Shelter Island Editorial: Lessons for the day

Q: What is Irish amnesia?
A: You forget everything except the grudge.

Which is one way of looking at memory when it comes to the Celts. Another is to try an experiment when — not if, sad to say — news is broadcast of a mass famine: Listen for the brogues among the voices of those who have come with charities to relieve the anguish. It’s surprising the number of people who are represented from such a small country.

It has to do with history — and not forgetting.

Much is known about the mid-19th century famine in Ireland. Christine Kinealy, an author and professor of history at Quinnipiac University, has written that the cataclysm “to this day remains one of the most lethal famines of the modern era. Out of a population of 8.5 million, over 1 million people died, and approximately 2 million people emigrated.”

What’s not as well known, is that it was not just a natural disaster caused by a crop failure, but a crime. The British government, Ms. Kinealy wrote, “chose not to use the resources of that vast empire to prevent suffering and starvation.”

But if the ruling powers turned away, good people did not. Ms. Kinealy chronicles relief efforts from around the world that, though only a finger in the dike, gave some comfort to the forsaken.

“One of the remarkable features of the Irish famine was that it was the first national disaster to attract international fundraising activities,” Ms. Kinealy wrote. “These activities cut across traditional divides of religion, nationality, class and gender. Such a response was unprecedented.”

A lesson worth learning and one the Irish have not forgotten.

Something else to consider is the welcome those starving wretches received when they arrived in America. They were discriminated against and reviled.

Demagogues warned that American values and civilization itself was in peril by the immigration of the Irish. New York Times columnist Timothy Egan recently unearthed a statement from New Yorker George Templeton Strong, described as a prominent 19th century establishment figure: “I am sorry to find that England is right about the lower class of Irish. They are brutal, base, cruel cowards … creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they infest.”

We should remember Mr. Strong when we hear rhetoric blaring through the land about walls and banning people because of their religion.

One other piece of history to examine today is that peace has come to Ireland after decades of a vile war. The Troubles was a conflict that descended to the lowest level of humanity, with bombs detonated against civilian populations, state-sponsored torture on a large scale, imprisonment without trial and countless assassinations and maimings.

For those who have a working knowledge of the situation in the North of Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, the news that the smoke has cleared — not completely, there are still dead-enders trying to rekindle the violence — is miraculous. History, James Joyce wrote, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” and the Ulster night seemed endless.

But leadership from both sides and skillful efforts by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell as a special envoy appointed by President Bill Clinton, led to negotiations and agreements that secured peace.

Hope can be an engine driving history into a better future, which the Irish on both sides of a centuries-long conflict have proven.

Lessons for the day, Irish or not: Keep a light in the eye and don’t forget where you came from.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.