Normalizing Ireland

Picture of George V's visit to Dublin in 1911 - from The Guardian

In just two days, Queen Elizabeth II will be arriving in Dublin - just a few hours after I leave for Berlin.  I am actually quite happy to be missing the royal visit, and that other semi-royal visit of President Obama returning to the country of (a few of) his ancestors.  But American presidents have visited Ireland before, and despite attempts by the press and the Irish government to cast it as inter-stitial business as usual, the Queen's visit is actually quite a big deal.  The last British monarch to visit Ireland was King George V in 1911- which means that no British monarch has ever visited the Republic of Ireland. Put another way, no British monarch has ever visited the 26 counties when they didn't belong to the British empire.
The range of responses to the Queen's visit is fairly broad.  The establishment seems to be bending over backwards to convince both the Irish people and the world that the visit is a certified Good Thing.  Speaking to the Guardian, tánaiste Eamon Gilmore (the tánaiste is the deputy to the taoisach, who is the leader of the Irish government) said "She is the head of state of a neighbouring country and state visits are very much part of what we do. She will get a very warm welcome. Her visit will herald a much more normal relationship between Ireland and the UK."  RTÉ is running a program tonight on the life of the Queen, which looks to be about how QEII is really a nice normal lady who happens to be a Windsor.

Protest website associated with the Cork English Market

I think that a lot of people who bother to think about the visit at all, wonder if there can ever be a normal relationship between Ireland and the UK. I also don't think that acknowledging how complicated the Anglo-Irish relationship is, is a bad thing.  After all, for many in the 26 counties of the republic and the 6 counties in Northern Ireland, a British presence in the North is considered an unwarranted military occupation.  The security arrangements that are being taken to protect the Queen point to the ways in which this is not a normal state visit.  The press has widely discussed whether it is wise for the Queen to visit the Garden of Remembrance which honours those who died "for the cause of Irish freedom," especially in light of promises made by Republican groups to occupy the garden and surrounding areas in the days before the visit.  Of even greater concern is her proposed visit to Croke Park, where in 1920, British troops took the field in armored vehicles and fired into the crowd watching a Gaelic football match, in retaliation for IRA killings of British intelligence officials earlier in the day.  As The Guardian noted "It is not so very long since no Briton could have set foot there, let alone a British monarch."
There are people - I have met people - who remember living in an Ireland where British colonialism was real, often brutally so.  Although the generation who lived through the Irish war for independence is now mostly dead, there are still OAPs who were children in the 1920s, and who grew up in an occupied 26 counties.  Although these wounds are rawer and more recent in the North, where the events of 'Bloody Sunday' and the hunger strikes have very present repercussions - to assume that they are healed in the Republic is, I think naive.
One of the themes in news reports leading up to the Queen's visit is the importance of memory and anniversary in Irish culture.  Assertions that the Irish are obsessed with the past has overtones of accused mysticism that are very much part of a political tradition where the Irish are cast as dreamers or as unnecessarily mired in the history of their country.  I think that some of these tropes, particularly the seething anti-British Irishman clutching at resentment that has (nominally) been laid to rest in the Northern Irish peace process effectively obscures some of the very real concerns that some people have about what it means for a British monarch to visit Ireland without making some move to atone for British sins.
In contrast to mainstream normalization, Éirigí, a political group that trends younger than many Republican movements, and which calls for "a socialist [Irish] republic" presents this list of questions about the royal visit:

• Why should the people of Ireland be expected to welcome the head of state of a country that continues to occupy the Six Counties? 
• What message does this visit send from the Twenty-Six Counties to those who live under the British occupation in the Six Counties? 
• Why should upwards of €20,000,000 be spent hosting such a controversial state visit at a time of unprecedented economic depression? 
• Is this visit really about improving relations between the peoples of Ireland and Britain, or is it about reinforcing the British occupation?"

I understand the impulse to normalize this visit - an impulse I imagine is in service of limiting violent protests - but rather than talk about it as if it were simply a long overdue formality, I think it would be well for those claiming 'no big deal' to actually engage with the arguments of people who oppose it.  To dismiss their objections as wrong headed or mired in the problems of the past is to disregard a historical relationship very much at the heart of modern Ireland, and a missed opportunity for people with very different ideas about the place of Ireland in the British archipelago, in Europe and in the world to honestly debate Ireland's future.

Typhoid, Montclair and service learning

As a side project, C and I are trying to put together a curated New York City walk.  We're starting with a public health theme, centered on the story of "typhoid" Mary Mallon, perhaps the most famous silent carrier in American history.  It's easy to see epidemics like typhoid as urban problems, and many health experts throughout history have prescribed a clean air rest cure exactly because the close, airless conditions that are common in cities were thought to be insalubrious.  (An aside, at a recent talk at NYU David Oshinsky argued that Roosevelt's polio might be traced to just such a proscription for clean air.  Oshinsky thinks that stress from Congressional hearings about gays in the Navy combined with a vacation that featured vigorous outdoor activity and swimming in the Bay of Fundy made Roosevelt particularly susceptible to the polio virus, which he might have picked up while visiting a boyscout jamboree in 1921.)  I came across another counterexample while looking for an organic dairy that would deliver near where I live.  In 1894, the New York Times reported a "local epidemic of typhoid fever in Montclair, NJ" that was traced to a Verona milkman named G.W. Gould.  There's no particular revelation here - typhoid can be spread through a number of media and food was historically one of the most common.
Having recently re-worked my statement of teaching philosophy - in which I lay a great deal of emphasis on encouraging students to think of history in terms of human consequences rather than a litany of facts, this article on the Montclair typhoid epidemic served as a nice reminder of the ways in which academic history can intersect in unexpected ways with "real" life - and reminds me how much I want to destabilize the model that deliniates between life in the ivory tower and everything outside of it.  The "service learning" concept, which is used by some colleges to encourage their students to "not only learn the practical applications of their studies, [but also to] become actively contributing citizens and community members through the service they perform," satisfies this need admirably.

Gem from the archives

From the Dublin Nation of October 17th, 1846:

"On the whole, we advise the Irish people by no means to rely on government officials, or government relief, and especially to fear and distrust mere Political Economists."

Scaling tragedy.

Two things.  Yesterday I went to Skibbereen.  Today I watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featuring Lisa Kudrow.

(I think that Who Do You Think You Are? is really fascinating T.V.  The people they profile always seem to be transformed by what they find out - from Sarah Jessica Parker saying that knowing one of her ancestors went west for the gold rush changed everything she knew about herself to Spike Lee saying that he always knew who he was, now he just knew more.  I've been interested in my family's history for, if not as long as I can remember, at least some time - so the idea of never asking questions about where parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are from feels unnatural to me.)

For people who study Irish history, Skibbereen (a village in west Cork, about 50 miles from Cork city) has become a stand-in for all of the worst parts of Ireland during the 1845-52 famine.  In part, its development as an archetype for famine Ireland comes from the fact that during the famine, residents of Skibbereen - particularly Dr. O'Donovan and Rev. Traill - worked hard to let local elites and government representatives in Dublin know about the extent of destitution in their district.  Their many letters made Skibbereen famous as a place where scenes of horror were plentiful, and diarists and artists on tours of Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s would often stop at Skibbereen to see "real" Irish destitution.  In addition, the most iconic images of the famine today - like the "Boy and Girl at Cahera"produced for the Illustrated London News in February of 1847 - were drawn in Skibbereen and its environs. 

Given the iconic place that Skibbereen holds in the imaginations of historians of the famine, and the central role it played in nineteenth-century accounts of suffering in Ireland, it was hard for me to imagine the town at all.  I think I was expecting something greyer, and more sinister than the cheerful and very typical Irish streetscape that I found.  There is a museum devoted to the famine, as well as a walking tour that takes you to the town's soup kitchen, the site of the old poor house, and the dispensary - but today these are just eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings, like any other less meaningful edifice on any street in any small Irish town.  I think that I had been expecting to feel the scale of the tragedy in some way.  I knew, I had read about, people dying in the streets of Skibbereen - in some of the very spots that I stopped.  I knew that the poor house turned people away, and that those lucky enough to get in were packed in so close that there was no room to move - but I simply didn't feel the chill of that knowledge as much as I'd expected to.  I looked for it too at the Abbeystrewery Graveyard, site of a burial pit into which it is estimated that 9,000 people were buried, coffinless and nameless, during the famine.  One boy was so ill that his mother thought he had died, and buried him alive in the pit.  He was able to dig his way out through the corpses, but remained marked for life both mentally and physically.  The physical injury has been attributed to the fact that his mother broke his legs in order to get him into the only coffin available.

The famine plot is the lighter green patch at the bottom of the hill.

The graveyard in Skibbereen is an eloquent, and muted testimony to suffering.  The graveyard is built on a hill, with most grave markers precariously perched on whatever ground is available in the midst of rocky outcroppings.  The only truly flat area, which would be the easiest and most likely place to put new graves under other circumstances, has no graves, and marks the plot where the famine pit was.  It's not a shocking memorial.  There are no accounts of abject suffering, or of people dying of starvation - I think that the people who designed this memorial assumed that no one would visit the graveyard without some prior knowledge of the famine and its impact.  But I also have to imagine what it must be like to live today with the responsibility of tending to the historical legacy of Skibbereen.  The town as a whole seems relatively ambivalent towards the famine - which is totally understandable.  Who would want to actively remember that the place you live is famous for suffering?  I don't think that I had anticipated the fact that Skibbereen was a real place.  I had fetishized the suffering so much in my head that it had almost become divorced from reality.  There's an old chestnut of a Stalin quote (supposedly) that's something like 'one death is a tragedy, one thousand deaths are statistics' [See note] that I think rings true for historians of disaster.  It was almost impossible, for me at least, to get my head around the scale of the suffering as a consequence of the famine - so much so that when confronted with an actual place and actual graves, all I felt was disconnect.

By way of contrast, on the episode of WDYTYA? that I watched today, Lisa Kudrow learned that her great-grandmother had been forced by SS officers to stand at the edge of a pit with two other members of her family, and had been shot and then set on fire.  That was evocative, and tear-jerking - everything I thought I'd feel in SkibbereenSkibbereen does an excellent job of honoring its past while not becoming mired in re-enacting tragedy - and I am working, as someone who studies crises to keep the epic scale of disasters and the poignant narratives of individual sufferers in my head - and do justice to both in my work - at the same time.


NOTE: On this topic, Eddie Izzard says:

"Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people and we can't even deal with that.  I think, you know, we think somebody kills someone that's murder, you go to prison.  You kill ten people, you go to Texas they hit you with a brick, that's what they do.  Twenty people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever.  And over that ... we can't deal with it, you know?  Somebody's killed 100,000 people we're almost going 'well done! well done!  You killed 100,000 people?  Well, you must get up very early in the morning.  I can't even get down the gym!  Your diary must look odd: get up in the morning death, death, death, death, death, death, death.  Lunch.  Death, death, death.  Afternoon tea.  Death, death, death ... "

A quick note on death and the Celtic fringe

Most crime dramas feature scenes in the morgue, when quirky doctors pore over, and sometimes talk to the dead.  We expect these coroners to be weird.  After all, who in their right mind - mainstream culture asks - would choose to spend their time with corpses?  This weirdness tends to be coded into the character themself.  It is not enough for audiences to assume difference because someone works in a morgue instead of a doctor's office - most portrayals of coroners in popular culture, and particularly television and film, assign them other "othering" characteristics.  In U.S. television, sassy women of color or creepy cadaverous men dominate, but in British crime dramas, coroners are almost always a denizen of the Celtic fringe.  A few examples: in the Inspector Lynley Mysteries the coroner, Stuart Lafferty is a punk-rock-listening Irishman.  In Being Human, the coroner Quinn is Scottish, and also helping the vampires of Bristol cover their tracks.  Even in NCIS, an American drama, the coroner is a Scot by the name of Dr. "Ducky" Mallard.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time engaging with differences - real, imagined or constructed - between "The Celts" and "the rest," the persistent use of Scottish or Irish actors to play those who work was perhaps more noticeable to me than it is to either the people who watch these shows or the people who write them.  I'm not sure whether this casting is due to a lingering association between the Scottish anatomists of the nineteenth century and the the modern coroner, or between the morbid and decidedly weird Burke and Hare; or is just another way of signaling that those who work with death are not part of the mainstream.  Either way, now that I've started to look for "Celticness" in popular culture as a marker of difference, I'm starting to think that it's a ubiquitous trope in English programs especially.  Want to subtly (or not so subtly) signal that someone is a little odd, or wild, or unknowable?  Find an actor with a Scottish, Welsh or Irish accent.

Oversharing

There have been several notable instances of oversharing on the internet of late, the most recent being the UCLA student who posted a rant on YouTube about Asian students in the library.  I think we think of oversharing of this type as a problem of the moment - exacerbated by internet technology and a generation of facebook, twitter and blogger users.  But, as it happens, I've come across a few wonderful moments of - if not oversharing per se - then at least someone saying something in what they believed to be a private forum, or a relatively un-public forum, only to have it widely, and regrettably circulated.
My most recent example is from accounts of the minutes of the Cork Poor Relief Society:  The Secretary read a form of application for pecuniary assistance, which was to be forwarded to affluent members of society, requesting subscriptions for the poor.  It was approved and the secretary was requested to note down the names of all parties to whom he had written.

The Secretary said that he had written to the members of the medical profession already
Mr. Burke said that he had applied to Dr. William Lloyd for a subscription, and the doctor stated that he would give no money, but would attend the poor professionally two hours each day, gratuitously, give advice and any medicine he ordered them, he would pay out of his own pocket. - (loud laughter)

 One can imagine, reading the transcript of this meeting the next day, that the members wished they either had not laughed so loudly at the prospect of Dr. Lloyd being generous, or that the correspondent from the Cork Constitution (which paper campaigned against the kind of relief the committee was distributing) might have been more delicate in his note-taking.

On disasters

Ruth Reichl, one of my favorite writers, both on food and otherwise, apparently got into a bit of an internet kerfuffle over a tweet.  Before reading the news out of Japan, Reichl tweeted "Basking in sunshine. Gently fried eggs, soft golden yolks. Bright salsa: chiles, onions, tomatoes. Black beans. Warm tortillas. So fine."  The internet, predictably, responded with a measure of vitriol over how a public personality could bask in sunshine and eggs when tens of thousands of people are dying.  Reichl responded with a measured and thoughtful blog post on what she called "horror and gratitude."


While this is notable as a primer for the best results of internet scuffles, I was particularly struck by this passage (emphasis mine):

"There is no time, ever, in which a terrible disaster is not taking place somewhere on the planet.  And thanks to modern technology, we know all about it almost immediately. As I see it, we have a moral responsibility to respond to those disasters in the best ways that we can. Write letters, send money, do whatever possible to alleviate pain, end suffering and make the world a more just place."

I think a lot about the intersection between technology and responses to news.  I think that one of the reasons that the Irish famine became such a lightning rod for international interest was that the news technology (ease of printing, speed over land by rail, quick ocean crossings by steam, even faster movement of information by telegraph) made it possible for people as far away from the epicenter of disaster as the Cherokee nation and the Ottoman empire to experience news of suffering in time to do something about it.  I think that Reichl is right - that the rapidity with which we know about something means that we are forced to make quicker and quicker decisions about what we can do.

But I wonder too how that quickness-of-knowing affects the aid environment.  I am absolutely no expert in contemporary humanitarianism, in the running and mechanisms of aid groups or not-for-profits, or on the mechanics of getting aid to the people who need it most.  But it seems to me that since we now have the technology to make everyone a commentator on every crisis (that receives a certain degree of media attention - and that certainly means that many, many are ignored) information might get muddled.  The many stories about the state of Japan's nuclear reactors circulating on twitter in the wake of the earthquake alone seem to point to an information environment in which rumors and facts become intertwined and confused as quickly as it takes someone to write them.  I am again (as I so often am) reminded of my own research, about the many and conflicting ideas about how to save the potato crop, from soaking the plants in lye to coating them in guano, that we know in retrospect were terribly wrong, and likely detrimental, but which were presented with authority in major newspapers because someone of note had speculated at some point that they might work.

So I guess my question is: is there a way to balance widely available and accessible sources of information (and abilities to share information) with some kind of factual "truth?"  Put another way (since that last sentence wasn't entirely clear) what do we gain and loose, in a crisis, from hundreds, thousands, millions of competing stories, some of which will necessarily be right and some wrong?  What do we gain and loose by limiting narratives to those that are "correct"?  I am inclined to err on the side of greater freedoms - both to produce and to consume information - but I do wonder how those freedoms play out in crises and disasters.