"No Irish Need Apply!" Shouted a Man at Shakespeare's

Captions: 1. Craig Kauffman, vice president and CFO of one or two banks. 2. 2015 Shamrock Bicycle Ride celebrants on St. Patrick's Day in Dyersville, Iowa.

A few years ago, apropos of nothing, a man drinking at the bar suddenly shouted, "No Irish need apply!" at Shakespeare's in southeast Iowa City, Iowa. I was astonished that anyone still remembered the hiring signs of old, when Irish job applicants were overtly discriminated against.

For years, I didn't know I'm part Irish until I paid to have my and my father's DNA done through National Geographic's Genographic Genome Project. My confirmed DNA Irish surnames are Burke, Hall, Halliday, Halloway, Howell, Marshall, Pemberton, Ryan, and so on.

I didn't know the full horror of how and why Irish immigrants arrived in America until I got interested in the Irish famine, sometimes referred to as the Irish Holocaust. I stopped at the late, lamented used book store, Murphy Brookfield and asked for books on the subject. The well informed owner immediately found a thick tome, "The Great Hunger" by Woodham-Smith, which was wonderfully detailed but very sad, and also offered me a novel on the Irish famine, "Famine," by Liam O'Flaherty, which has so many archaic words and interesting turns of phrases that it's worth reading just for those alone. I bought both, and plunged into "The Great Hunger" first.

The cruelty of the English to the Irish took my breath away. When the potato blight hit, turning potatoes into goo in the ground, the English insisted on selling grain overseas for fear of lowering the price instead of giving any of it to the Irish, although grain was the only other source of food for the Irish once the potatoes turned to goo. Over a million Irish literally starved to death.

A friend who used to live in Iowa City, a thin man known simply as Fodge, said his Irish ancestors lost their rented land on a lord's estate, most likely an English lord because the English owned most of the best land, for want of the equivalent of $10 owed to the lord. During the famine, only the Quakers offered the Irish any edible soup in what were known as "famine pots," pots still kept in some Irish kitchens today, but the Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, couldn't feed millions of starving Irish.

So the starving Irish, between 1845 and 1849, began emigrating to Canada and the U.S. in what were described as "coffin ships" because so many people died on them. Why? Because the Irish had to bring their own food for travel, though they had none or little. Also, the Canadian and American authorities' fear of "famine fever" kept those boats quarantined in harbor for weeks before the Irish on board who were still alive were allowed to disembark.

Irish survivors must have been strong and lucky. Eventually, they prospered, becoming New York City police officers and firefighters, among other professions. On an Irish-American map, with dark green indicating 10%+ Irish-American, New York State and Maine are completely dark green. Team Escape from New York comes on RAGBRAI every year and stays at the homes of Iowa firefighters.

The Irish, e.g., William Butler Yeats, excel in writing and lyric poetry. His poem, "The Second Coming," is as powerfully beautiful and true today as it was when Yeats wrote it. There is some thought that Gaelic is a particularly lyrical language and lends itself to a gift for poetry. Certainly the Irish have disproportionately contributed to great literature compared to their numbers in the population.

St. Patrick's Day is March 17th, 2018, and Ireland has recognized that most of the Irish have emigrated to other countries. The part of the Irish population that transplanted itself to the U.S. multiplied into 39.6 million Americans claiming Irish-American heritage, including five million who have Scots-Irish heritage. Ireland itself has 6.3 million Irish residents. Click here for the numbers of Irish immigrants and their descendants in other countries like Canada and Australia.