Oh, To Be Irish Why Do Irish Americans Identify So Closely With History Of Their Homeland?

What is it with the Irish?

Generations beyond immigration, decades past assimilation, ask any grade school in America for a show of Irish blood, and hundreds of hands will shoot up.

When the U.S. Census Bureau asked in 1990, 44 million hands shot up. Nearly one in four people in Spokane.

Why do Irish Americans identify so closely with their Irishness? What is it about a country half the size of Washington state, a country modernizing so quickly it’s now the hottest economy in the European Union, that calls so many Americans home?

“There’s an old joke that says that Cork people are homesick for Cork - even when they’re in Cork,” said Jim McAuley, Irish-born director of the Eastern Washington University Press.

All Maureen Hurley Peterson knows is that after 56 years in Eastern Washington she still didn’t feel right, didn’t fit right. After two days in Ireland, she called her sister.

“I’m normal,” she said. “I’m just living in the wrong country.”

“All my likes, everything I was, was the same there. I no longer stood out from the crowd. It was incredible, I felt like I’d really come home.”

The founder and president of the Spokane-Limerick Sister City Society spends half her time on Irish-related activities. She is co-writing a book on Irish Americans in Spokane. This year, she became a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, with both Irish and U.S. passports.

Peterson isn’t even all Irish. Her mother was part English, part who knows.

“I’d say to my dad, ‘What else are we?’ And he’d say, ‘What the hell’s the difference?”’

The Irish Consulate for the Pacific Region reports a growing number of Americans are claiming dual citizenship through their Irish-born grandparents or parents.

Nationally, tourism to Ireland passed a Irish, record 500,000 in 1994 - then swelled another 25 percent, states the Irish Tourist Board.

Storyteller Batt Burns has asked elementary schoolchildren nationwide for a show of Irish blood.

“No matter where we are, at black schools in Michigan or schools in Florida, from Boston to Seattle, at least 400 to 500 hands will shoot up,” he says.

Curiosity is so great that Burns, who also teaches at Kent State University, now teaches the Irish language along with the stories.

“It’s one thing to be interested in Irish history; it’s another to take 10 weeks of intensive conversational Gaelic,” he said during a visit to Spokane last week. “It’s utterly amazing.”

The mayor of Spokane has Gaelic on his business card.

The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick have tripled membership in the past two years.

Eastern Washington University turns away hundreds of nationwide applicants for its summer Dublin writing workshop, now in its 17th year.

Such interest helped mobilize St. Patrick’s Day parades throughout the country this weekend as Americans pooled their Irish enthusiasm and lowered their tolerance for bad ties.

The parades were originally organized to show the strength of the Irish Catholic community in America in response to intolerance and bigotry, said David Emmons, a history professor at the University of Montana and author of “The Butte Irish.”

A century later, they still draw people back into the fold.

Dubliners have had enough.

Earlier this year, the city of Dublin vowed to make its St. Patrick’s Day celebration the best in the world.

“We’re taking it back,” Orla Carey, spokeswoman of the Irish Tourist Board, said crisply. “If you went to Dublin for Bastille Day and it was better than Paris, or Cork for Independence Day and it was better than Washington, wouldn’t you?”

Roots

Maybe it’s the brogue.

Burns says people hear his voice and they’re hooked. They hear the words and they’re silenced.

“You can’t hear the story of Ireland without being emotionally touched in some way,” he says.

Historians date the perceptible rise in Irish interest to the 1960s after the Kennedy brothers kindled awareness and the bloody civil war in Northern Ireland (the Troubles) steadily fed the flame.

The 1976 Alex Haley novel “Roots” also prompted Americans of all ethnicities to begin tracing their heritage.

In Irish-American families, time also had an effect. It often took a generation to appreciate Ireland.

Immigrants didn’t want to discuss it. And they were as likely to pass on a hatred of the British as much as a love of things Irish, said Tim Sarbaugh, Gonzaga University associate professor of history.

Tim Higgins grew up in an Irish Spokane household but never appreciated it until he was an adult.

“My grandmother used to sing in Gaelic when we were little kids, but we didn’t recognize until she passed away what a terrible loss of information and resources that was,” said the attorney at Winston and Cashatt.

Higgins, 49, now holds dual citizenship through his grandparents. With an Irish passport, he can travel more freely in the European Union, and after he is a citizen for three years, his wife Patty can apply.

The U.S. State Department remains neutral on the question of dual citizenship, which does not affect your status as an American as long as you don’t renounce U.S. citizenship. (You must use your U.S. passport to enter and leave this country.) Higgins’ Irish passport is both a practical travel aid and an act of love. He loves Celtic culture, the archaeology, the heroic myths, and oral and written use of language that produced Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and the 1995 Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. Higgins will spend part of his retirement in Ireland, coming full circle from the grandparents who left.

In Style magazine reports Kevin Costner, Sean Penn, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and Harrison Ford would like to join him. Marlon Brando reportedly has been seeking citizenship, and Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irons, Angela Lansbury and Andrew Lloyd Webber already live there.

Emmons likens some of the current craze for Ireland to the celebrity craze for Montana.

“A lot of what they see is what they see in Montana: an island of sanity in an insane world,” he said.

The danger, of course, is treating Ireland like a theme park, “a Disneyland with real castles.”

In Spokane, the more involved Irish Americans harbor no such illusions. They speak of Ireland as a modernizing country, desperate for economic development to stop its centuries-old brain drain. They reel off companies that operate there: Key Tronic, Intel, Microsoft.

They warn that purses can be lifted in Dublin as in any major city and bemoan Americans who treat the highly educated and politically sophisticated populace as an ignorant peasantry. Coming together in groups such as the Limerick Sister City Society and Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, they roll their eyes and resolve to hold another lecture or cultural event.

Such a brotherhood may be an Irish-American version of multiculturalism.

“There is this mad rush for community in this country, and you find your cohort groups by defining what makes you separate,” Emmons said.

And what starts with fellowship can build.

“When I was in my 20s, I was more interested in the drinking and the rowdiness,” said Mike Shields, 49. “Now, I’m more interested in the culture, the literature and the music.”

The Catholic Church and the struggle to unite Ireland will always bind Irish Americans together, historians say. But the Irish Tourist Board is also doing its share.

A billion Irish pounds (about $1.5 billion U.S.) has been spent on amenities ranging from computerized heritage centers where Americans can trace their ancestry to travel promotions on U.S. television.

Irish officials say they are taking care that such marketing does not spoil the charm and character that people find so attractive.

For what Irish Americans seem to connect to most is the warmth in the Irish identity.

“The things that endure after you’ve seen all the scenery and the castles is the human contact, the people you meet on the street,” said Burns, who hosts tours to Ireland designed to expose that quality.

According to Emmons, Ireland has always been countercultural to the fast-paced industrializing world. Yeats and Eamon De Valera wanted Ireland to remain free of the “filthy modern tide,” offering not great wealth, but humaneness.

Superior Court Judge James Murphy says that spirit is what he admires most - and aspires to.

“If the rest of the world exhibited their sense of humanity, we’d have a much more peaceful and complacent place,” he said.

Emmons said there has always been a sense that Ireland can turn a weakness into a strength.

“If Ireland was poor, poor was good,” Emmons said.

And Ireland was poor: Famine museums had trouble collecting artifacts because their subjects had so few possessions to leave behind. Irish Americans have family trees of ditch diggers and miners, railroaders and cops walking the beat.

“No one told me we were poor until I was older,” said Bill Flanigan, the 11th child of a railroad worker and grandson of an Irish boxer.

From his family home in Hillyard to Hurley Peterson’s family home in Malden, Wash., the Irish identity may be the equivalent of a cherished crystal vase - an heirloom passed on from one generation to the next.

For so long, they had so little else.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 color)