Saint Patrick's Day

My mother was Irish. One hundred percent. She wasn't particularly proud of it and I have to say I share her sentiments about my fifty percent Irishness.

She was not ashamed of being Irish. In Saint John, New Brunswick you really didn't want to be because you were surrounded by people who would cheerfully reinforce any sense of inferiority an Irish person might have about being Irish. My uncles were all very big, tough men and more than willing to stand up to anyone who insulted them for being Irish.

It's an odd thing that they were so big as both their parents, especially my grandfather, were small people. And so were all my grandparent's siblings. Well, not so odd, really. They were small because they didn't get enough to eat as children. My mother's generation were the first to eat properly all their lives. My grandfather managed this on a barber's salary. And there were ten children to feed.

Eight of them went to university. One of her brothers became the head gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic. Another became a newspaper writer and then editor until he had paid all of his siblings way through university. Then he went back to school and became a lawyer. He argued a half dozen cases before the supreme court in his career including one of the very last death penalty cases in Canada. (He told me later that his two clients were the worst people he ever met and he sometimes regretted saving their lives as both went on to other horrid crimes.)

But the thing is that all of them ditched their Irish accents and culture. The oldest boy had a trace of an Irish accent all his life. The others took great pains to train themselves to speak with no discernible accent. (My mother rarely sneered but she always sneered at anyone "who has been here twenty years and still speaks with an accent".)

They looked at the preppy east coast Anglicans around them and saw that, however much they resented the way these people treated them, the culture of success had gotten to be that way for a reason. And they adopted it as their own. In Saint John, they lived long enough to see the old Loyalist order collapse and lose all its power and influence to be replaced by a new elite. An elite they were part of. At the end of their lives they looked at the English and saw, with justifiable pride,  that they had replaced them by being truer to the English values of liberty, merit, prudence, restraint, elegance and, yes, class than the English had been.

I think that's a model and culture worth emulating. Alternatively, we could all go out and cite whatever percentage of "Irish Blood" we thing we have and drink green beer until we puke.