Biden and the darker side of Irish-American history

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Liam Kennedy has narrated this article for you to listen to.

My introduction to an Irish-American sense of history was not in Boston or New York but in the American Midwest. I was visiting the eccentric House on the Rock in rural Wisconsin. The receptionist told me proudly that she was Irish. ‘My people were driven out during the Famine by Cromwell… and Strongbow.’ I admired her compositional virtuosity in bringing together the 12th-century Cambro-Norman warlord Strongbow, the mid-17th-century hammer of the Gaels (and the Scots) Oliver Cromwell, and the Irish landlord clearances of the 1840s — all in one short sentence. What’s more, her declaration chimed with the self-mythologising of Irish-Americans who trace their origins back to the Great Famine of the 1840s.

It’s a trope that Joe Biden, the first Irish-American Catholic president since Kennedy, is happy to adopt. In September’s presidential TV debate, he used his Irishness to attack Trump, claiming that he and his associates ‘look down their nose on people like Irish Catholics and like me’. He’s also fond of the word ‘malarkey’, claiming it’s a word ‘we Irish’ use. In fact, there’s no evidence for malarkey’s Irish origin, but that didn’t stop Biden making ‘No malarkey!’ the short-lived and much-mocked slogan for his campaign tour across Iowa at the end of 2019.

Biden has deep Irish roots and an attachment to nationalist Ireland, though little knowledge, it seems, of the darker side of Irish-American history. Nor is it likely that the storming of Capitol Hill by American ‘patriots’ caused him to register faint echoes of the occupation of central Dublin by Irish ‘patriots’, Easter week 1916.

A recent throwaway comment by Biden to dismiss a BBC reporter — ‘I am Irish’ — has alarmed some in the British press. Does he share a sense of historic grievance against the English? Or is that English paranoia? To understand the Irish-American mindset it helps to examine its foundational myth.