French television audiences will discover tomorrow night the Ireland of happy endings, forever tied to its American Diaspora in The Revenge of the Exiles, The Irish Diaspora in the US, a one-hour television documentary written by Pierre Joannon for the France 3 station.
Joannon is the Irish Consul in Antibes and the head of the Ireland Fund in France. He was given the idea by another Hibernophile Frenchman, the writer Jean-Francois Deniau, whose premise is that at the end of the 20th century, immigrant groups within the world's only superpower exercise more influence than some European nation states. Ireland is the first country considered in a series that will continue with the Chinese and Israeli lobbies.
Joannon's film, which was directed by Eric Sarner, begins with the 237th Saint Patrick's Day parade in New York. Forty-two million Americans say they are of Irish origin, and they are proud of their dual identity. "More than 200 years have passed since Protestants and Catholics left Ireland to escape poverty and 600 years of English domination," the film explains, using antique engravings to illustrate the mass exodus.
The historian Joe Lee notes that the first Irish emigration was that of Protestants of Scottish origin in 1720. The Protestants of Northern Ireland long distrusted the influence of Catholic Irish-Americans, John Gilmour of the Ulster American Folk Park says. More recently, they have learned the importance of their own emigration, and have begun to study it.
Joannon speaks of a million deaths in the Great Famine, of soup kitchens where only Protestants were allowed to eat. "There was no choice but to die or leave. Ireland, especially Catholic Ireland, will never forgive England," he writes.
"We are a migratory people. It is part of our culture and our memory," the academic Richard Kearney remarks in flawless French, framed against a magnificent Irish coastline. Kearney believes one reason that Irish people do so well in exile is that "they realise there is no such thing as a pure, united people uncontaminated by others". They are a hybrid people, which means "you can always choose to be Irish and `something else' - Irish and American, Irish and Australian, Irish and English."
Joe Lee explains how emigrants who survived the coffin ships sent passage money home to their families, how emigration fed emigration. Archive film shows boatloads of Irish people arriving at Ellis Island. America was a continent that needed building, and the Irish had the strength to do it, Joannon writes. They became navvies, woodsmen, miners. "They crossed the continent bathed in sweat." But they were often scorned by earlier emigrants, who regarded newcomers as drinkers and brawlers.
Irish immigrants to the US encountered a ruling white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite not unlike the one they had left behind, Joe Lee notes. "But they organised themselves politically. The Irish may have been very backward economically, but politically they were very advanced." The French documentary tells of the Irish role in US trade unionism - and of the interest taken by immigrants in events back home, including the Easter Rising, the founding of the IRA and partition. The Irish segments of the film are more vivid than those concerning the US; it is obvious that Ireland, not America, is Joannon's first love.
The film chronicles the social and financial rise of Irish-Americans in this century, and the place they carved out for themselves in journalism, cinema, music and sport. Irish Catholics quickly dominated the Catholic church in the US, the viewer is told, and they helped to absorb waves of Polish, Mexican and Italian immigrants. Because the Great Famine nearly wiped out Irish language and culture, the historian Kevin Whelan says, the void was filled with religion. Joe Lee believes the Irish integrated more successfully than other immigrants because they knew they could not return home. There were equal numbers of men and women, so they usually married within their own community.
Irish Americans had sunk into a kitsch, tearful nostalgia for the old sod, Kevin Whelan claims. This has changed in recent years with the new international prominence of Ireland in cinema and music. The writer Frank McCourt is shown as an example, reading from the Pulitzer prize-winning Angela's Ashes and recounting his story in an Irish pub. The Ireland he left in 1949 was still a Victorian country, he says. "Everyone had to be respectable. There was no place for freedom. If you wanted to express yourself, you had to leave. Joyce, Sean O'Casey, everyone did it."
Narrated mainly by John Hume and Tim Pat Coogan, the last part of the film recounts the interest of successive US presidents in Ireland, from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton. It admits that Irish Americans supplied money and weapons to the IRA, but prefers to emphasise the philanthropic work of the Ireland Fund. Mary Robinson is praised for righting Ireland's past neglect of its emigrants. The Good Friday agreement and the Nobel Peace prize awarded to Hume and David Trimble make a happy ending, even if John Hume's vision of Ireland as "a prosperous offshore island of the US and Europe" might not be everyone's ideal future.
