They have built upon an untruth. They have conceived of nationality as a material thing, whereas it is a spiritual thing. They have made the same mistake that a man would make if he were to forget that he has an immortal soul. They have not recognised in their people the image and likeness of God. Hence, the nation to them is not all holy, a thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or dishonour on pain of eternal perdition.
For Pearse, the last generation are the constitutional nationalists, the Home Rulers who had abandoned the doctrine of full separation from England. They had lost their manhood. There had been four armed rebellions against British rule in the century before Pearse was born, and none in his lifetime. Intentionally or not, Pearse corrects Edmund Burke. For Pearse, a nation is not just a contract but a living thing, found in “the sum of the facts, spiritual and intellectual, which mark off one nation from another.” It is something to be intransigent about, as one would be intransigent in the defense of a home.
Going to the roots brought me to consider the Easter Rising. And what it says to me now is that the past reproaches the present on behalf of the future.
I mean this almost superliterally: The ghosts of a nation reproach the living on behalf of posterity. A nation or a society is not merely a contract between the living, the unborn, and the dead; it is a spiritual ecology that exists among them. A nation exists in the things that a father gives to his children, or else he is shamed before his father and grandfather, and his descendants too. The things that are needed for the future.
We have, perhaps fatally, polluted this ecology. We have reversed the process in which humility before the past leads to self-sacrifice in the present and new life and regeneration for the future. We have declared this state of things the end of history, imagining that people can live as consumers only, bored with life.
That loneliness I once felt, a latchkey kid in housing built for broken families. The only child and the man of the house at the same time. That’s common now. That feeling of being cut off from the past at a young age. This is becoming a way of life in America. And Ireland is on the way too.
When we do have children we so often have them as consumable objects, as part of our lifestyle choices. We do not receive them as gifts, as living things, inviolate and inviolable. We calculate about them, not worried over what we might give them, but what they take from us. Or, as you know, we simply abandon them. The children we keep, we leave to the care of professionals, who in turn treat them like units of labor to be worked on. We give them over to an education system that euthanizes their imagination, that literally drugs them into obedience. Any individual without a posterity may be a tragedy, or may be a saint. But a nation that is characterized by this fatherlessness, that ignores the real future that is incarnate before us, changes its society in a frightening way.
I believe it causes us to overconsume our natural resources, to overconsume generally, as a form of emotional compensation and distraction from lives wrung out of deeper joys and trials. Instead of leaving our own surplus, we turn the state into a machine for passing on our debts—economic, environmental, social—to a posterity that we do not create. And our posterity, insofar as it exists at all, is left unequipped to meet those debts.
Because we have committed this abuse, naturally we must deafen ourselves to the reproach of the past. We reinvent the murder machine, and turn it on ourselves. The old one worked by making Ireland’s past and its heroes invisible to the Irish, thereby depriving them of an identity that could be hostile to Britain. The new murder machine is almost the whole culture now, which works even harder and constantly, not to make the past invisible, but to make it omnipresent and detestable, thereby to deprive us of the conscience of our nation. The murder machine invents little faddish ideologies on which to fail the past, and in doing so it relieves ourselves of its censure.
We are great consumers. We are useless as conservators. Useless in this way, we deepen the pattern, failing to have children, or failing the children we have. We make ourselves sleek, obsequious. Pearse used rhetoric to urge himself on to greater deeds. We use the same to comfort ourselves in backing away from even the most common decency. I’ve discovered in the letters between you and my mother the legal and moral calculations done over me, what was legal in America, but not yet in Ireland. My mother brought it up to you as a point of discussion, but she quickly dismissed it. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She would make sacrifices, and make a home for me.
Fatherhood teaches me that if we let it, new life comes to restore us. A new life reconciles us as fathers and sons, nations with their history, however turbulent. That is what I’ve learned in this year and a half since becoming a father.
* * *
—
Last year, there was another wedding invitation in my life. This one from Darragh, the cousin I never thought I’d know. When I was a child, he had been a name, but now that you and I are repairing the breach, he is a friend, sometimes a confidant, and a man who will place bets for me. The ones that are not yet legal in America, only in Ireland. He and his household have done well in life, and out of that sense of abundance, he had my whole household come to share in “the big do.”
At that wedding, you and I were sharing black beers in the very hotel from which the British shot out the rebels in St. Stephen’s Green. My child, your granddaughter, was playing upstairs, perhaps in a room that was used by khaki soldiers as one of the poshest sniper’s nests in the history of the empire. A testament that the Irish can accept whatever others dish out. Darragh’s wife, I came to learn, was in the touring company for Riverdance. And so we also had testament that night that even Ireland’s kitsch can be remade as joy.
And that night you told me your side of one of our stories. You told me about the time you had saved and saved for the plane ticket, only for my mother to disallow you from seeing me after you landed in Newark. She was too upset, she said. And I would be too upset. You went home, having seen your son for only a few minutes.
You told me how, in the following years, your frustration at being unable to see me overcame you. So you researched the times of my recess and lunch at my primary school. And without telling my mother, you flew to America and just presented yourself to me at my school. You made your best friend a coconspirator. He told you he believed you’d both be arrested. You caught so much hell for this from my mother, and from the nuns, and from your own conscience. I had spent years giving you silence, thinking that I was the afterthought in your trip. And here, on this night, I find I was your only thought.
“I felt like a terrorist,” you said, recalling it and feeling guilty. The words fell on me like a thunderclap. Our estrangement was real, but in that moment, I learned you had made real sacrifices, taken real risks to see me. You would endure any strife it might cause in your house, and any hatred it occasioned in mine. You could barely lift your eyes up to me as you said that now, having a child of my own, I would understand.
I do.
But I shared with you the other detail of the story, the one that haunted me through all my years of silence. When you had come to the door of my school’s cafeteria and my back was to you, that friend of mine said to me, as if it were nothing, “Michael, your dad is here.” He had never seen you before. He just looked at you and knew. The simple fact that everyone could see about us—even if, at times, I tried to deny it.
Please, never be ashamed of the things you did to know me and be known by me. No matter how stupid or awful you felt, no matter how strange or upsetting they were to others, even to me. My mother’s wish, expressed to you in a letter, was that I should know myself to be Irish. It was an absurd thing to hope for. But maybe a little “terrorism” on your part made it true.
You predicted that my own fatherhood would send me to the roots. Of course it did. Fatherhood makes sense of sacrifice. It is an education that has deepened my ability to be “generous in s
ervice, withal joyous.” And that is why you and I must, in those small moments we steal now and then in the years we have left, here or in Ireland, make up a little of the time lost between the first time you put the hurl in my hand and the first time I walked onto a hurling pitch twenty-five years later. My daughter must tramp around in the stony gray soil in Monaghan, where you walked to Mass with your grandparents. She should hear you argue for Connolly and class war against me, and me argue for Pearse and the nation against you. We can laugh about our common ancestry with the High Kings of Ulster, and all that has gotten us in life. You should bring her a little hurl next time you are here. Get her a Dublin jumper. Better yet, Monaghan. What would your grandfather want for her? There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you.
You said that our relationship now, as men, is more than you could have rightly hoped. Can’t you see that, among all the loves, fears, shames, and uncertainties that belong to us and only us, there is something else that proceeds outward from our relationship? That what we call Ireland is found in the things that pass between us, and reverberate out into the world? To dance up to the line of idolatry, you might say that the life of a nation proceeds from the father and the son.
Because, faced with a child, you do the things you never thought you would do. You dare to do what was unthinkable, or even impossible. You become intransigent and indomitable, proud and valiant, yet willing to be the fool, throwing his life away. You crossed an ocean for the sight of me. I sing a dying language to life. Nations are stubborn things, no?
I never knew your father. And yet, on the night my daughter was born, I called you with the good news. You may still feel like you have no right to me. And that through your absence in my boyhood, you have forfeited any claim upon your granddaughter. I cannot speak to how you feel. But I can tell you that she has a claim on you, her granddad, whatever the accidents, smashups, and misunderstandings that have characterized life between you and me.
Back when you felt like a terrorist, when you were searching in some American school for a son who hardly knew you, could you see that moment?
Ireland is what you gave me, when you wrote letters and sent them into the silence. Ireland is what my mother gave me, when she put those CDs on constant rotation, or hung the bodhran proudly in her room. Ireland is what I give to my daughter when I croak out a Fenian tune that would please your father, or when I embarrass myself reading the Irish language books my mother read to me. The men who calculate and search out useful lessons for the present will erect their glass cages and other monstrosities across the landscape. But Ireland will surround her in muddy faerie forts. Her divine knight will come again, “walking from the summer headlands / To His scarecrow cross in the turnip-ground.” And through a new, yet always dying, language she will see honey pour out of the meadows. Romantic Ireland is dead and gone; it yet rises from the grave. And underneath a canopy of blush and violet sky, my daughter will see this transfigured Ireland through the songs her daddy sang to her.
These gestures are small rebellions measured against an Empire built on forgetting, in a world that, having given up a sense of duty to posterity, also finds itself a stranger to its past. But the Rising has taught me that when we act, or when we are forced to act on behalf of the future, the past can be given back to us as a gift.
You said that I earned the approval of your father with my songs. If I can do that, you can be my father from now on, in a way that earns the approval of your grandchildren.
’Twas Britannia that bade our wild geese go, that “small nations might be free”;
But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the shore of the great North Sea.
Oh, had they died by Pearse’s side or fought with Cathal Brugha
Their graves we’d keep where the Fenians sleep, ’neath the shroud of the foggy dew.
I’m still singing it.
* * *
—
I don’t know if you can bear to read these words. I am finally ready to answer your question now. Do I have anything to say to you?
I am happy you are my father. I am so happy my daughter has you for her granddad. Tons and tons of love to you and my siblings.
And there is more news. We are expecting another child. Another American-born man who will be taught, against all reason, that he is also Irish. He’ll be with us next January. You will come over, and he’ll see you at a younger, tenderer age than you first saw me. I can’t wait.
Your son,
Michael
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the most challenging period of my life, my wife, Marissa, encouraged the trip to Ireland and to that hurling field in Finglas that formed the first paragraphs of this book and changed the trajectory of all our lives. It was she who sent me “back home” again in 2016. It was she who has made several transatlantic flights while expertly managing our unruly babies. And it was she who welcomed into our lives and our home the wild-rover side of my family, one that had been a mystery to her for almost a decade previously. She made the writing—this life—possible. Marissa, I love you.
I am also indebted to all the men who, at different times in my life, showed me fatherly concern and modeled something of what it was to be a man. First my uncles, Donald and Chris Dougherty, who have never denied me anything I needed, even when it was a kick in the pants. Also my eternal gratitude goes to Lawrence Scanlon, who endured the fatherly burden of listening to me blast my favorite music, and in exchange gave me all the tools one needs to make a livelihood in this line of work. I am also indebted to Tony Saracino, who, at a very crucial time in my adolescence, gave me so many chances to transmute fear into courage. And to the men I call “Father” outside the home too: Fr. James McLucas, Fr. Richard Cipolla, and Fr. Greg Markey.
My gratitude extends to my entire family on all sides, who formed me through argument, clowning around, and ballbusting—love, as I’ve come to know it. All the Doughertys, Marseks, Torettas, Komosinskis, McCormacks, and Christofalos. And to all the people and places that provided shelter while I was writing, especially my parents-in-law, Ted and Louise. My eternal gratitude to Toni for taking care of our rambunctious children and enduring my ideas at their most half-baked. Also Finbar, Theresa, and all the Sullivan children, who took in my wife and children as I wrote. Thanks to Grace Farms in New Canaan, and their librarian Christina, who provided a home office away from the home office that my kids were screaming in.
I’ve benefited from the enormous amount of high-quality scholarship that goes into Irish history, and a generation of historians who are slowly overturning the overwhelming prejudices of the age I grew up in: Diarmaid Ferriter, Ronan Fanning, Charles Townshend, R. F. Foster, and Fearghal McGarry. Also, my sincere thanks go to my infinitely patient Irish teacher, Sam Ó Fearraigh, who gave me surprising things to read on Irish culture and from the Irish stage, while teaching me true “sheep-shagger’s” Irish.
My survival in adulthood is also owed to the editors who all left an imprint on me, as mentors, confidants, and friends. Chief on that long list is Kara Hopkins who transformed the opinionated kid I was into a better writer than I had any right to be. Scott McConnell and Dan McCarthy also were essential in that same project. Joe Weisenthal, Greg Veis, and Ryan Hockensmith, at various times, gave me encouragement and desperately needed paying gigs. Then there was the set of editors at The Week who heard me start babbling about the ideas in this book as early as 2015: Ben Frumin, Ryu Spaeth, and Nico Lauricella. And to Charlie Cooke, who endures so much from me now: my copy, my unimpressive attempts at accents from the Isles, and my never-ending stream of anti-English insults, sometimes in song.
Then there are all the friends and colleagues who gave me some kind of advice or support in the long run-up to this book: Matt Frost, Yuval Levin, Rich Lowry, Jonathan V. Last, Rod Dreher, Kyle Smith, Ed West, David Frum, Matthew Walther, Helen Andrews, Jay Nordlin
ger, Jonah Goldberg, Katherine Howell, Alexandra DeSanctis, Jibran Khan, Gabriel Rossman, and Alan Jacobs. Special thanks belong to Matthew Schmitz, who took up the offer to read this project with gusto, and gave it a good shearing at one critical stage. I’ve been gifted to have peers in this business who are the secret audience I write for, the same people I’ve been writing for since most of us were young: Reihan Salam, Peter Suderman, Eve Fairbanks, Kevin Williamson, Will Wilkinson, Will Wilson, Joanna Robinson, Julian Sanchez, Ezra Klein, Daniel Larison, Chris Hayes, Rob Montz, Graeme Wood, Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Foster, and Kerry Howley.
Special thanks go to the sustaining friendship of three men—three fathers—who go before me in all things: Ross Douthat, Freddy Gray, and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. I’m also blessed to have friends from my school days who keep me grounded and sufficiently humiliated: Tommy Cairney, Justin Akin, Justin Perez, Peter Tascio, and Jeff Vacca.
And to all the people who made this book happen. My agent, David Larabell, has believed in my work as long as anyone. He and the entire team at CAA have been essential to every part of this book. And to my patient editor and confidante, Bria Sandford, who believed in this project more than any other person on earth besides my wife. Thank you, Bria.
I’d like to thank my Irish siblings, Shelley, Yvonne, and Joe, who have endured their American half brother occasionally invading their childhood home, and the affliction of his late affections. Special thanks also for the hospitality, support, and understanding of Francine, their mother.
And of course to Brendan—my father—whose love has endured all the humiliations, the rejections, the extended silences, and now the absurd spectacle of being my father for almost four decades. He can add this to the list of things we need to make up to each other.
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