Dan Snow's History Hit - St Patrick's Day

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

We all have a story about St Patrick's Day and our guest on the podcast today, Adrian Mulligan has a few. Adrian is an Associate Professor of Geography at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. We had a fascinating talk about the origins of St Patrick's day, Irish Nationalism, how it has become a global phenomenon, the Irish American experience and how it's celebration has been influenced by the Irish diaspora. Enjoy this wonderful episode and happy St Patrick's Day!

Hi everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's St. Patrick's Day, folks. So happy St. Patrick's Day. This podcast is first broadcast on the 17th of March, 2021. Everyone knows St. Patrick's Day, a giant celebration of Irishness. My dad's born in Ireland. I'd go to weddings in Ireland. I remember one on a St. Patrick's Day probably 15 years ago now where I was one of the few English guys in the room. I remember my Irish cousin was marrying an unbelievably gorgeous and fantastically intelligent, wonderful human being. The kind of woman that I would love to have married at the time when I was a lonely single. And then we celebrated this wonderful wedding as only the Irish know how. And after the service, we watched Ireland play England in the rugby at

Twickenham, a home game for England. As the only England fan in the room, I was quite happy when England took a lead and then Ireland scored in the last minute and won the game to a universal meltdown at the wedding. It took the wedding up a gear when I thought we were already in fifth. I've got to be honest. So that's my St. Patrick's Day story. Everybody's got one. Adrian Mulligan has a few. He's a wonderful academic. He's an associate professor of geography, interestingly, at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. We had a fascinating talk about St. Patrick's Day, its origins, Irish nationalism, of course, and its global significance nowadays, how it's turned into a festival that everyone feels able to join in no matter where you are

in the world, but also particularly the Irishish american experience now so patrick's day was almost exported to north america and then imported back into ireland from the diaspora fantastically interesting stuff if you wish to get some more history or listen to more of these history podcasts without ads or watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries please go to historyhit.tv you may have heard me mention it before it's a history channel like Netflix for history. It's the best. It's award-winning. You're going to love it.

So please go and check that out, historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, everyone, enjoy Adrian Mulligan. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Adrian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I'm glad to be on. Very nice to meet you, Dan. St. Patrick's Day is a phenomenon, right? And I've met Americans who go to Dublin for St. Patrick's Day thinking it's going to be like visiting the place where the Super Bowl is on Super Bowl weekend and being a bit disappointed. It's almost bigger in the rest of the world than

it is in Dublin. Yeah, absolutely. We can talk about that some more today, just in terms of the history of this parade and where it comes from. A lot of my work is looking at this as a political tradition as much as a cultural tradition. And as a geographer, thinking about its locatedness and the various locations around the world, especially where this thing took off and became charged and has that history. I'd like to talk about the politics. Is it worth just first ticking off the easy bit? Why do they celebrate in South Korea? Irishness is attractive, Irish bars, St. Patrick's Day. That's just a branding thing, right? The South Koreans aren't

into the Irish story. Yeah, we can begin with more recent periods. And you have global cities, and you've got tourism, and you've got cities trying to look sexy and attract hypermobile global capital and put themselves on the map and maybe try to appear multicultural and cool and sexy. And the Irish government as well with our tourism the last 20 or so years, we've marketed the hell out of the Celtic Tiger and Ireland. So this is also coming out of Ireland too, but you've got that dimension of it, yes, where it's everywhere and it's not necessarily political in those locations. It's probably more geared to tourism. Yeah, that's the interest. You just said it yourself. It seems that it's seized upon by other places as a politically safe event to have. And yet, its genesis is obviously intensely

political. And part of that coolness of Ireland surely is a result of it being one of the first to break away from the all-powerful British Empire. Yeah, I mean, we can sort of go back here and think about some of the history of St. Patrick's Day and its Yeah, I mean, we can sort of go back here and think about some of the history of St. Patrick's Day and its beginning. I mean, we're starting here with, I mean, what this guy was coming out of Romano-Britain, wasn't he? In like the 300s. So there's a little bit of history here we can get back into. Not that I'm too good with the ancient history. I'm better in sort of modern context, but... That's a good point. We need to work out who St. Patrick is. He's a Romano-British person abducted by pirates or slave raiders, taken to Ireland, and has a Pauline experience,

becomes a passionate advocate for Christianity. Absolutely, yeah. I was doing a little bit more research on this too, thinking to myself, where does the shamrock come from? Thinking about the significance of the shamrock to St. Patrick and people talking about religious sort of, you know, elements of the shamrock historically in Ireland with Catholicism. It's interesting to see sort of over time, and obviously, you've got a history of Catholicism in Ireland, especially once we get into a period of British colonialism from the 1600s with Catholicism being driven underground in Ireland. And then we begin to see, I think, the event beginning to take on a little bit more political significance, you know, from the 1600s and so onwards.

Okay, so St. Patrick becomes a symbol of Irish Catholic resistance to Protestant British colonialism. I think this is where we begin to see it. I think once you begin to sort of look at sort of Cromwellian period in Ireland, and you look at plantations and stuff from the 1600s on into the 1700s, and you look at those penal laws in Ireland, and you see the ways in which Catholicism was made illegal, I think that those are the points at which obviously having a patron saint

and having a day that is uniquely sort of Irish, I think we can begin to think about how that context sort of shifted the meaning of this particular event. And then presumably the next big moment on this day's journey to this globally recognised event is Irish nationalism, Irish people jumping the Atlantic and it becoming a badge of Irishness within the United States? Absolutely. So you see those penal laws in Ireland, I think they started to get repealed in the late 18th century, but we still don't have St. Patrick's Day parades or anything like

that in Ireland. The first St. Patrick's Day parade, and everybody points this out, the first parades were in the United States. The first St. Patrick's Day parade, and everybody points this out, the first parades were in the United States. They really took off with the famine immigrants and with the Roman Catholic famine immigrants from the 1840s, 1850s onwards in American cities. But there were St. Patrick's Day parades before that massive Roman Catholic exodus into the U.S. People talk, for example, about when the United States was a British colony. You've got British troops, some of whom were of Irish extraction. It's rumored celebrating St. Patrick's Day in places like New York City back in the 1700s. Although they're there

representing the United Kingdom and Great Britain, they're also there as Irish people. And there's some celebrations of St. Patrick's Day with those troops. Is there a bit here about the nature of these migrant communities within this new American space? So just kind of leaving aside the politics of resistance for a second, do you find Italians and do you find Scottish migrants? Do they transplant and celebrate their days with that kind of vigour by virtue of being migrants? Or is there something different about St. Patrick's Day in the Irish community? I study nationalism and it's always interesting how nationalism is often argued to be coming out of the soil and packaged within the shores of your country.

And when you go to school and you often learn about your national history, it's often packaged in that particular way. But as you know, we've got loads of examples of diasporic nationalism around the world and of people feeling quite nationalistic outside of their home countries and arguably becoming more nationalistic outside of their home countries as a result of the distance. And then there's interesting things that happen with that, where I wonder if from a distance, you see things more black and white, where there's less shades of grey. I mean, there's lots of examples of nation states around the world that have been founded with diasporic influence, with money, with ideas, with actual people coming back. I mean, Ireland's one example of this, but there's

plenty more examples too. So yeah, I think you're exactly right. When you look at folks in the US and you think of those British troops, perhaps stationed in the Americas before the American Revolution, if they were celebrating or thinking about their Irishness there, of course, the Irish would have been free to be able to do it in the United States in ways that they couldn't do it at home. So as we think about, you mentioned the Italians, for example, who later on have a Columbus Day parade, they could ostensibly have had those in Italy since it wasn't illegal or it wasn't questionable to be celebrating that stuff in Italy in the late 19th century. Whereas in Ireland, we've got colonialism arguably in Ireland during late 19th century. Whereas in Ireland,

we've got colonialism arguably in Ireland. During the 19th century, that would have been more difficult to do, to have an outward sort of expression of Irishness and to be able to parade it. And we didn't really see St. Patrick's Day parades in Ireland until like the early 20th century when the Irish nationalism really began to take off and become more public. of century when the Irish nationalism really began to take off and become more public. After the initial British troops in places like New York were supposedly celebrating St. Patrick's Day parades and beginning to march at that point in time, we have Protestants Irish who had got to remember the United States before the 1850s, any Irishness in the US would have been predominantly Protestant. So they are also celebrating St. Patrick's Day, but they're celebrating it, I think,

as representative of being Irish. And of course, we've got that history too of the United Irishmen and that revolution in 1798 in Ireland being just as much Protestants as Catholics and a Republican Irishness that bubbled up at that point in time. So we might see some of that stuff washing over to the States too in the early 19th century. Okay, I'm going to ask you the question that you're not going to answer because you're too clever.

So St. Patrick's Day as we understand it today, a US invention, question mark. Yes, this is the interesting thing. From the 1850s onwards we can understand st patrick's day parade i'm a jogger first so thinking about it in the context of cities like new york cities like boston thinking about the irish the irish came over with an awful lot of colonial baggage i mean they came over we think about race today and race has predominantly become associated with skin color. But you have

to remember that during the 19th century, a lot of the discrimination that the Irish faced, they were conceptualized as a race. And there were different types of white people. And there were Anglo-Saxon white people, but there were also Celtic Irish white people who were argued to be somewhat of a different race. And there was a lot of racism associated with colonialism, racism that justified British colonialism. And when the Irish came to the United States, like many other immigrant groups who came to the United States, Asian immigrants, for example, they came with that racial baggage associated with them. So yes, in American context, this is what people forget. These parades, when they started in the US, were all about sort of decorum, taking charge of a

street for the day, presenting yourself as people who could be trusted. There's a lot of nativism. There's a lot of anti-Irish feeling in the US in the mid to late 19th century. And they are trying to resist those sort of stereotypes of how they are. America at this point in time is worried about papal influence and all these millions of Irish coming in and taking over and how dangerous that was. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is first going out on St. Patrick's Day, so it's a St. Patrick's Day special with Adrian Mulligan. More coming up after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores,

scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows

or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And so at what stage does this tradition almost get re-exported back to Ireland? So you see this thing evolving in American contexts. You see as the Irish begin to take charge of these streets and begin to organise themselves. I'm a geographer here thinking about the role that controlling a street for the day plays a big role. There's also internal dimensions of these parades too. It's not just about presenting a unified front to the outside world, but it's also there's

internal dimensions as well in terms of the line of march, who gets to march first, who gets to march last, who's important in the community, who's arguably not important in the community. You've got a lot of masculinism in these events. You've got nationalism. They're commenting on events in Ireland. They're also commenting on events in the United States as well. So they're a form of sort of expression here. And that bubbles up later too with some Supreme Court stuff that's happened more recently, thinking about them as a form of expression. So yes, we think about then making the jump, leaving the United States. I think you've really got to get into sort of a post-independence period in Ireland. You've got to look at after the founding of the Free State in the 1920s. And then once we get into Ireland being established, as we get more power into the 1930s, that's when you're going to see these parades take off. But I think the early ones in Ireland, they were always very militaristic affairs. And that's certainly the case in the US as well. There's a very sort of militaristic dimension

of them. And I think historically, that dates to Irish American involvement in the Civil War. And again, this is about patriotism serving your country. And a lot of parading in the US has a militaristic dimension. And St. Patrick's Day parades are certainly like that. And we could talk as well about how they've changed, though, because as they got exported, they became less militaristic. Yeah, tell me about that. That's something you see in Ireland in the early 20th century. St. Patrick's Day parades were very much about marching and had that militaristic dimension. But I think that as they've become exported, and have become more commodified more recently, they seem to have become these celebratory

carnival-esque events. I don't know if they're quite like carnivals, though, because like the whole history of carnival is like a world being turned upside down. And it's a day when slaves and oppressed people can poke fun at their masters. But it's like a safety valve type day that's sort of built into a calendar. I don't know if we're talking about St. Patrick's Day parades as being carnivalesque, whether there's that dimension to them. Primarily, they've become very commodified and they've become these celebrations of Irishness. What I find interesting, I've done work on this. A lot of my research was in the 1990s. I came over here as a graduate student and I was doing

research on the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City. And that's the parade at that time when there was LGBTQ Irish groups wanting to get into the Fifth Avenue parade and being told that you can't get into the parade. This is not a gay parade. And you've got that dimension of what's happening there in the 1990s. And we can sort of chart that through and think what's happened and how they've evolved because they have become more multicultural, celebratory events and have become, I think, more inclusive over the course of the last 20, 30 years. We can critique them for being commodified and plastic, but I think there's also an inclusivity and a multicultural-ness that's also a dimension there, but it's important too and not something we should forget.

I love listening to American podcasts like everybody else. I listen to, ingest a lot of American culture. I'm astonished by the stickiness of the Irish identity. You take a guy, often it is a guy, and he goes, well, I'm Irish. And then he'll name a great-grandparent or a great-great-grandparent from Sligo. I should say my family in Canada were all of Scottish descent and the Laidlaws married the McMillans and the rest of it. Now, maybe that is true. Maybe in Boston, they are. But it's funny that you cling onto that part of the identity so powerfully. It still means something today in the US. What does it mean? Does it mean to be an outsider? in Boston, they are. But it's funny that they cling onto that part of the identity so powerfully.

And it still means something today in the US. What does it mean? Does it mean to be an outsider? Does it show that you have lived the American dream? Because you've got your podcast now, you're obviously successful, you're a general, you're a broadcaster. And yet that Irishness is like a suggestion that you've fought your way in somehow. It's interesting to see the hyphenated American-ness that you often see with white Americans. We can talk about this too, but certainly we can think about ethnicity in the United States and how people are able to retain their Italian-ness or their Irish-ness or their Greek immigrant identity at the same time as they have their American national identity. The two things aren't argued to be sort of in tension with each other. And often the

Irishness or the Italianness or the Greekness or whatever it is, is maintained through festivals, through food, through family, sometimes with religious dimensions as well. The interesting thing about Irishness though, and these other identities too, is Irish America has been cut off from Ireland. There's no more immigrants. So I think Irish America is getting more distanced from Ireland because the emigration has slowed down. 1950s it picked up, 1990s it picked up, but it's becoming more distanced now generationally from Ireland. And you see that distance through St. Patrick's Day's parades in the States, which have become in many ways sort of divorced from modern Ireland. Ireland is now a country of immigrants.

Ireland is a country that it's not perfect, but we're wrestling with racism and multicultural narratives of what it means to be Irishness. And we're trying to forge new paths and stuff in ways that you'll often see St. Patrick's Day parades in the US not keeping tabs with where Ireland is going today and that distance getting quite big. Wow, man. One day we should do French and French Canadians because that's such an interesting era as well.

Yeah. I mean, as we think about those LGBTQ groups who were trying to get into the parade of the 90s, a lot of them were Irish immigrants. A lot of them were quite offended that Irish Americans were telling them that they couldn't get into a St. Patrick's Day parade. You've got those protests that went on for decades. There was a Supreme Court case in the 1990s, which was John Wacko Hurley, who was the organizer of a South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade. He was belonging to a veterans organization in South Boston, and it was a case of him versus the gay and lesbian Irish bisexual group of Boston. And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, it was Justice Souter, ruled in 1995 that a St. Patrick's Day parade

is a form of expression, not just motion, therefore covered under First Amendment rights. And the rights of this particular organization in South Boston could not be infringed. They shouldn't have to present themselves publicly in a manner that they disagreed with. So we see, therefore, when that court case went down in 1995, it became fairly contentious then. We also see various protests happening in both New York and Boston, protesting the heteronormative character of these particular parades. What's interesting is during this period as well, these parades were argued then to be Roman Catholic events. And that was the basis by which you could arguably discriminate against these folks wanting to get in. But the counter argument there was that they had become

divorced from their Catholicism. They had become about green beer and partying and all that stuff. So LGBTQ groups were like, well, this is kind of rich, but suddenly now it's Catholic. And that's the basis for us not getting in. Did the fact that the troubles on the island of Ireland add a dimension, a kind of exciting political dimension to attending a St. Patrick's Day parade that would have been lacking another Greek or Italian-American event? Yeah, I spent the first 10 years of my life in Belfast during the 1970s and you would never have seen... There'd be lots of people parading, but let's just say there wouldn't have been any St. Patrick's Day parades in that part of the world back then.

In the States, what you see, therefore, the New York parade and the Boston parade are these signs that would say England out of Ireland. You know, these parades have always, going right back to the 19th century, they've always been vehicles by which people have articulated their beliefs, not just in the US, but also projected back to the so-called old country. And then in many ways, then later, when people argued in the face of LGBTQ groups wanting to get in, that these events were not political, but yet you have England out of Ireland signs being marched, people would be like, well, they are. But often when it's your own politics and it gets naturalised in a parade, you don't see it. It just becomes part of sort of the fabric of the event. And it might take other people to point that out. Some of the research I did then after that,

sort of in the early 2000s, was looking at a dueling parade, a counter parade, which was established in Queens in New York, in Woodside and Sunnyside. It happened in a different place on a different day. But this was a St. Pat's for All parade established by Brendan Fay, who was one of the original folks who had been protesting exclusion on Fifth Avenue. folks who had been protesting exclusion on Fifth Avenue. And this parade, it's still going. And it's a parade all about sort of a more multicultural celebration of Irishness. It's about Irish contributions to different parts of the world. It's less about your Irish blood and your ethnicity and the fact that Irishness is in your veins. And it's a parade that was really sort of embraced by those neighborhoods of Queens that have an awful lot of immigrants in them. So you have Chilean immigrants

celebrating Bernardo O'Higgins, one of the founders of Chile. You had Mexican immigrants celebrating San Patricio Battalion who crossed over in the US-Mexico war. They were Irish immigrants and they crossed over to fight for the Mexicans. So that's sort of a really interesting parade that's still going and has been taken to heart by people in Queens and made their own. And interestingly, too, the Irish government seemed to sort of embrace that parade as well, tried to walk the line of embracing that parade because it celebrated more sort of multicultural, arguably more positive, forward-thinking models of Irishness that made more sense in Ireland, perhaps. That is extraordinary. I just love talking about these things. Thank you so much I've been doing stuff with abolitionism in the 19th century in the Atlantic

world. I do work on Japanese-American imprisonment during World War II. I'm a geographer, so I just think spatially about lots of different things to try to understand them better. Well, I love trying to understand nationalism and identity. So let's talk again soon. Thank you very much for coming on. Sounds good. Thank you, Dan. Take care. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return,

I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. you