Transcripts For CSPAN2 Michael Brendan Dougherty My Father L

CSPAN2 Michael Brendan Dougherty My Father Left Me Ireland July 14, 2024

Which i absolutely love my father left me ireland by Michael Brendan dougherty. In some ways is very different from what we do, from what im used to. Im a scholar here at aei and we are a private institute for Public Policy research. We do lots of social science studies and in fact social science studies get a bad name in my father left me ireland but in a way that highlights what we have in common to the section that goes after how nationhood in the modern day is often well ill put it like this a nation today in a modern way of thinking is at best problematic. It is at best problematic a useful administrative unit. That section is tipped off by the author Michael Daugherty talking about singing to his newborn baby over and over again the same songs. The foggy dew, the wind that shakes the barley and even the patriots game which i tried to sing in that lullaby way. This is familiar to me because i also sing my children to sleep with irish songs. I mostly use irish rebel songs because they are a lot easier and i dont have the vocal chords that mr. Dougherty does. The stories that we tell our children, this is another way of educating in addition to the Public Policy Research Type stuff who typically do here at aei and there are birchers and perils of this. My story before he bring out the other here is one of apparel. My son charlie was learning about world war ii and he turned to me and said deb im a little confused. Are the british and the the same thing . Charlie what are you talking about . We were on the same side as the british in world war ii. We were on the same side as the british . Suddenly i realized as a catholic family growing up with the stories of st. Thomas more a love of america will which had to fight against the braves and an irishness that you could come to understand the brits is only the bad guys. I thought about the lullaby and i would sing to all six of my children kevin barry about a rebel who went off with his head held high was executed and he was as simply name your coconspirators and kevin barry answered no and was sent off to his death. Why do we sing the songs to our children . Not to demonize it but because we know the creation of a good populace, the creation of improving our world the same thing we try to do Public Policy research and good policy all of that primarily is not the job of our Public Policy researchers but of our poets and are storytellers. Here at aei is excellent that we have in my opinion a brandnew irishamerican poet and storyteller Michael Brendan dougherty who will give us a few remarks about his great book an american sons search for home. Michael, thank you. [applause] i am brandon dougherty. I am Michael Brandon dougherty from national review. So ive had trouble in the last week with a book coming out people asked me what is this book . Its hard to summarize sometimes in the 14 seconds before the commercial break interrupts you. So im going to quote with absolutely no vanity in my heart at all a couple of reviews real quick just to situate it. A timeless tale of familial longing. Andrew sullivan called it a heartbreaking tome to maternal love and sacrifice. Alan jacobs called it a book about revisionist history but not in the usual sense of the term. It was also called via edward a. Moving lyrical memoir about fatherhood and identity is stirring defense of nationalism and attack on once in a critique of some of the core assumptions of liberal modernity. Its its also i would say fundamentally a romance book. Im six years old and im sitting in the backseat of a car. My mother and father are in the front seats. The morning before we flew into ireland and as we were banding i pretended to count the shades of green and the fields as we circled above the airport. I had to know if there were 40 let my schoolteacher said. At this point in the back of a car we are looking over the hood of a very deep grey gray sky, so great that its turning all the green grass blue. The wind whipping around. This is possibly the oldest memory i can recall being with my father. My fathers been talking about his job driving around ireland and delivering books. This is long before the eu built roads and highways that allowed you to drive through ireland while missing everything is beautiful and worthwhile about it. The drive was a long days work. Hes smiling and looking at my mother in the loving way which was new to me as if you are trying to say watch this. Thats when he turns to me and informs me our noble blood, the blood i have for him. Did you know michael that you are descendent from the high king . Did you know that . Their parts of the upholstery that are torn. There are parts of my father sweater that are threadbare. I noticed my father examining my reaction. You see the point was that the irish blood, the irish royal blood had got us nothing except it was still a post over the whole earth. My mother let her heart sickness over this man drive her crazy in a way. Her parents listened to irish lullabies of tula rule a rule which was composed in detroit. But she started to think of herself as irish and her son as irish and she started studying the language, taking me to these weekends in rural new york where you were forbidden from speaking to she started singing the songs and teaching me a little bit of the history and the history that i learned as a child was straightforward and heroic. A people coming out of captivity colonization on one side and rule on the other. Irish people, irish rebellions and the confederates against protestant usurpers as united irishmen in this role of westminster as all white boy tenets against their wicked landlords that Young Irelands republicans against the power of the english monarchy and nationalists against british imperialism and finally as the irish nation itself. Against those who attempted to rob them of their culture, their history and their selfunderstanding. It was rebellion itself that made you irish. But what did i have to rebel against . I got tired of this view of ireland as a teenager. The people coming out of captivity was a joke from historian roy fosler about the excessive view of irish history that he and his contreras set out to destroy. So the leaders of irelands most heroic rebellion were fed into a counternarrative. The National Liberation promised by the rising became a kind of perverse joke. It was the moment and on opted body of radicals shortcircuited the democratic process instead of home rule to write rich recent by this person be of colds into the angloirish for. A very exacting idealism rising by the cause of a reasonable war. The irish lose decent builds institutions and have to turn towards a church that is corrupt and crotty asked and in an odd twist of counternarrative echoed the and religious bigotry of hardcore unionists. You see the conclusion is obvious. The Irish Catholics because of their irishness and catholicism were unfit for self rule. That was the view of irelands professional cast in the 1990s and increasingly it was my view to. What was ireland but a belching superstore along the atlantic sending me riverdance and frank courtland ashes and a hundred other we have be ugly disgusting cultural products coming out of the celtic tide. But something about this was unfounded. I realized the education i got, the one that taught me to despise these things was an education that wasnt really preparing me for anything about manhood. It wasnt preparing me for doing the basic things you have to do in life, having children, raising them correctly and eventually i did mary and i found as my mother did when a child was coming to me i suddenly was falling in love with ireland again. I looked back at these men, men like Patrick Pearse in a different way. Pierce was if you dont know the sun of an english stonecutter and an irish mother. He did a little career in law in the beginning of the 20th century before turning his mind to education. It was an Experimental Secondary School for boys with the national spectacle. The boys put on plays. He taught them in irish. It was an irish medium education and he taught them irish sport particularly hurling. Hed announce the Education System the english had set up in ireland as a murder machine and he is writing about it. He compared it to the separate education set up for in antiquity. He wrote to the children of the free work path all noble and goodly things that would tend to make them strong proud and valiant. The children of the all such dangerous knowledge was hidden. They were taught not to be strong and valiant but to be sleek, to be up seque is, to be dexterous. The object was not to make them good men but to make them good and so in ireland. Sleek obsequious and dexterous. I remember reading these words with my sleeping newborn infant daughter in my lap and thinking this is harvard enyel and every prep school and every product of those schools ive ever met in this trade of journalism in washington d. C. The idea of becoming strong and proud and valiant was something i was taught in school to laugh at. I wasnt taught that directly. There was talk that by education so i had to confront this man pearce. Pearce was a home roller. He was a moderate like everyone else in the democrat in 1912 when home rule was first passed. As he saw it undermined and subverted into it democratic or a hed joined the hardcore nationalists and many others did and he wrote this essay ghosts which has been formative in irish history ever since. The irish proverb low to him but do is evil. The men who have led ireland for 25 years have done evil and they are bankrupt. They are bankrupt in policy, bankrupting credit, bankruptcy now even in words. They have nothing to propose ireland. No wisdom no counsel of courage and when they speak they speak only untrue than blasphemy. Their utterances are no longer the utterances of men. They are the mumblings and g. Rings up they built upon an untruth that conceived of nationality is a materialism or a spiritual thing. They made the same mistake a man would make if he were to forget that he had an immortal soul. They have not recognized in their people the images of god. The nation to them is not a holy thing in violent and in viable. They thought of nationality is a thing to be negotiated about is a man negotiates about a terror for a. Robb rather than immediate jewel to be purveyed preserved in all peril of things so sacred that it may be not brought into the darker places at all or spoken of where a man travel. Pearce was announcing this generational curse on the home rulers who tried to bargain with an empire that when organ with him a parliament that laughed in their faces, egg king that worked with members of that parliament for democratic achievement of the violence within it. My use of this essay in this book was brought up to me the other day on irish radio. The host of the radio said its disdainful of democracy. Its extremist demands have echoed uncomfortably in irish history ever since inspiring cadres of them men of violence into their own hands. In fact pearce wasnt totally disdainful of democracy. It was only on its one point whether the nation was a holy thing to be preserved against all peril. Whether people would recognize the image of likeness of god and its life. The radio host was correct about my intentions with that passage in with this book. I have her old pearces generational curse. I too believe in ireland today life bearing the image and likeness of god has been denied and transgressed. This crime goes down with the blessing of democracy and in increases the shame. The shame is general though. Its not specific to recent events in ireland. Its a shame of a whole generation that believed i liberating itself from the taboos and prejudices of her previous agent would find real freedom and what they found instead was they were liberated from responsibility and from care of their own children. Fatherlessness is now common in america, becoming common in ireland. This book is an odd book. The joy of my life was discovering in my childhood i suddenly faced with this daughter was doing the same crazy things my mother did. We tend to think of a way of extending ourselves in the future when we think of it via logically but i noticed in this book that it actually works the reverse way, that my child sent me back to my parents and my child would give me looks that i recognize as my mothers looks or my fathers and the needs my child had impressed upon me to go to my parents and asked them what to do. I notice also that it was my parents, my mother in particular who was impelling me toward the future. Was she who is bothering me with some of her dying breath to give her a grandchildren. I have only gotten three so far but we are working on it. And so i found that pearce was right when he talked about the hand of the past weighing on the present or the future. My mother weighed on me to get on with life and become a man, to become a father. History weighed upon these rebels in 19162 men up, to do something for posterity. Now that biological connection to my father, the joy of my life after my daughters birth and the fact of my irish fathers parentage into the real social fact. He sees my grandchildren more than he saw me. He saw his granddaughter the first day of her life and he didnt see me for nine or 10 months. So this book is a romance of fatherhood. My father and i missed each other in my boyhood. We only found each other late like any good romance novel. So i come back to that story of the car where he informed me of my royal blood. That implanted something in me, that story and it implanted this longing for him and this recognition of his longing for me and somehow we navigated this understanding. So my fathers own absurd host that irishmen even with american accents we are crowned with sad songs, mary rebellions and foolish absurd sacrifices that annoy everyone else. My daughter runs into his lap and she calls him graden dad unselfconsciously. I wouldnt trade that for all the spice in india, all the Raw Materials and oil of iraq or any of the tee that they dumped in boston harbor. Thank you. [applause] thank you michael and we are welcoming to the stage are responded rick caldwell. Chris is the editor of the claremont review of looks. He himself is writing a second book so if anybody is fit to comment on the book gets chris. Anyway chris please tell me what you think is interesting and important. I think almost everything about this book is interesting and important. You know michael said earlier that it was hard to describe what the book was about. I can describe it fairly easily. We have a different situation here. He was brought up by his mother and left by his father. So if you look, you know it sounds sort of like it actually resembles the autobiography of our most famous irishamerican, our last president actually. This is a kind of a richer and more ambitious and literary attempt to bring two stories together. If you look at the title of this book, my father left me ireland thats the title of two books. The first book is my father left me in the second book is ireland. So theres something in this first book. You have a really sad, its a very raw american book of the sort that irish people cant rewrite. There is a sort of a self revealing autobiographical thing of the sort that americans really excel at and other people dont. Could i read something . Do you mind having someone read . I want people to read it. I would like to read you a passage. Its a perfect description i think of something a lot of children of divorce will kind of share. I sat in mike grandmothers rocking chair just in the uniform of my catholic school. Gray slacks, a white dress shirt and a cotton type red eyes stare down my black shoes across the blue carpet to eucom his father missed addressing sitting across from me. You told me the news. Your wife is pregnant. Your wife . I had let myself forget and you were having a child sin. I was going to be a brother. How was i a brother to someone who was not my mothers child . Why do you need to be a big brother to someone 3000 miles away . Was i going to be to them what there was to me a name placed on the relative i have never seen . Being a child i could not even ask these questions. The one skill i had to deploy was talking to adults and the exact response i wanted to elicit from me but the strategy was failing in that moment. What do you want from me . What did my mother want . I was falling silent. I was crying. You have to get in the car and go. Neither of us got to see how hard this was on the other. In a few minutes i would run out of the house venturing halfway up iredell avenue under the delusion that would make it to school before they would return any child sobbing that way belongs, in his home but not moment he gave me a goodbye hug and reassured that you are still my father and nothing would change between us. Ill ever want is whats for change. I had never thought any of it through until then. I didnt really know why you live 2000 miles. Is new enough not to ask. This announcement revealed to me the secret hope in my heart. This is the raw material for which this book is built and as michael has described he started to study ireland which is kind of a sad thing when you think about it. But there is the raw material of a very kind of interesting resolution to this problem in the history of ireland and without being formulaic about it ever he sets up a parallel in the course of this book which i will describe, hopefully not to dampen the experience of reading this book for anybody but this book is really not, its not about the mythology of ireland and you know the great, the lords of ancient times and brian peru and all that stuff its actually a kind of a close study of the easter rising in 1916 so its sort of an ideological origin of a disturbed life in if you know bernard bailiff spoke about the American Revolution and what i think he finds and correct me if any of this is nonsense is that its not so much a release of a nation from captivity but the rise of the nation into identity. The interesting thing about all of these people in their different ways and its really spectacular and the spilled out way here but for all of the people who were involved in that rising it was about claiming an idea of ireland for themselves. Here its become extremely subtle. Its about an assertion of ones identity. It seems to be about an assertion of identity which ireland had never had a four like these people are founders but once the rising is over and once a civil war starts it becomes clear that they did have that identity, you know . That they had it by wishing for it and that is the sort of, that is what he is seeking in a parallel way. I wont go into too much detail. I was running the stories together. What was interesting to me is there is all this ideological

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