Casey, Marion R. The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Pp. 326. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 13579108642. US$35.00 (hardback).
Casey’s The Green Space follows the transformation of the Irish image in the United States from downtrodden and despised–“No Irish need apply”- to what Casey writes is the status of being “universally claimed and acclaimed” (3). The example of the latter that she gives is “Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” an exhortation emblazoned on T-shirts and hats sold in souvenir shops and even, as she points out, on buttons in the duty-free shop of Shannon Airport (216). Her assertion that the Irish are “universally acclaimed” seems as impossible to prove as her claim that, before the end of the eighteenth century, “the Irish were loved and loathed in about equal measure throughout the colonies of the New World” (7).
There can scarcely have been a book written about Irish Americans that has not touched on the image of the Irish in the United States, whether as sad exiles or otherwise. As Casey writes, “how to convey or represent Irish in the United States was a protracted struggle between the 1890s and the 1960s” (4). Casey’s claim for the distinctiveness of her book is that it is “not a traditional history of an ethnic group, nor is it about ‘Irishness’ or ‘hibernophilia.’” She notes that the full dimensions of “Irish as an image” unfolded in a much broader national and international context. Hers is “a history of contested Irish image-making” (6).
Casey’s book is packed with detail. She draws on academic work on both sides of the Atlantic, including references to Irish studies such as Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis, edited by Barbara O’Connor and Michael Cronin. The Green Space is a dense thicket of amusing and irritating facts about how the Irish have come to be seen in America. This is a matrix where Ireland meets Irish America, and both meet the wider United States, in the formulation of an image of Irishness.
Casey’s “green space” is filled not just by people but also by things, including many commercial products that partly determine how others view the Irish, such as red beards, china pigs, floppy hats, shamrocks and, of course, the “shillalah” (sic). The strains between how Ireland commodified itself abroad to foster economic growth and how its image was exploited commercially in the United States are well explored in two particular chapters.
Other authors, including Kerby Miller (Emigrants and Exiles) and Timothy J. Meagher (Becoming Irish American), have given us earlier accounts of the development of Irish America. But none has honed in quite like Casey here on how its image was developed, hyphenated or otherwise. There are at least three ways in which people with Irish origins who live in America see themselves, namely as “Irish” (especially those born in Ireland), as “Irish American,” or as people who are “American” but with Irish roots. Indeed, Kevin Kenny entitled his history The American Irish.
If you ever wondered why the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in New York was for many years far more robust and colorful than in Dublin, this book makes it clear. A long chapter entitled “Emerald Sheen” gives many examples of U.S. merchandising and movies that commodified what were regarded as Irish symbols and tropes in ways that invited all U.S. citizens to share in the annual celebration by spending money. Indeed, as Casey notes, one of the terms coined to promote films generally was the “ballyhoo,” itself perhaps a word of Irish origin. Thus, Paramount assured cinemas that non-Irish people would flock to its Irish Luck (1926), “for there’s an appeal about the Emerald Isle that attracts,” and Warner Brothers claimed when it released Irish Hearts the following year that “You don’t need to be Irish to like it. You simply need to be human” (175).
Meanwhile, in Dublin, there was little to celebrate, as the suppurating sore of emigration meant that Ireland’s population continued to decline until 1961, long after the Great Famine. Ireland’s forced membership of the United Kingdom before 1922 – especially in the case of Catholics – restricted its ability to grow economically. St. Patrick’s Day was long not even recognized as a public holiday. As a child in the 1950s, when attending St. Patrick’s Day parades in Dublin, this reviewer often heard them compared unfavorably to corresponding “Irish” parades in the United States.
Casey explores the role of U.S. media in contributing to the transformation of the Irish image, pointing out that “many American reporters and commentators persisted in painting a different portrait” of Ireland from the one that continued to evolve after the creation of an Irish state in 1922 (20-21). Some of this was harmless thatched cottages and “boreen” stuff, possibly encouraged by particular Irish tourism interests. However, when the quaint infused even ostensibly objective mainstream journalism, it perpetuated stereotypes and caricatures in ways that might have implications for Ireland’s political and economic interests, especially when the Irish government sought inward investment abroad.
By comparing and contrasting A Century of Population Growth, published by the U.S. Bureau of Census in 1909, with A Hidden Phase of American History: Ireland’s Part in America’s Struggle for Liberty (1919) and other data sources, Casey demonstrates how the methodologies used to measure national origins were flawed and weaponized in order to bolster the relationship between Britain and the United States. Estimating national origins became crucial for the Irish when, in the early twentieth century, the total number of immigrants permitted to be admitted to the United States from any country was calculated as a percentage of the total number of persons originating in that country who had been resident in the United States on a particular date some decades earlier.
An Irish person reading this book, as distinct from an Irish American, may be struck by other distinctions. In Ireland, one may assume that the Irish contribution to the growth and development of the United States is fully recognized. In her chapter “Racial Reckoning,” Casey makes it clear that in the United States, this was not always so, and that the relative contributions of British and Irish immigrants across the centuries was pointedly contested and impacted the image of the Irish there.
Cartoons in Punch magazine in the nineteenth century were one way in which the British ruling class reassured itself and encouraged it to bray that the uncouth and irrational Paddy could not be trusted to govern himself. Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States came up against similar caricatures of their people from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and others. A very old relative of this reviewer vividly recalled in Boston in the early 1970s the “No Irish, No Negro” signs that she encountered when first seeking domestic service in America.
Indeed, Casey’s book would have been strengthened by referring more to the relationship between Irish immigrants and Black people and relating this to the image of the Irish. When in 2011, President Barack Obama spoke in College Green, Dublin, he vaunted the reception of Frederick Douglass in Ireland. Even so, Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century had vied for work with enslaved Black people, because many Irish were rough, unskilled, and ignorant due to extreme poverty. Comparisons to the corresponding national “space” of other ethnic groups such as Italians and Germans would also have been welcome.
From the earliest years of the twentieth century, the founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, actively supported the Irish industrial development movement by producing Sinn Féin Yearbooks and other publications packed with ideas and statistics to stimulate economic growth. In this context, a visit to the new state of Ireland by U.S. ad men and women in 1924 in the company of the first president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies was a significant token of change within the “green space.” He became the first patron of a corresponding Irish advertising association. This was significant not least because that president was James O’Shaughnessy, a son of a poor immigrant to St. Louis from Co. Galway.
O’Shaugnessy’s family was deeply embedded along a Missouri-Chicago axis; they were central to Chicago’s prominent Irish Fellowship Club and sent their sons to Notre Dame. One was a leading Gaelic Revival artist who designed all the windows in the famous St. Pat’s Church in downtown Chicago. Other sons were lawyers. They boosted the multifaceted nature of an Irish America that is too often reduced to caricature and even ridicule within Ireland itself. Casey is not the first author of a book on Irish America who might have allowed more space to stories of Irish American success in business and commerce. In a book about the transformation of the “Irish image,” and not merely about caricatures, such careers are central to an understanding of that transformation.
Casey, in her concluding chapter, refers to a promotion by the Irish tourist board (Bord Fáilte) that in 1989 billed Ireland as the “ancient birthplace of good times” and to the representation of Ireland in Busch (Budweiser) Gardens in Williamsburg in 2001, observing that “For decades now, visitor presumptions about Irish have been confirmed by such hyperreality” (215). Other scholars might have devoted more time to contrasting contemporary and previous forms of Irish and Irish American identity. This would have permitted greater consideration of not only “Irish” movies on streaming services and the widely cast internet, but also of the significance of successive visits to Ireland of U.S. presidents and of the impact of contemporary Irish musicians such as Enya, U2, and Sinéad O’Connor on American perceptions of Ireland. Today, Ireland ranks in the top ten countries globally for foreign direct investment in the United States. Irish companies employ almost as many people in the U.S. as U.S. companies employ in Ireland. In 2024, Irish exports to the United States were worth $10.3 billion, while U.S. exports to Ireland were worth only $1.27 billion. The “green space” is not what it was in the 1960s, and the difference is at least as important as are abiding presumptions.
The Green Space is an informative and welcome book. Notwithstanding that “Irish as a multidimensional discourse is so elastic and time tested that its historical, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural challenges have faded,” writes Casey, “one cannot underestimate the green space” (216). Her new book gives readers an understanding of the tangled web of associations, preconceptions, and self- and national identification that made that space green.
Colum Kenny
Works Cited
Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2000.
Meagher, Timothy J. Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
O’Connor, Barbara and Cronin, Michael (eds). Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis. Cork: Cork University Press, 1993.
Image credit: IJAS Online believes that the use of the image above of a book cover to illustrate a review of the book in question is excepted from copyright under fair dealing or fair use.
