Really good point. As a white person with various ancestry, it is annoying sometimes to see all these Affirmative Action policies that favor others, but nobody seems to care about how my ancestors suffered. Well, my Irish ancestors fled for their lives during the Famine and then had to deal with NINA and living in horrible conditions in NYC and Philadelphia? Where are my reparations? What about my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors who dealt with the anti-German bias in WW1? Where are the reparations to atone for how badly you treated grandma? Can I at least get a minority scholarship or something?
And it’s also pretty likely that there are some victims of the Highland Clearances in my family tree. Umm, that wasn’t cool, dude. Reparations? FREEDOM!! (and minority scholarships!!!)
Huh. I would hope that knowing that your ancestors were strangers in the land and despised might give you some perspective, so you don’t act so superior to immigrants and minorities now.
Is that not how it’s thought about? Or is that the difference between right-wing and left-wing Irish-Americans?
Maybe I should start an IMHO thread or something.
Hi,
Irish history is a sad story.
In the nineteenth century the Irish arriving in America were lucky enough to have a choice about where they went.
The Irish sold as slaves in the seventeenth century might have faced much greater discrimination I’d think.
Our colonial masters had adopted the policy of “transportation” to Australia by the nineteenth century for the more troublesome and less lucky.
The economic genocide of “The Famine” was another interesting social policy.
Not intended as one upmanship.
No Irish Need Apply was trivial in comparison to how things were here.
Take care…
Maybe an IMHO thread or a GD thread would be a good idea.
Anyway, why are African Americans considered a minority while Irish Americans are not? Is it the fact that you can’t just look at someone and say, oh, he’s Irish? Is it a subjective judgment as to what level of prejudice remains? If that’s the case, then arguably there should be someone out there monitoring society for the right moment when prejudice drops to the critical mark so that they can notify the Office of Ethnic Equality to officially de-classify African Americans as minorities and admit them to the majority society.
The more I learn about Irish history, the more the awful the situation seems. At times it did rise to genocidal or almost-genocidal levels. So, where are our reparations? All that suffering, and you won’t give us anything? Anyone? Bueller? So you can abuse my people and then give us nothing, and then turn around and give all sorts of benefits to others that you also abused? What sort of twisted logic is that? That’s not real remorse, or real social justice.
Yeah, sorry, NI specific I’m sure. I don’t know how say, Bono (or someone from a purely Anglo-Irish background), would say it but I imagine things in the south are more uniform.
Yes, pretty much. Not the only one, but appearance is the easiest stereotype before someone even opens their mouth. See also: passing.
Hi,
as an Irish person I have no interest at all in reparations of any kind.
The line in Ulysses about “History is a nightmare…” was written a long time ago.
There is no future in the past…
Discrimination against the Irish is regarded as a joke now.
Not everyone has done as well it seems…:mad:
Take care
Ahem. Then the name should be Larsen, not Larson. Or was he trying to pass for Swedish? :dubious:
You are so right! It was definitely a replica sign, and not used in any local businesses.
My teacher sent me a link to some research conducted by someone at University of Illinois at Chicago wherein it looks like the NINA myth (at least in the USA) is just that: a myth. This link has a boatload of information http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm.
Here’s a pretty good article (which rambles for a bit before getting going) about historical anti-Irish Catholic sentiment by the Canadian establishment.
That’s my go to quote when I’m “trying” an Irish accent.
I think Canada was more about anti-Catholic sentiment. While current Canadian political affairs revolve around language (or used to) the original BNA Act that formed Canada recognized the formation of public school boards and a “separate” school board for those pesky Catholics. I guess between the French already here and a wave of Catholic Irish, the protestant ruling class felt like they were being overwhelmed and needed to keep those pesky critters away.
I remember even in the 60’s when I was in (Catholic) grade school, someone made a comment about how only one of the top 100 companies in Ontario had a Catholic president. And, thanks to a 1930’s court decision, Catholic school boards were only funded to Grade 10 because that was sufficient education for a Catholic in those days.
I would say that the NINA (if at all) had faded much sooner than Jewish or Italian discrimination, because the wave of lower-class Irish arrived in the early 1800’s during the famine, while those other groups arrived in the later 1800’s and early 1900’s. So by the 1920’s, the Italians and Jewish immigrants were FOB or first generation, while the Irish would be mostly well assimilated 2nd or 3rd generation (or higher generations, if the stories about Irish reproduction are true… 
)
Yes, my mistake: Larsen it was. And as per family lore, it was changed at point-of-entry by an official (customs I guess?).