annoyed at how the old caricatures of Irishness and Irish Americanness persist along the route both in the parade and among the spectators. And while I did see some of that, I was more focused on marching with my brothers in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Many of us continued the celebration of our brotherhood and our common heritage later that day and it proved to be one of the better, and sunnier, St. Patrick’s Days that I’ve experienced in a long time. We, Irish Americans persist in our stubborn identity because we’ve built our communities in this country around our roots. It defines us distinctly from our fellow Americans, and with all good intentions demonstrates to our cousins across the water that we haven’t forgotten about them.

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An Equine Etymology

An Equine Etymology – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I discuss the two Irish words for the horse, and what they tell us about the history of the Irish language. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I discuss the two Irish words for the horse, and what they tell us about the history of the Irish language.

The word that we’re taught in Irish classes, in fact the word which is listed in the 1959 English-Irish Dictionary for the English word horse is capall. I like this word; it sounds to me like the clopping of a horse’s hooves on stone. Yet it actually derives from the Latin caballus, a word borrowed into Latin from the Gaulish *kaballos that gradually replaced the Classical Latin equus in late antiquity.[1] Capall then is a relative of the French chevalas well as the Welsh ceffyl. Yet Irish also has another word for horse, each, which fell out of use in favor of capall at some point in the past. Even still, each survives in words deriving from the concept of horsemanship, or equestrianism if you prefer Latin roots over the former’s Germanic ones.

How then did capall replace each, and when might Irish have come into contact with the Latin caballus that did this deed? T. F. O’Rahilly argued in the 1930s that capall may be one of several Brittonic loan words in Irish, owing to its similarities to the Welsh ceffyl.[2] I’m less sold on this idea myself, as it presumes that capallentered Irish earlier than the arrival of Christianity, though it does speak to the presence of interisland trade between the Britons and Gaels in the Iron Age.

Each derives from the Proto-Celtic *ekwālos, itself a descendant of the Proto-Indo-European *h1ékwos. Other Celtic languages derived words for horse from this root, including the Welsh word cyfeb referring to a mare in foal and ebol referring to a colt or a foal. Gaulish appears to have had the word epos for horse, existing alongside the aforementioned *kaballos, which in turn appears similar to the Gallo-Roman horse goddess Epona. 

Each remains the more common Scottish Gaelic word for horse to this day, which to me rules out a possible Norman introduction, as the influence of Norman French was felt in both Ireland and Scotland in the twelfth century. Rather then, considering the Welsh connection to their word ceffyl, it seems to me that capall was introduced to Ireland by the Roman monks who brought Christianity to the Gaels in the fifth and sixth centuries. In the stories of St. Patrick, the holy man studied for the priesthood not in his native Britain but in Gaul, where again this Latin word caballus found its origins.

The recurring problem with this question is one of sources. I am trained to study texts looking for answers to historical quandaries. In the case of Irish, few textual sources from before the coming of Christianity survive. We have an idea of what life was like in Ireland before St. Patrick’s mission through the ancient epics and stories that have survived and been embellished down the generations, yet there is something lost deep within our past that could only survive as the faintest whisper of a thought in our memory.

How then do we address older stories in the historical narrative? In my mind, I am able to separate these stories from the factual accounts which I study in the same way that I am able to delineate the different spheres of the scientific from the spiritual. It doesn’t matter to me if there was never a man named Amergin Glúingel whose song on the eve of the Milesian invasion of Ireland to wrest control of the land from the Tuatha Dé Dannán, led to a peaceful division of that island home between the two peoples. What matters instead is that the story tells us to seek peace rather than war, dialogue instead of revenge as Amergin’s brothers sought in their invasion. I don’t use these stories in my research, yet I’d gladly tell them beyond the analytical sphere of my writing.

Yesterday morning, I read in the Guardian the analysis of one nostalgia expert that we historians are often drawn to study the past because of a yearning to experience a time different from our own. This story was written in the context of the 25th anniversary of the computer game Age of Empires II, which I too played in my youth. From my vantage, I see myself very much as one of the wider diasporas that came from the homelands of my ancestors. I grew up with far more connections to the Irish diaspora here in America, and so have come to know myself more as an Irish American than by any other appellation. At the heart of that sense of being Irish American is the sense that even if we today are well at home in America, our families came here as exiles, deoraithe in Irish, and in some sense, we feel that weight even today generations later.

There is a sense that something is lost when one is ever yearning for the land of their ancestors, the lives they might have lived. I’ve been to the town around which most of my paternal ancestors came, Newport, County Mayo, and I was struck on the one hand by how many of the people were the spitting images of their cousins that I’ve known in Chicago, and on the other hand how as beautiful the country around Clew Bay is I’d much prefer the city over living there. For me then, I’ve turned to the language, to Gaeilge, as a way of keeping that connection with our roots alive and flourishing like some great tree amid the physical and spiritual droughts of the world today.

My eye as a historian is drawn to finding the roots of the things that I come across, both in my studies and in my curiosities. It struck me then to see in my Fócloir Gaeilge-Béarla that different equine words in Irish retained traces of this older word for the horse: each. In my likely forlorn search for some trace of the oldest roots of the Irish language, and by extension of my own ancestors, I feel the need to understand where these two words come from. Horses are important in their own way, albeit replaced in most uses by cars, trains, and airplanes today. Despite moving to a farm when I was six in order to have horses, I don’t think I’ve ridden a horse in at least 15 years, if not a full score. When you ride a horse, you are working with the horse to move about the world. Wherever you look, the horse will wander that direction. It’s key to remember that the horse is more than just a vehicle, it is a living being with thoughts and wishes all its own.

Having two words for this animal show that the perceptions of it have changed down the generations. This word each today is used to describe people or activities which relate to horses in the same way we use the word equine in English. That English word however derives from the Latin equus, while each is a relative of the same generation as the Latin. Meanwhile, capall is the horse as the everyday being: the beast of burden, the bearer of riders, and yes the friend. As with most things concerning the origins of the Irish language, I can’t yet say for certain when or how capall entered the language though I am more certain that each was already there if only because I know that equus predates caballus in Latin, and because the most innate relationship humanity can have with a horse, as the rider, is reflected in Irish with the word eachaí. 

There is much we can learn from our past, and how we lived within nature and alongside other natural things in those distant days. I do hope we can learn more as we continue on in our lives on this Earth.

[1] The use of the asterisk in these Gaulish, Proto-Celtic, and Proto-Indo-European words denote that they are theoretical reconstructions.

[2] Myles Dillon, “Linguistic Borrowing and Historical Evidence,” Language 21, no. 1 (1945): 12–17, at 13. (JSTOR)

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The Essence of Being

The Essence of Being – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to begin Season 4 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, I want to talk about what it means to exist. I know, small topic for a Wednesday. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, to begin Season 4 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, I want to talk about what it means to exist. I know, small topic for a Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, I started teaching a new class that I’m calling Bunrang Ghaeilge, Beginner Irish. The students come from my fellow members of the Fr. Bernard Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and their relatives, and in the first two weeks we’ve progressed slower than I initially expected yet we’re still progressing through the materials. The first verb which I taught my current students in English translates as to be, yet in Irish as two forms: is for a more permanent being and tá in a more impermanent circumstance. In the moment I explained this difference by noting how I say is as Chicago mé (I am from Chicago), as in I was born in the Chicago area, but I say tá mé i mo chónaí in Kansas City (I live in Kansas City). We don’t have this distinction in English, either between the permanent and impermanent versions of the to be verb or in the clear distinction between where you’re from at birth and where you currently live; that distinction is far more subtle in English.

At the same time, I am learning Italian for a trip this summer, my own version of the Grand Tour, and on the Busuu app where I’m learning Italian they taught that I should say sono di Chicago però abito a Kansas City,as in I was born in Chicago, but I inhabit today in Kansas City. This distinction between a place that is central to our essence, the place where we were born, and the place where we now live seem important, yet it flies in the face of the American sense of reinvention that we can make ourselves into whomever we want to be. It’s struck me when I’ve met people who would rather see themselves as from the place where they currently live than the place where they were born. That is a different view from my own, born out of different lived experiences and different aspirations.

This word essence developed from the Latin word essentia, which the 1st century CE Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote was coined by the great orator Cicero as a translation of the Greek word οὐσία (ousia), a noun form of the Ancient Greek verb εἰμί (eimi), meaning “to be.” (Sen., Ep. 58.6) It refers to an innate idea that the ultimate goal of philosophy and learning in general is to better understand the self; the most famous inscription in the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi read γνῶθι σαυτόν (gnōthi sauton), or “know thyself.” I add to that goal the aspiration that one can improve oneself. 

This time of year, I find myself thinking more and more about what it means for me to be an Irish American. This past weekend we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, a day of great celebration for the global Irish diaspora and our cousins back in Ireland as well. I’ve written before here about how my communities’ immigrant connections to Ireland often predate the current century, if not the twentieth century as well and how we are in many respects far more American than Irish. In recent years, I began to refer to myself in this subject as an American cousin, after all as much as I have Irish roots and I come from an Irish family, I’m an American and have lived an American life to date. I’m not as far removed from Ireland as many I know, yet this year marks the 110th anniversary of my great-grandfather Thomas Kane’s arrival in America.

There’s something about being Irish American which doesn’t quite fit neatly into any of the official boxes. In Ireland, to be Irish is to be from Ireland or to be a close enough descendant that you qualify for Irish citizenship, like my father does. In America, there’s a sense that the old stereotypes of Irish immigrants are fair caricatures to still uphold, especially on our communities’ holiday in much the same way that the sombreros are donned on Cinco de Mayo. Yet there’s a lot more to it. On both sides of the Atlantic, our communities have the same deeply intertwined connections between families near and far, friends in common, and a sense of nostalgia that I see especially strong among those of us born in America.

Perhaps the Irish language can offer the best answer here. In Irish, I’ll say to Irish people, as I wrote a few paragraphs ago, “Is col ceathrair Meiriceánach mé.” Yet the official Irish name for us Irish Americans is “na Gael-Meiriceánigh”, or Gaelic Americans. I think this speaks to something far older and deeper than any geographic or political connections. We come from common ancestors, share common histories and stories that wind their way back generations and centuries even. We are who we are because of whom we’ve come from. I hope to pass this rich legacy in all its joys and struggles onto the next generation in my family; perhaps I dream of those not yet born hoping they’ll be better versions of my own generation. I hope they’ll still feel this connection to our diaspora like I do even as we continue on our way along the long winding road of time further and further from Ireland.

I am the child of my parents, the grandchild of my grandparents, and great-grandchild of my great-grandparents. In so many ways, I am who I am today because of those who’ve come before me. The geography of my life was written by them, by a choice among other immigrants from County Mayo my ancestors found their way to Chicago instead of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. My politics reflect my ancestors’ views as well, in the Irish context the legacies of the Home Rule Crisis of 1912-1916, the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence of 1919-1921, and the Civil War of 1922-1924 all have as much of a presence in my political philosophy as does their American contemporaries: the Progressive Era and its successor in the New Deal coalition. Yet I am my own person, and from these foundations I’ve built my own house in as much of an image of the past as it is a hope for the future.

What does it mean then to be ourselves? We hear a great deal today about how people identify, in a way which seems to be a radical departure from older norms and expectations both in the English language and in how we live. We constantly seek answers to all of our questions because we anticipate that all of our questions can be answered, yet the mystery of being is one of my great joys. I love that there are always things which I do not know, things with which I’m unfamiliar and uncertain. This is where belief extends my horizons beyond what my knowledge can hold, a belief born from the optimistic twins of aspiration and imagination. I know that the essence of my being, the very fundamental elements of who I am, draw far more from these twins than any other emotion. I am what my dreams make of me, I see my world with eyes colored by what my mind imagines might be possible; and in that possibility I find the courage to hope for a better tomorrow.

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