One could attend competing Irish cultural events every night of the week in New York. I’ve always found it comforting to know that if I show up at an affair at the Consulate or NYU’s Ireland House, I’ll know a good portion of the people there. But after drinking from the same trough for twenty years, we could use some fresh-faced twenty-year-olds to keep us energized. Not to write ourselves off prematurely, but the youngest of the Morrison/Donnelly visa recipients have hit forty by now. Heslin told me recently that there are just two Irish-born actors under the age of thirty who can legally work in New York and that “the scarcity of young Irish artists living in America at this time is having a real impact on how we tell our cultural story.”
This is not to suggest that the community is in danger of going extinct—not with some 34.5 million people who can claim Irish heritage living in the US. But without the influx of more recent, younger immigrants, there is a noticeable disjunction between the Irish of Ireland, who are increasingly tolerant and open in their social attitudes, and the Irish-American community, which is leaning more conservative. Gay organizations were banned from participating in the official St. Patrick’s Day parade on 5th Avenue in New York until as recently as 2015—which was the same year that Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. A majority of Irish-American voters, who had narrowly favored Barack Obama in 2012, broke for Donald Trump in 2016 (as did most white Catholic voters), while last year Leo Varadkar, a young gay man of Indian descent, was elected as Taoiseach, or prime minister, in Ireland. Several of Trump’s closest advisers (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, John Kelly) and his loudest media cheerleaders (Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly) have Irish surnames—and theirs have also been some of the most hard-line voices against immigration under the Trump administration.
To be sure, this is far from the whole story of Irish-American politics. In my community in New York, a new grassroots movement called Irish Stand was set up last year by Irish Senator Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, with the help of the writer Lisa Tierney-Keogh and others, to defend the civil rights of immigrants and refugees in response to Trump’s election. (The organization’s inaugural event, held at Riverside Church in Manhattan last March, was attended by nearly 3,000 people.) This divergence in Irish and Irish-American attitudes is part of why the founder of the digital news site IrishCentral.com, Niall O’Dowd, who has been lobbying for immigration reform since he came here as an undocumented immigrant in the 1980s, told me recently that “maintaining that first-generation connection has never been more important.”