The Luck of the Irish ☘️

Leprechauns, rainbows, and lucky shamrocks. Ireland possess a kind of mysterious magic in spite of its sometimes troubled and tragic past.

My paternal grandmother was Irish. She emigrated from the Galway region of Ireland to the United States in 1922 at the tender age of seventeen. When I first saw the 2015 film, Brooklyn, (based on Colm Tóibín’s novel of the same name) I thought of my grandmother’s story, which, of course, took place more than a generation before that of fictional character, Eilis Lacey.

Ireland in the late teens and twenties was rife with conflict and change. It was a revolutionary period, with the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and the establishment of the Irish Free State all taking place between 1916 and 1923.

My great-grandfather was a farmer with too many mouths to feed, so poverty, along with national conflict, influenced my grandmother’s departure. The “new world” provided new hope and opportunity for her as it did for so many others.

Most of us have ancestors who hailed from somewhere else, whether it’s one generation back or five. And some of us are the immigrants. (In fact, I immigrated to Canada from the U.S. as a one-year-old baby.)

Issues related to travel, immigration, choosing where to live, or being forced out of zones known as home are as active now as they were a hundred years ago. We humans have been moving around this planet through choice and choicelessness for ages. Especially as it’s become logistically, technologically, and politically easier to do so.

A friend said recently: “Isn’t it amazing that within a matter of hours on a plane we can land in a completely different part of the world?” From desert to mountains, from one ocean to another, from the tropics to the arctics, we can move around more easily and affordably than ever before (carbon footprint and colonization arguments aside for the moment, it’s pretty mind blowing, isn’t it?). We don’t have to spend a week on a ship crossing the Atlantic to go from Europe to the U.S., unless we want to. And unlike our ancestors, we don’t have to be gone months, years, or a lifetime.

My grandmother only went home once after her first son was born (my father’s oldest brother). She made her home in a new country with others who had emigrated one or two generations earlier. She naturalized, put down roots, left progeny, lived and died in her chosen country. Her chosen home.

Her commitment to her new country meant we lost touch with any family remaining in Ireland, but when I visited there for the first time in 2015, I felt a vibration of home in my heart. I felt the magic of the place, too, which is available to anyone open to feeling it. I plan to return for a visit in September, to Dublin, to co-lead a creative writing workshop with my friend, Sabrina Görlitz. We’ll be focusing on some of the deep existential and creative questions that came up in our Stories to Live and Die For webinar talks. If you feel called to join us, please get in touch.

Sláinte mhaith,

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ~ WB Yeats

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” ~ President Franklin D. Roosevelt