Home and Hearth, Kith and Kin

This is where my husband's family lives.  Around this oven -- an Aga cooker.  My beloved mother-in-law bakes scones and soda bread in it.  Everyone makes tea.  The rashers, black pudding and eggs are kept warm there.  The family gathers around it and they talk and eat and eat and talk.  Alongside the Aga is a television where Husband No. 1's father watches the occasional rugby game.  His mother now boots up her laptop in this room after a breakfast or a lunch or a tea or a dinner, and offers it to us to check our e-mail or she herself updates her Facebook status or confirms the flight to Tenerife.  The children run in an out like kids do when the outdoors is as safe as the indoors.  And when they fight or fall; they come to this room dominated by the cooker to get hugs, sweets and adjudication.

This is where we are much of the time when we go home.  Everybody talks what with a table of 7 or 8 adults with decades of life, several marriages, 2 continents and a small busful of children between them.  Mostly I listen.  Because when you are dialectially outnumbered (forgive me that awful pun) you can't keep up.  I'm lucky if I can understand every fifth word.  Doesn't matter, it leaves me time to read bodies and to imagine what it is to be Irish.

Or, in particular, to be this Irish family which has owned land and a farmstead in County Longford for hundreds of years.  Being Catholic they have also been deprived of some of that land and if you drive a few minutes up the road my brother-in-law can tell you how the Protestants were deeded this acreage or that as reward for preserving English dominion.  Oh, how I got it, how easy it is to understand the legacy of reflexive animus that remains even though Ireland became wildly prosperous on its own terms, and despite the financial debacle, will never be either as poor or as oppressed as it had been before the early 1970's.

In our country, the stranglehold of inequitable land distribution and therefore the inability to prosper en masse, forced the greatest internal migration this nation's ever seen, African-Americans heading to the industrialized, urban north.  The Irish didn't have that as an out; it took the Famine to drive them here.

And what do you get when you have two disenfranchised peoples -- African-Americans and the American Irish -- competing for power and place?    The Draft Riots of the 1860's, Boston's social convulsions over busing in the 1970's, the affirmative action battles in urban fire and police departments and the building trades, and the slow and interrupted increase of dynastic African-American mayors in Northern cities.


In other words, fraternal enemies.