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Tuesday, August 17, 2021

What I Learned About the United States After Ten Years in Ireland (UPDATED)

 


 

This is an anniversary, of sorts, for me. I have now lived in Ireland for ten years. They were ten good years. During that time, I made some friends and worked with colleagues, who later became friends, and befriended some students, who later befriended me. During this time, I made one good decision, and one bad mis-judgment—and the two were related.

 

One Good Decision

 

Before moving to Ireland and taking up my post as a law lecturer, I consciously decided that I would make my best effort not to be judgmental regarding differences between home and abroad, between the U.S. and Ireland. It is particularly easy to fall into that intellectual trap, not just because there is a little bit of an ugly American or overweening patriot in most of us, but because there is a large influential, domestic (that is, Irish) crowd in Ireland that exults in complaining about most aspects of Irish (and Western) life, and their having a foreigner adding to the roster of domestic complaints positively confirms their worldview.

 

There are other reasons making it overly easy to complain about Irish life.

 

Ireland is a small country—a population of just under 5 million (excluding Northern Ireland). There are problems with life in a small country that are not the making of its individual inhabitants—they are problems which inhere in the country’s size. The most important hardship associated with small-country life is that some (not all) prices are seriously out-of-whack because the entity lacks economies of scale. In a small country, sharing and pooling resources and risk can be difficult and, therefore, costly—for example, the availability and prices for cutting edge medical services and insurance are frequent sources of complaint here. This is the reason Ireland’s initial decision to join the European Economic Community (now the European Union) made so much sense. By moving into a continent-wide no-tariff zone, Ireland escaped many of the economic shackles inherent in small-country life.

 

Another aspect of small country life is that if you have a profession or specialty, you will have a fairly small number of colleagues. Your reputation will stick. If you make any sort of notable mistake, there are few opportunities for second acts. If you want a second act, you may have to choose another profession—or migrate to a foreign country.

 

Larger countries are likely to have, and are commonly believed to have, deeper wells of expertise. Irish appellate judges are slow to overturn their own precedents unless the new proposed path forward has first been adopted by foreign courts. Irish regulators are much the same. It works much the same way in reverse too. A great many Irish find validation only when the Irish position is adopted in EU or international fora, or where an Irish athlete takes a medal at the Olympics or some other international competition. There are a surprising number of people (including young people) in this country who don’t believe what happens here matters—unless what is done here follows what the wider international community has done or unless what is done here is adopted abroad. More than a few of those born here to ethnically Irish parents will say, proudly, that they do not think of themselves as Irish, but as European.  

 

All this can take a psychological toll on the inhabitants of a small country. They constantly look abroad for validation, and only sometimes find it. It lowers the esteem they have for their own country and countrymen. That effect is doubled when the small country is right alongside a large country. The bigger country will tend to set the standard, and its culture is more likely to dominate conversation and news. It is easy to see the larger country’s virtues—e.g., its museums, stadiums, and universities are bigger and brighter—and so, by contrast, one’s own chief cultural institutions seem almost shabby by contrast. This pattern will appear again and again, and sometimes in the most unexpected ways. In my own small Dublin Jewish community, we use American printed prayer books—the prayer for the state speaks to the President and Vice President of the United States. A generation ago, the Irish Jewish community used prayer books printed in the United Kingdom—with a prayer for the British royal family. Of course, in Ireland, these prayers were modified by custom, locally-made inserts, and stickers covering the original printed text. There is nothing terrible about this. But if everything you have was made abroad, or made with others in mind, and you have to modify it to make it right, it takes a toll. I expect that some Canadians feel this way about the United States. But for the Irish the effect of being alongside a large country is not merely doubled, it is quadrupled, because their neighbour is not just a large country speaking the same language, but (according to the received Irish historical narrative) the former colonial power.

 

So it is easy to fall into the anti-Irish trap. And doing so will have personal consequences. In 2011, I started at my university with a small cohort of foreign academics. Each one of them is now gone. One reason they are gone is every time they saw some defect in Irish life, it became a gripe when compared to life back home. But it never worked that way in reverse. Whenever they received some benefit here that was different or better than what was the standard back home, that was just pocketed as the natural order of things, and there was little or no effort to balance the gripes against the benefits.

 

One Bad Misjudgment

 

When traveling in the Irish countryside, I came across a lonely plinth. It was a memorial to a long dead Irish soldier—one of Wellington’s officers, who served during the Napoleonic Wars in the United Kingdom’s armed forces. The plinth’s inscription was eroded; its base was not maintained. The path to it was in disorder. There was no modern historic marker directing road traffic to the location. This was a bit of rejected history. The received view here is that this isn’t proper Irish history; rather, it is British history, whose artifacts remain in independent Ireland. Yes, this soldier was ethnically Irish, but he was a soldier for a foreign power, and not just a foreign power, but for the occupying colonial power.

 

It struck me that this approach was wrong. All wrong. The way I saw it was … the plinth is part of Irish history, and it is a memorial to an accomplished Irish person. Moreover, excising one’s history has real costs. It can often leave one with no history at all, or, what can be worse, it can leave one with a history that is all a story of woe and oppression. If that is a nation’s whole history, its children will seek to escape their identity. Maybe it is no wonder that so many young Irish identify as European?

 

I might add that this particular monument is not the only bit of abandoned and contested Irish history. There are graves in Ireland where rest Irish soldiers who had served in Britain’s armed forces during World War I—before, during, and after the time of the 1916 Irish Rising. How to memorialize and remember such men is a continuing source of friction here. It is a problem of history and identity. In a certain sense, one might argue that the circumstances of the Irish WWI veterans and war dead is more clear cut—in this case, there was a hard conflict between the political worldview of Irish revolutionaries and those continuing to identify with the United Kingdom. Whether one agrees or not, one can understand why today’s Irish nation and society might not want to memorialize such men. But if the circumstances of the Irish WWI veterans is more clear, then the lonely plinth and remembering Wellington’s Irish officers becomes less clear. The Napoleonic Wars were a long time ago. The hard, long bloody conflict, which would lead to Irish independence, remained in the distant future. Surely, I thought, the generous approach should be to maintain the monument, and to do so as bona fide Irish history.

 

Anyway, those were my thoughts at the time. But I have come to reconsider my position. This is why. I asked the question: How did early post-independence Americans memorialize and remember the military service of loyal Americans who had served in the British armed forces in the French and Indian War (a/k/a Seven Years’ War a/k/a War of the Conquest)? The obvious place to look was Major General Henry Lee’s 1799 funeral oration for President George Washington, who had reached the rank of colonel in the provincial/colonial Virginia militia during the French and Indian War. All Lee does—all he can do—is to point to Washington’s valour.

Will you go with me to the Banks of the Monongahela [in 1755], to see your youthful WASHINGTON supporting, in the dismal hour of Indian victory, the ill-fated Braddock, and saving, by his judgment and by his valor, the remains of a defeated army, pressed by the conquering savage foe?

Washington’s martial skill can be recorded, but not his loyalty—which was then in service to what became a foreign nation—and not just a foreign nation—but the enemy from which national independence was won. It may be that our American forefathers believed (and, perhaps, rightly) that such loyalties cannot be divided. And if Washington was correct to direct his loyalties to the crown in 1755, then that renders suspect his and our break with the Britain in 1776. The human heart may not be big enough to accommodate two such loyalties, at least where political disunion is accomplished through violence.

 

Moving forward in our history, one might ask who (if anyone) maintains the graves of Mexican soldiers, buried in the United States, who fell in the War of Texas Independence and, later, in the Mexican-American War? I don’t doubt that a generous people—even if they had been enemies—would have given them a proper burial. But I wonder, in the aftermath of those two wars, were those graves maintained at public expense by the sons and daughters, sometimes the orphans, of the Texan and American people who had opposed the Mexican war dead?

 

And then, there were WWII Axis soldiers interned on American territory, who died as POWs. Not all their bodies were repatriated to their homelands at the end of WWII. Are those graves maintained at public expense? I have never seen any roadside markers—This way to the Axis Soldiers’ graves.

 

In recent times, we have seen crazed violence across the United States destroying graves, plinths, and other memorials. Some of these memorials should have never been built. None of them should have been taken down by vigilante violence, absent democratic authority from today’s municipal authorities (in regard to public monuments). And although I believe that no one should be taxed to build or maintain public monuments and memorials to traitors and the nation’s enemies, I also believe that todays lawless violence is a greater threat to our society than contested monuments and memorials, which, in any event, might be taken down by lawful and democratic means.

 

There is a solution to dealing with such monuments. Let them erode. Let the land around them grow unkempt. Then time will displace them, and they will be forgotten. Ten years in Ireland, and this is what I learned here. I suspect it is what Major General Henry Lee knew all along.

 

Seth


PS: A former Irish student wrote me as follows: On the grounds of Leinster House [the building housing the Irish national parliament], is a statue commemorating Prince Albert [18191861] and there’s been several attempts by Irish Republicans to remove it from the grounds of Leinster House. Fine Gael [one of the two primary national parties which have regularly formed Irish governments] have successfully vetoed the proposal on a number of occasions, but [Irish] Republicans found a way around it . . . by stopping the hedges around the statue being cutenveloping the statue more and more. If you cant tear it down, cover it in bushes apparently.


Seth Barrett Tillman, What I Learned About the United States After Ten Years in Ireland, New Reform Club (Aug. 17, 2021, 6:23 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2021/08/what-i-learned-about-united-states.html>; 


19 comments:

Troy said...

https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/24204

Yes, those graves are maintained at taxpayer expense at military bases around the USA.


https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=cemetary+german+POWs

John of Argghhh! said...

Come to Fort Leavenworth. There is a tale to tell about German POWs and memory. I'll be happy to give you the tour.

RETCOL said...

I remember the German POW grave at Fort Leavenworth.

Unknown said...

There are hundreds of German POW graves maintained at public expense all over the U.S.

https://www.findagrave.com/virtual-cemetery/531769?page=1#sr-254221

Ken Mitchell said...

Our history is our history, the good parts and the bad parts. No Confederate statues should be torn down just for trying to erase the Civil War. No streets should be renamed; it's a pointless and confusing expense. Human beings are human beings, and are no less human for having been on the wrong side during a war.

The Brits who were our ancestors were every bit as human as I am. (I'm a European mongrel; Irish and Greek and English and German and other places in between.) And in many - perhaps even most - cases, the average soldier had no choices about what battles he fought in. Once the average soldier took the King's shilling, he didn't get to make many decisions. Ship out to America? Get on the ship, or hang. Shoot who the Colonel said to shoot, or hang.

Our history needs to include ALL of our history; what we did, what they did, what our ancestors did. Learn all the mistakes from BOTH sides that history can teach us, or you're preparing to make those same mistakes again.

We're learning that again, just this week.

Unknown said...

“Moving forward in our history, one might ask who (if anyone) maintains the graves of Mexican soldiers, buried in the United States, who fell in the War of Texas Independence and the Mexican-American War?”
This isn’t an example of Mexican soldiers’ graves from the Texas War for Independence being maintained at the public expense, but they are identified by a historical marker.
https://historic.one/TX/refugio-county/historical-marker/yucatan-soliders-burial-site

BZZZzzz... said...

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/40368/johnson%27s-island-confederate-cemetery

Unknown said...

Further, there are WW2 German graves maintained at public expense in Belgium and Luxembourg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandweiler_German_war_cemetery

OldFan said...

Ah, another total reversal of the actual meaning of "Ugly American." In the original work of fiction it was based upon (now almost 75 years old), the "ugly American" was the ONLY member of the US diplomatic corps who tried to understand the local culture, provided assistance they actually needed and wanted, and gained any respect from them. The rest of the handsome, highly-credentialed, lofty-minded people in the embassy were clueless at best and self-serving at worst.

The Ugly American was the hero of the piece, not the villain.

Since it was also a profoundly anti-communist work, I'm not at all surprised that this reversal has been deliberately engineered by academics and media people.

kbaud said...

Bennington VT has a large marker just a few feet from the grave of Robert Frost which states:
"AROUND THIS STONE LIE BURIED MANY PATRIOTS WHO FELL IN THE BATTLE OF BENNINGTON, AUGUST 16TH 1777--HERE ALSO REST BRITISH SOLDIERS, HESSIANS WHO DIED FROM WOUNDS AFTERBATTLE AS CAPTIVES"

Unknown said...

If you want a remarkable example of the treatment of the enemy fallen, go to Gallipoli in Turkey on April 25th to see the ceremony commemorating the troops who died in the abortive invasion by British, Australian and New Zealand troops in 1915. They were defeated by the Turkish army Mustafa Kemal who was later the founder of the Turkish Republic. Despite the deaths of 56,000 Turkish troops, Turkey set aside the land to honour the enemy dead and facilitates the annual commemoration which is a pilgrimage site for Australians and New Zealanders.

Marcus said...

I guess it is all right to ignore and let sink into disrepair the gravestones and gravesites of traitors. I would suggest McCain and Ted Kennedy to start. And then, after the most racist president of my lifetime dies, his also.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

In Budapest there were many communist statues in prominent places when the Iron Curtain fell. What to do? Can't keep them up, can't take them down. They moved them out of town, to a residential neighborhood, practically in a couple of families' back yards. They made a park out of them that you can visit, Szoborpark. They are displayed and cared for, but look a little ridiculous and out of place. I think it's a good solution.

It's a fun visit as a tourist, too. Soviet art tended toward the huge and overdramatic. Now it has an Ozymandias feel.

Michael Edwards said...

You have learned nothing, you have insulted whole nations. I have lived 23+ years out of USA, starting as Army vet - 1971 left Vietnam. Such a small mind you have. I am sorry for you. I have been back in Vietnam while working in Singapore 2003-2008, three times, had good conversations with them. Please learn to actually open your mind.

Banshee said...

Benedict Arnold was a turncoat, but his leg has an honored monument at Saratoga.

Martin F. Sorensen said...

I think there is a difference when it comes to huge statues of Confederate Generals which dominate an avenue or a whole vista. It gives them a prominence beyond their time. They will not disappear in the weeds. Of course, due municipal process is needed.

truthmatters said...

Interesting article, I enjoyed it.

Bench Dweller said...

Seth-
I spent a year at Maynooth as a visiting student from the U.S. back in the mid-80s. I'd love to know what it's like now.

IGotBupkis said...

}}} Another aspect of small country life is that if you have a profession or specialty, you will have a fairly small number of colleagues. Your reputation will stick. If you make any sort of notable mistake, there are few opportunities for second acts. If you want a second act, you may have to choose another profession—or immigrate.

I think you mean "emigrate" there...? :-P