Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America
by Tom Hayden
Verso Books 2001

by Máirtín Ó Muilleoir

The first time I heard Irish spoken in the Donegal Gaeltacht, I was in awe. Here was a part of my heritage that I wanted to repossess, a part of my soul gone AWOL. Learning Irish was my homecoming. Reading Tom Hayden's new book, Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America, has made me realise for the first time that Irish-Americans must experience a similar feeling of arrival and fulfilment when they return to the land of their forefathers.

We take it for granted that Irish-Americans are part of the Belfast furniture - who doesn't have an aunt in Boston or an uncle in LA? - but for the Diaspora, making it back to their people is a very, very big deal.

For many, it's the final chapter in a journey of rediscovery which starts often in the second generation when questions are asked about Irish roots which have become obscured by the weeds of American assimilation. Tracing the family tree, joining Irish organisations, listening to Irish traditional music, taking a new pride in Ireland's authors are all part of the expat mix but it's the placing of feet on Irish soil that is the true epiphany. Especially for those Irish, like Hayden, whose people fled Ireland during the Famine.

Irish on the Inside is part travelogue - a journey in search of heritage as well as an account of the author's frequent trips to Ireland to shore up the peace process - part memoir and part political treatise.

On all three levels, it's an impressive piece of work. Though anyone who has followed the author's progress from sixties' radical and civil rights campaigner, to eighties' MacBride campaigner to nineties' peace process activist, may have hoped for more biography and less polemic. But then the political arguments are targeted at an Irish-American audience.

And the former Californian Senator is unsparing - perhaps even despondent - in his verdict on his fellow Irish-Americans. Those who love ŒIreland' but have a blindspot for any place North of the Border are a disgrace. "If Irish Americans were to become half as supportive of Irish Northern nationalism as Jewish Americans are of Israel's interests, the British Army would be on transports flying home," he says, adding: "Contrary to unionist myth, entertainment careers in America are not advanced by romanticising the IRA. Most Irish and Irish American careers succeed in exactly the proportion that they avoid the Troubles."

In short, Irish-Americans should avoid the fate of becoming "a permanent caste of Reagan Democrats, adopting the same superior pretensions and free market nostrums that doomed our own ancestors to catastrophic suffering, or we can learn from our origins to identify with the landless, the hungry, the poor, and the immigrants in our own country and abroad." Their future lies with the wretched of the earth, most of them people of colour who have often enjoyed fractious relations with Irish-America. Readers who suspect that at least one prominent Irish-American enjoyed a holiday in his heart when Gerry embraced Fidel wouldn't be mistaken!

Hayden's own Irish reawakening occurred during his high-profile stance for civil rights in the oppressive atmosphere of the sixties. His marriage to Jane Fonda (their son Troy Garity who painted several murals on the Ormeau Road during a visit some years back is following in his mum's footsteps, recently starring with Bruce Willis in Bandits) helped propel him to national attention. He's probably the only sixties' icon to be included in the script of the Simpsons and, if memory serves me right, Bonfire of Vanities.

Thus when he brought his not inconsiderable clout to bear on Ireland - vigorously endorsing President Clinton's peace building and popping up on every economic mission from the US (much to the embarrassment of the City Fathers, he used to embrace the Sinn Féin councillors on the welcoming line) - he was a force to be reckoned with. More than anyone else, he was responsible for having the state of California adopt the MacBride Principles on Fair Employment.

He paved the way for Gerry Adams' triumphant trip to Hollywood and he continues to ask disturbing questions about why the number of Catholics employed in US-owned firms has FALLEN since the 1994 IRA ceasefire?

Though no longer holding political office - and recovering from heart surgery - Hayden remains a potent force in Irish America. His passionate politics, his no-holds-barred condemnation of shamrockery, and his commitment to justice all shine through in Irish on the Inside.

But the book's real, though undeveloped, strength is his personal memories. There's a big autobiography struggling to get out of Irish on the Inside and perhaps one that will see the light of day yet. But there are fascinating insights here too: how his father, who set out on family vacation with a glass of beer in one hand, the wheel of the family Plymouth in the other, walked out on the family. "When I was ten, he walked into my darkened bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, told me he was divorcing my mother, kissed me on the cheek for the first time I could remember, and walked out. I was shocked, my chest was locked in pain..."

Neither of his parents dwelt on their Irish past. With folk memories of Ellis Island still sharp, becoming a fully-fledged and patriotic American was the priority. When Hayden burst into the political limelight in the sixties, his mother "went into hiding in motels or left the state". On her death in 1984, the author discovered that she had placed $6,000 in life savings in three separate bank vaults. "She had wrapped her money in tinfoil to protect against an unnamed catastrophe she must have feared. A catastrophe that only an immigrant could imagine."

Hayden's first anti-Vietnam protest in 1963 led quickly to a life in the civil rights frontline. He was inspired by the Kennedys, yet didn't make the connection with their shared Irishness - which to that point was the identity badge worn by rightwingers like Senator Joe McCarthy and Mayor Daley of Chicago.

But in October 1968, everything changed when, fresh from the burning streets of America's cities, the young radical witnessed TV pictures of the RUC attack on Derry civil rights protesters. "Suddenly, I realised what had been denied, that these marchers were somehow kin to me, that under the void of my identity I was Irish, and that being Irish...could mean being an American rebel not in spite of being Irish, but because of being Irish."

In equal measure searching for his Irish roots and determined to support the battle for justice in the North, Hayden made it to Ireland in 1969, only to be nabbed at Shannon, on the advice of the FBI, and deported. Some céad míle fáilte.

He returned in the seventies, meeting up with Sinn Féin figures who would later be in Government but were then at the receiving end of a bitter campaign of intimidation and murder.

Support for republicanism and the H-Block prisoners was a decidedly unpopular position in the States leaving Hayden feeling like "a stranded Irishman in America". His elevation to the State Senate in 1982 - where he remained for 18 years - gave the author a unique opportunity to fly the flag for those causes - including Irish freedom - closest to his heart. But it was the peace process that created the space for Hayden's commitment to Ireland to bloom. When he returned to the North in 1992, he found ready allies in Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, children too of the sixties.

In at the birth of the peace process, Hayden remained a doting parent throughout the nineties. He travelled to the Falls and Shankill and berated the British for failing to deliver on the economic peace dividend. He was at Stormont for the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and took a stand against bigotry on the Ormeau Road and on the Garvaghy Road.

A rivetting and uplifting read, Irish on the Inside is a powerful testimony to the pride of the resurgent Irish Disapora.

It reveals Tom Hayden as a dreamer and a rebel. Could any Irish person ask for a greater honour?

Máirtín Ó Muilleoir is Managing Editor Andersonstown News/North Belfast News/Lá. This article appeared on the Irelandclick.com web site on January 11, 2002.

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