In a New York minute, everything has changed for Irish in America
We won't be getting any more questions about bombs or tigers, just jokes about our fiscal woes, says Donal Lynch
YOU can usually tell how often an American reads the foreign pages of a newspaper by the questions they ask about Ireland.
If they earnestly want to know if "there are still bombs everywhere" then it might have been quite some time. If they're still asking about the Celtic Tiger and if everyone is rich there then you may assume it's been a few years.
If, on the other hand, they wince, look sorrowfully at you and ask if your family made it out safely, then they are clued-in, up-to-date and unlikely to have any follow up queries about leprechauns.
As of this past week there can't be many Yanks who are clinging on to fairytales about the old country, be they of pots o' gold or pots o' dough. In our spectacular economic failure, we are, for once, the centre of media attention. As a country we have migrated out of the foreign page footnotes and into the headlines.
'Ireland's Big Mistake' bellowed the New York Times on Tuesday in an article that compared us to Texas, the most bankrupt and mortgage-delinquent state in the union.
'Is Ireland the Next Greece?' wondered Time magazine as it focused on a country "in the spotlight of investor concerns".
The San Francisco Chronicle phrased it more memorably, dubbing the current situation a 'Celtic Chimera'.
Not, you understand, that they have much sympathy for us. In fact, you could say they're quietly cheering as we inch nearer the precipice. CNN, which highlighted the possible exodus of GAA stars from Ireland, coolly noted that our country's loss may be America's gain: "(If Ireland seeks EU aid) the stock market might regain what it has lost in past weeks over 'fears of European recovery'."
On Yahoo's American homepage, Rick Newman opined that a bailout for Ireland, while "tough to swallow" for us, might ultimately "calm global markets," thus benefiting the US in the short term.
Not a murmur of protest at this cold, hard fact from the 40 million Irish-Americans, you may note. But can you blame them? We, along with the rest of Europe, spent the boom years rolling our eyes at George W Bush's awful policies, so now Americans have found themselves not above a little transatlantic snarkiness and back-biting.
William K Black in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that much of the blame for the crisis lay at the Dublin Government's "exquisitely awful" handling of our problems, adding that Germany, whose banks acted like "drunken girls gone wild", didn't provide much of a cavalry.
If sympathy is thin on the ground it could be because America knows that we will turn to it in our thousands in the coming years. When Irish people begin bailing themselves out they will fly west.
On Slate.com -- one of the most read current affairs websites in America -- the headline on Tuesday was 'Irish Youth Jump Ship, Head Abroad' and quoted UCD's Morgan Kelly and his prediction of "anxiety giving way to the first upswellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will transform Irish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America". Smug little us, all angry and poor?
As on many of these websites, the comment-posters could barely contain their schadenfreude.
"And to think, just last February my company told our facility that we would be closing -- and a portion of the jobs would be heading to their Ireland location. Now I feel so much better..." wrote one.
"Just another illustration justifying my jab towards the Emerald Isle ... " crowed another. "If Ireland's such a great place, why are so many people from there?"
The upshot is that when we do arrive as one large, huddled mass at Ellis Island (or JFK -- same difference) we are unlikely to be asked any perky questions about tigers or bombs. As in the old days we can settle in as the butt of American jokes.
"Why is the Irish economy in such a crisis?" wrote one US blogger last week. "Because they think their capital is always Dublin."
Not amused? It can only get worse from here.
Originally published in
