Colin Sheridan: We've all sat down by the hearth on someone else's home turf

Irish Examiner

15 hours ago

A couple of years back while escorting an American guest around the wildest recesses of Connemara, we encountered a local chap who was incredibly impressed to meet someone from the East coast of the States.
It sounds made up, like a badly written sketch from a Martin McDonagh movie, especially given the ubiquity of Americans in Clifden, Leenan, Kylemore, and Renvyle each summer. But, sure as a soft day on Dogs Bay, there he was lobbing turf onto an open fire, clearly in thrall to the exotic outlier that sat before him.
My guest was not from New York, but this mattered little to the turf-thrower; he had made a brief and solitary trip to the Big Apple and had the stories to prove it. Skyscrapers as big as mountains, he said, and dancing girls on tables in the bars. Every colour and creed of man just going about their business. He had a brother in Yonkers you see. Left Leitirmor aged 18. Still spoke Irish in the pubs on McLean Avenue.
Such was the wholesomeness of his wonder I wasn't sure was he taking the piss — you can't go to Connemara without a local taking the piss — but with no wink of inclusion in my direction forthcoming, I took him at his word. 'See Times Square and die,' as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously said.
The coup de grace for Turf Man was not the Empire State Building, nor Ellis Island, it wasn't even the Abercrombie and Fitch store on 5th Avenue, it was, as he described in colourful detail, the fact that you could get a steak at 5 O'clock in the morning.
'Can you believe it?' he asked us, doubting that we did, 'A steak! And spuds! The whole shebang at 5am! I've never seen anything like it.'
Now, I'm not sure if he told the steak story to every exotic visitor that passed through the doors of the establishment — an establishment that only seemed to employ him to reload the turf — but if he did, there was literally no way he could've brought such gusto to each telling. The colour and detail were enough to make Joan Didion weep.
'It's distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair,' she famously said of her beloved New York. Perhaps wise to her warning, Turf Man only stayed a long weekend.
Only the cities of London and Boston hold the same place in Irish hearts that New York does, and that love affair owes much to the embrace it has given to millions for generations. So many exiled under duress through hunger and poverty, others so privileged to go there by choice.
Family ties
My own father lived there in the 60s and, by his telling, he happened to meet every key historical figure of that decade while he was holed up in the Bronx, which is remarkable for a guy who drove a delivery truck for Canada Dry and took coats at the University Club on West 54th Street.
My mother took him back for the first time in three decades almost 20 years ago, and after a brief stop into an aforementioned department store to buy boxer shorts for her sons (because, you know), she found my dad out front, chatting to a topless Black male model, himself in little more than briefs, telling him about the time he took Eisenhower's hat.
It's always been that kind of town, but times they are a changing. Last month there were reports of undocumented Irish staying away from GAA matches in Gaelic Park, from Irish dances, from weddings, fearing raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) squads, the same type of raids that have set Los Angeles ablaze in the last week. The riots on the West Coast will only amplify that sense of paranoia that only undocumented immigrants know.
The Irish in America are no more deserving of better treatment than a Haitian immigrant, say, and they must know they have it much better, though it will serve as little consolation. Black and Brown people have and will be targeted much faster by ICE, an agency that is acting very much in the likeness of the country's president, Donald Trump. Racism, as much as capitalism, is at the core of each and every domestic policy in America presently, and undocumented Irish people may well be the unintended victims of that.
We need not look so far West to audit the results of systemic bigotry. Events in Ballymena this week function as a cold reminder that manmade fear and paranoia injected into a society by nefarious actors only begets more hatred and violence.
There isn't an Irish person alive whose family has not benefited from the open arms of other countries, whether through a J1 visa or a generous aunt in Dorchester. How people fall for the same tired lines of scaremongering and gaslighting is beyond me. It's always the immigrants' fault, am I right?
My arse it is.
Everyone deserves to eat 5am steak at least once in their lives.