On Thursday, March 27, Sacred Heart University welcomed professor and historian Dr. Marion Casey to the Martire Forum for a lecture on her recent book “The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image.”
Casey specializes in Irish and Irish American history, receiving a Ph.D. from NYU in 1998 and being named Centennial Historian of the City of New York in 1999. She has received many awards for her work, including the Henry P. Lannen Award from the New York Irish History Roundtable and Irish Woman of the Year by the New York City Department of Education in 2010.
Source: Marion R. Casey, LinkedIn
“Green Space” traces the evolution of the Irish image in America and the world, from distinctly American nativist racism, to the “Everybody’s Irish Today” spirit of modern St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Casey identifies the titular “Green Space” as the avenues by which perception of Irishness changed across a century of the Irish in America.
Casey discussed the commodification of Irishness in her lecture, with St. Patrick’s Day as a main object. In regions of America where the Irish and Catholics never ventured, like the South and Midwest, St. Patrick’s Day’s origins as a celebration of those intertwined groups was lost.
Celebrations of the holiday became diluted overtime, promoting a cartoonish stereotype of Ireland and Irish people. As late as 1937, the annual St Patrick’s Day parade was met with degrading racist humor towards the Irish, as heard on one of the top programs of the time, “The Fred Allen Show.”
At the same time, however, this watering down contributed to a decrease in anti-Irish and Catholic sentiment and aided the upward mobility and assimilation of Irish Americans. The Protestants, who dominated America, found this springtime holiday with key symbols and mascots much easier to embrace than the religious and ethnic celebration it began as.
This Americanization of St. Patrick’s Day also came back around to Ireland itself. Since the 1990s, Ireland has increased the promotion of St. Patrick’s Day to increase tourism, what many Irish people have dubbed “America on the streets of Dublin.”
Historic Irish drinks like Guinness and Bailey’s dramatically increase sales over the month of March. The modern iteration of the holiday might be owed to America, but it’s truly gone global with celebrations drawing up shamrocks and leprechauns all over the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe.
Dr. Abby Bender, professor of Irish Studies at Sacred Heart, worked with Casey at NYU and put this lecture together. She hopes this lecture continued to draw support for the center for Irish studies, and events they organize.
“I hope they realize how much interesting history, culture, literature, music, there is, these parts of Irish traditions in both an Irish American context and broader Irish context,” Bender said. “Like any place, Ireland is dealing with the complexities of modernity, but maybe in a more profound way because development was kind of slower there initially, a lot of radical change has happened there in culture and community in the past 50 years.”
Freshman Blake Mattesich said that he was deeply moved by the lecture. “I found it all fascinating. It’s really so interesting the ways in which Irish heritage was turned into something bought and sold to millions of people,” said Mattesich. “The legacies are multifaceted, having changed things for better and worse, neutering both anti Irish/Catholic sentiment and the more complex aspects of Irish culture beyond the kitschy fashion.”
The Center for Irish Studies’ next event will be a conversation with Fulbright Scholar Conall Ó Fátharta on Ireland’s institutional Abuse Scandals on Friday, April 5.
