St. Patricks Day 2023 - We still need to talk about Ireland (and the Oscars)
As we brace ourselves for another Lá Fhéile Pádraig it is time to participate in a new story that embraces where we come from and more importantly who we are becoming.
For better or for worse, St.Patrick’s Day has become a day synonymous with Irish cultural identity. This is the day when Ireland plays a central role on the world stage.
In 2014, The Trailblazery hosted We Need To Talk About Ireland - a 90 minute creative celebration of Ireland’s past, present and future. The vision of the project was to evoke a new cultural storyline about our social, political, cultural and spiritual evolution on this island and beyond, and aims to re-imagine the kind of Ireland we want to fully participate in. It was broadcast live on RTÉ Player and The Washington Post.
It looks like we still need to talk about Ireland…
Jimmy Kimmel’s recent caricature of the Irish at the Oscars following a set of ‘jokes’ about Ireland on Saturday Night Live has hit a collective nerve. In our long history, the Irish people have been the subject of many bigoted Oirish stereotypes. We have been depicted as weak, submissive, lazy, stupid, dirty, uneducated, helpless, unreliable, belligerent, violent, ignorant, uncivilized, and drunken. It’s time we questioned this relentless paddywhackery and called it out for the damaging racial prejudice that it is.
The Academy Award Ceremony was a huge moment of celebration for Irish culture on a global stage. There was a record number of nominations for Irish talent at the 95th Academy Awards as The Banshees of Inisherin and An Cailín Ciúin brought the ‘green wave’ of Irish film to Hollywood. Afterwards Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, congratulated the two Irish Oscar winners describing it as a “historic night”. This could have been a watershed moment for a new wave of Irish culture making. Instead, this moment was publically hijacked for the sake of a cheap laugh - at the cruel expense of the Irish people.
My heart has been heavy as I reflected on the impact of these old colonial tropes on Irish society today. I have recently completed a year-long, graduate level training with Dr.Gabor Maté called Compassionate Inquiry, so I have been able to dig deep and find capacity to hold it all in my heart.
But the old wounds have been activated.
And these waters run deep….
The word context is derived from the Latin word contexere meaning “to weave together”. Let me unravel some of the entangled threads that have led to this moment.
A few years ago, I found myself on the Lower East Side of New York at the Irish Tenement Museum when I came across a series of cartoons caricaturing the Irish as apes which shook me to my core. As I looked at these images of Irish immigrants cast as depraved drunks, violent and savage, I felt a wash of shame and nausea creep over me. This visceral feeling stayed with me for days and weeks. It visited me in my dreams, I couldn’t shake it off. Part of me realised this was some kind of inherited cultural trauma and an internalized shame spiral.
According to sociologists, the Irish (whether in Ireland, Britain, or the U.S.) have been heavily stereotyped since the 1800s, when scientists apparently believed the Irish were more closely related to apes than other Europeans. As waves of emigration to the U.S increased, so too did the prevalence of stereotypes of immigrants. In Paddy and the Republic, historian Dale Knobel argues that stereotypes created “projective caricatures”, models that shaped how the public viewed people of a certain national background. The stereotype of Irish people as “Paddy”, became a common pejorative. At first this stereotype focused on internal character traits but gradually shifted to physical characteristics - dark eyes, ape-like facial structure, and bright red hair - that served as markers to the assumed physical, emotional and mental flaws of the Irish.
“Stereotype threat” is the term applied, when individuals belonging to a negatively stereotyped group find their performance diminished because of it. This prejudice had real-world effects on the Irish people’s ability to find work, as the now-infamous phrase “No Irish Need Apply” was used in America from the early nineteenth century.
My visceral experience at the Tenement Museum moved me to explore ideas around cultural identity in Ireland and the Irish diaspora. It inspired me to revisit my time at NUIG and the words of my former History Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh who described the ‘enforced abandonment’ of native language and culture as
“a deep psychological trauma, at an individual and communal level, caused by the loss of a rich inherited matrix of wisdom and knowledge”
Ireland has a complicated set of relationships with colonisation that continues to impact our wellbeing today. One of the hallmarks of British colonial oppression was the establishment of social and cultural control over the native Irish population. Through a system of penal codes, civil rights restrictions and ideological attacks on Irish customs and traditions, the British government penalized Irishness and prohibited any attempts to maintain our traditional indigenous culture.
In Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) the acclaimed Kenyan author and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o argues that colonialism’s most powerful weapon is the
“cultural bomb which can annihilate a people’s belief in their names, languages, environment, their heritage of struggle, unity, capacities and ultimately in themselves”
The repercussions of the colonial ‘cultural bomb’ are complex and long lasting. The process of decolonisation requires a vocabulary that can truly articulate and express the real human experience of trauma. This pervasive phenomenon is also known as the ‘soul wound’ in indigenous knowledge systems and can profoundly shape the collective psyche of a culture.
The rest as they say, is history…
The term “historical trauma” was coined by Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart specifically in relation to the colonization, forced relocation, and assimilation of Native Americans. She defined it as "cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations including one's own lifespan. Historical trauma results from the collective experience of a community or generation, such as genocide, famine, economic depression or war.
Irish historian Joseph Lee states that many current mental health problems in Irish society can be best understood in the context of “historical wounding”. Through Ireland’s traumatic history, our sense of cultural identity has been continually threatened causing implicit and explicit intergenerational effects on those living in Ireland now as well as our global family - the Irish diaspora. The late Tomás Mac Síomóin, Irish writer, translator and scientist explored the trauma associated with language and culture loss in Ireland in his book The Broken Harp - Identity and Language in Modern Ireland.
“Only by fully understanding cultural colonisation in both its historical and biological dimensions, can we Irish begin to establish a firm basis for recovering intelligently parts of our ancestral heritage’
We know from science that fight, flight, or freeze responses are the body’s built-in way of responding to danger. These responses have been shaped by millions of years over countless generations and have served us well for most of that time. In the ancient past, it was useful for our ancestors to respond quickly; however the same evolutionary responses are still deeply embedded within our bodies today and can be stimulated by an invisible force called trauma. The fight response is the body's way of facing any perceived threat aggressively. Flight means the body’s urge to run from danger. Freeze is the body's inability to move or act against a threat.
When we look at the collective Irish experience from a trauma informed lens, we understand that due to the ongoing impact of systematic oppression the fight, flight and freeze responses have become deeply ingrained patterns in the Irish psyche-soma. These pathways are well-worn in our individual and collective nervous systems.
If we explore these pathways further from an Irish context, the fight response can be connected to ‘the fighting Irish’, a derogatory term which is still used by American football team Notre Dame today. The flight response can be connected to mass emigration triggered by severe famine and poverty. The freeze response can be connected to those who couldn’t escape but instead became silent, numb and/or dissociated.
These wounds continue to impact the people who live on the island of Ireland and the 70 million people around the world who claim Irish ancestry. Unresolved trauma haunts our collective imagination today like souvenirs of a past we have tried so hard to forget. But the body remembers and holds these memories like a repository of unprocessed pain. And when the floodgates open it can feel overwhelming.
So, when we come into contact with the stereotyping displayed on the Saturday Night Live show and at the recent Academy Awards something visceral is triggered - it literally hits a nerve. As I processed the impact on my own felt experience I tracked a cascade of shock, anger, grief and shame flooding my mind and body. This continued to activate my nervous system until I tended to it with care and kindness.
Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapeutic approach that reveals what lies beneath the appearance we present to the world. This immersive learning experience with Dr. Gabor Maté has taught me to place compassion at the heart of everything I am exploring from the inside, out. Last year he spoke directly to the Irish experience of cumulative trauma.
“We are talking about years of former occupation and sometimes brutal occupation and also of course, civil war of a murderous kind. Then the potato famine and the recent troubles. And of course the longer story if the finally publicly acknowledge sexual abuse and - abuse in general - of children by religious authorities who were meant to represent god on earth. So the trauma and pain in Irish culture is immense. The resultant escape into alcoholism is really a trauma response -a way of killing your pain.”
Dr. Gabor Maté
Probably the most ubiquitous stereotypes involving the Irish surround alcoholism and it has been widely asserted that ‘Ireland is synonymous with drinking’. The truth is that many individuals use alcohol as a coping mechanism to deal with unresolved pain. Addiction is an attempt to solve a problem and often the symptoms of a deeper wound, in most cases trauma. I believe that the cultural legacy of our collective national experience includes a sense of deep shame that has culminated in addiction and mental illness. Our passive submission to our colonial past has been described as Stockholm syndrome. We have somehow internalized an inferior self-image on an individual and collective basis.
In a paper called Malignant Shame of the Irish, the late renowned physician and psychiatrist Dr. Garrett O'Connor cites
”Whether they know it or not, Irish Catholics all over the world have inherited a history that evokes images of shame, oppression, deprivation and bigotry. In spite of this, they have, as a group, become justly known for their courage, wit, good humour and generosity, not to mention their imagination, sense of higher purpose and legendary capacity to triumph over adversity. These qualities have enabled them to attain unprecedented distinction in business, law, medicine, politics, religion and the arts. And yet many of them, even some of the most successful ones, say that they struggle privately with chronic feelings of shame and a painful sense of personal and cultural inferiority”
So on St. Patrick’s Day 2023 it is important that we find compassion for the parts of us that have experienced pain and remember that we can transform that pain into medicine. In The Mind-Body Code, Dr. Mario Martinez says we can heal the archetypal wounds of shame by stepping into the healing field of honour. We are being offered an opportunity to heal as ancestors-in-training so that future generations can finally be free, inside and out
So what will our legacy be?
Trauma is often thought of as a watershed moment. Our lives become defined by life pre and post the traumatic experience.
We are witnessing a cultural watershed moment for Ireland right now. The pervasive stereotypes reinforced on Saturday Night Live and at the Oscars show us that we still have work to do in creating a new image of contemporary Ireland. It is time to meet and challenge the dominant narratives and hidden cultural agreements that perpetuate old wounds.
There is a real need in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora for deeper engagement and conversation about the things that really matter to us as global citizens. The ability to respond (response-ability) and heal trauma is possible. Not only is recovery available but so is the human capacity for post traumatic growth.
Our people survived adversity and we are here because of their spirit which could not be broken. We may have inherited trauma but we have also inherited resilience. It is time to honour our ancestors and participate in a new story that promotes cultural wellbeing. It is time to remember who we really are and support the generations to come by swimming upstream in the direction of the post-traumatic wisdom that lies waiting for us.
Ní neart go cur le chéile - there is no strength without unity.
Beanachtaí
Kathy and all at the Trailblazery