I started researching my Irish genealogy with the intention of finding more than just names and dates of birth of my ancestors. Something was wrong with Irish people, not just with my family. There were plenty of articles that supported my thoughts, but I recently found a thesis written by a woman who had the same concerns about her own family and the Irish-American population in general: Sesko, Tiffinie Patricia, "Culture and Mental Health: Considering the Role of the Complex Cultural-History in Irish-American Population" (2017). CUNY Academic Works.

You can read her entire thesis here - in which she said, "I chose to research Irish culture, the Irish American individual, and how religion, spirituality, socialization, age, and gender shape the Irish heritage. I came to this decision for two reasons. One, because of my own heritage and curiosity about my Irish relatives, two, because of the percentage of Irish Americans living in the United States."

That struck a chord with me, because it was not only my family that had serious problems coping with everyday life but all of the Irish people I came in contact with during my working life. Contrary to the commonplace image of the Irish as a cheery and jovial lot, most were divorced, over-sensitive and agressive alcoholics with glaring personality disorders.

Sesko ties together the causes of mental and personality disorders that seem to be so prevalent in Irish-Americans. Alcoholism, depression, melancholia, and schizophrenia all occur in disproportionately higher numbers in Irish Americans than in other ethnicities. The same is true in Ireland as compared to the rest of Europe. Neither was the high incidence rate of these disorders localized to the Kilshannig or Castlegregory area of western Kerry, as some have said, but were and still are found throughout Ireland in greater concentration than in the rest of Europe.

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Mary's Interview

The Story of One Irish Immigrant
Scéal inimirceach Éireannach

After hearing the interview with Mary, it took a bit more reading and research to reconcile Mary's rendition of life in Ireland in the early 1900's with Irish history and with the impression I had gotten from others, both of which seem to conflict with Mary's story.

One web page in particular supported what I had long surmised. It was an article from the Journal of the Irish Medical Association by Dr. Dermot Walsh, an Irish psychiatrist, who said in part that the Irish were: ... in a general sense freer in their use of alcohol than most nationalities. There seems little doubt that drinking plays a large part in dealing with many deeper frustrations and conflicts, and … Alcohol, too, has in high degree the effect of inducing and enhancing the fantasy life which is so inherently a part of Irish cultural heritage. That, taken with the inaccuracy of some of her statements, makes me think that Mary's story was part fantasy and part faded or supressed memories.

Dr. Oonagh Walsh, Irish historian, believes also that a higher rate of mental illness resulted from Ireland's great potato famine not only in those who survived the famine but in several subsequent generations due to an inheritable change in 'gene expression'. She says that severe nutritional deprivation of expectant mothers caused an 'epigenetic change' that affected descendants of famine survivors for up to 150 years, including those who stayed in Ireland and those who emigrated. Read more here.

The interview starts with Mary saying she was born in the Republic of Ireland by the beautiful lakes of Killarney. We know she was born in Kilshannig which is 60 - 65 miles away from Killarney. That would be a long way off by horse cart and even further on foot, with or without shoes. I doubt that Mary ever saw Killarney until she returned to Ireland many years later. She also said at one point that she was the fourth child, but she was the fifth after Julia, John, Patrick, and Stephen, in that order.

Mary was born in Ireland but not in the Republic of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland did not exist when she was born in 1908. In 1916, all 32 counties of Ireland became the Irish Republic. After a period of insurrection and passage of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922, the Irish Republic seceded from the United Kingdom and all 32 counties became the Irish Free State. Six counties of Northern Ireland later withdrew in opposition to the treaty and today remain a part of the United Kingdom. In 1949, under the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948, the 26 southern counties became independent of the British Commonwealth and were named the Republic of Ireland.

They all had to make their own supper, she said, but on Sunday they sat together at a long table for twelve. It's hard to imagine a table for twelve fitting into a two-room cottage that housed twelve people unless the table doubled as a bed for three or four bodies. The 1911 census says the house consisted of two rooms, but Mary says there were four bedrooms and a big kitchen. It's possible that in later years one of the two rooms could have been divided into four tiny bedrooms while the big kitchen was left intact. At any rate, the twelve said Grace when assembled en masse to thank the Lord for what the British allowed them to have. Every night they said the Rosary which gave them peace of mind and a sense of contentment with life under British oppression. Didn't Karl Marx say religions were the opiate of the masses?

Mary said the potatoes were brought to market in Tralee by horse cart, a trip of about twenty miles. She started to say in a curach, which is a row boat, but corrected herself. A horse would probably average about 5 MPH on a 40 mile round trip. It's a wonder that potatoes would sell at a high enough price to make such a trip worthwhile, but such was the case.

Everybody had a horse in Mary's time, but according to the 1901 census there was no stable on the Flynn farm, only a cow house and two potato houses. There was a stable by the time of the 1911 census but only one potato house and an added piggery. The additional outbuildings were probably added after the 1903 Land Purchase Act and maybe after the death in 1908 of Mary's grandfather who was the leaseholder in 1901. Mary's father, Michael Flynn, owned the farm in 1911. Prior to the Land Purchase Act, any improvements made to the farm would become property of the landlord and might cause an increase in rent. After 1911, then, the two rooms could have been partitioned off to provide the four bedrooms Mary spoke of.

1916 was the time of the Easter Rising or Easter Rebellion. This is the time when Mary's brother, John, hid in the graveyard to escape the Royal Irish Constabulary or RIC. They were not the Black and Tans, however, who did not exist until 1920 when they were recruited to augment the RIC. The RIC were brutal but not as bad as the Black and Tans who were initially recruited and trained in England and sent to Ireland by none other than Winston Churchill. As many as twenty percent of the Black and Tans were Irish-born and many of those were recruited in Ireland. Mary was in Ireland when the Black and Tans were there, but she misused the term in reference to Royal Irish Constabulary that were there in 1916.

Mary attended school between the years 1914 and 1922. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century all primary schools were National Schools but were church-run at the local level by the denomination prevalent to the area. Early on, only a small number of girls were allowed to aim for higher education. In Catholic schools at least, girls were educated to be wives and mothers. Most were taught to read and write, sew, cook, and pray. Yet, Mary said she was taught algebra in the seventh grade and that she continued to the eighth grade which she said was equivalent to two years of high school by American standards. Two years of high school was more than the median level of education in the United states in 1925 which was about 8.2 years.

The schooling Mary described is in sharp contrast with the three to four years of education that Julia received, which left her barely literate. Mary attended the Maharees National School in nearby Fahamore, whereas Julia made the three to four mile trip to the girls' school in Castlegregory. If Mary's story is accurate, there must have been a radical change in girls' education in the nine years that elapsed between the time Julia started school and when Mary started. In my memory, however, I can't recall that Mary seemed any better educated than Julia or John, or that she had completed the equivalent of two years of high school.

After graduation, Mary worked on the family farm for the next three or four years before emigrating to the United States in 1926 at the age of seventeen. She decided to leave the beautiful Emerald Isle and her family home with the long table for twelve and go to America, the land of milk and honey.

When asked why she emigrated to America, Mary said because her sister Julia was there. So was her brother John, but that's not a reason for leaving. It's only a choice of destination rather than going to China or Poland or any other country. Mary avoided telling the reason why she left Ireland, why she left her parents and seven siblings to go to Julia, her one sister in America. She said the work was hard, everything was done by hand. Farm work was hard everywhere in the world during that era. Tractors were just coming into existence. Farms were not yet electrified even in America, farmers everywhere relied on horses, not just in Ireland.

Given the conditions that existed in Ireland in the 1920s, emigration was probably not a hard choice to make. But at that time, the British were gone from Ireland; the land barons were gone; Ireland should have been a land of opportunity begging for investors with much work to be done and few workers to do it. This was not the case, however. Emigration was preferable to the hard work of the farm labourer and the low wages and underemployment in other occupations. People were still leaving in hordes. It was as though nothing was gained by independence from Britain, an anticlimactic end to British oppression. The establishment of the Irish Free State gave rise to the first serious attempt since the 1890s to industrialise the south of Ireland, but always with scant resources. Farming became oriented around pasturage rather than tillage with the trend toward processing of goods for the export business. The country was gradually electrified and new state-owned factories were encouraged.

In hindsight, emigres could have financed small business growth, financed tractors and farm equipment to make farming easier and more productive, sent money 'home' to keep relatives in Ireland and make them productive there, or to pay for more education rather than paying for their ocean voyages. A farmer with a tractor could have made a business of plowing fields, mowing hay, or harvesting potatoes. Cottage industries such as the weaving that Mary mentioned could have become profitable small businesses. Farms could have been diversified away from potato farming to raising other cash crops, to dairy or cattle farming, raising sheep for wool and meat. Raising cattle would also produce leather for manufacturing shoes and other leather goods. Ireland would have prospered much sooner if more of the population had stayed put and had taken advantage of the liberation from England rather than abandoning the Old Sod. More should have stayed to develop the country with financial aid from those who did emigrate. In that way, the emigres could have returned to the 'home' they all claimed to dearly miss.

Mary, nevertheless, did leave her seven siblings and parents and went to America. Money was scarce, and England still controlled the economy. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow must lie in America, Australia, Canada, or even in England if the leprechauns could be believed at all. Mary entered the U.S. at Boston and made her way to Northampton, Massachusetts where her uncle's sister-in-law was a nun and teacher. She didn't say which uncle or if he was on the Flynn or Browne side of the family. Mary said there was a beautiful convent there, but I have not been able to find any evidence of one ever existing in Northampton. The school where the nun taught was likely St. Mary of the Assumption School, and the 'convent' was probably Smith College.

Only one of Mary's six brothers, John, emigrated or got married. He was the oldest son who, if primogeniture inheritance was the custom, would have become head of household when his father died in 1939 and would have inherited the farm when his mother died. John emigrated to the U.S. in 1922 at the age of twenty-one and apparently had no interest in running the family farm. So, if I correctly understand the Irish custom of inheritance, the five remaining brothers could stay in the house as long as they remained single. Girls could stay in the household as servants. The censuses do often list female siblings as servants after the death of a parent. That seems a likely reason why Mary and Julia left the beautiful, albeit somewhat overcrowded, home with the long kitchen table where the family said Grace to thank the Lord for their blessings.

As fledgling birds must leave the nest, so must humans leave the family home of their youth. Fledglings, however, are prepared by instinct and by parental guidance to cope with their environment and to survive. Not so with ill-prepared displaced persons who migrate to environs that are entirely strange to them. Julia was the first of the family to emigrate to the United States, but what was her reason for leaving Ireland? Julia paid for Mary's passage and for John's also, but who paid her way? Did her parents give her money to go and get established in a strange country? As I recall, she had to borrow money to clear immigration. Did Julia decide on her own that it was time to leave home, or was there a strong suggestion that it was time for her to move on?

Irish historian Dr. Oonagh Walsh claims there is little doubt that the catastrophic conditions deriving from British colonial rule coupled with the mid-nineteenth century potato famine have caused psychological illness not only in Irish people who endured those conditions but in several generations of their offspring whether they stayed in Ireland or emigrated to other lands. She thinks that 'speculative theories' of inferiority and the long-standing belief in higher rates of schizophrenia among Irish diaspora may actually reflect a 'malaise which resembles schizophrenia but which is really a product of historical dispossession. The importance of these factors is underscored by the previous neglect of Irish people, considered as an ethnic minority.'

So, in view of the conditions that existed in Ireland, as told by all but Mary, who objected only to the hard work on the farm, it's not hard to understand what the psychiatrist, Dr. Dermot Walsh, meant when he said that dealing with many deeper frustrations and conflicts is a root cause of alcoholism among Irish people. There is a comorbidity, then, of alcoholism and psychological disorders stemming from inherited as well as culturally induced mental and personality disorders which Dr. Oonagh Walsh says is a malaise resembling schizophrenia. But what were the deeper frustrations that Dermit Walsh alluded to?

In addition to the hardships of poverty and possibly the inherited disorders suggested by Oonagh Walsh, there seems to have been among the immigrants a sense of abandonment that led to hopelessness and melancholia. They were exiled by the family that sat at the big table for twelve and said thousands of prayers for a deliverance than would never come. This, we can assume, was common to Ireland, not just to the Flynn household. In keeping with Irish culture, the men in the family, except John, would stay unmarried in the family cabin while the women went off, unprepared and without funds, to a foreign, WASP dominated country where they were met with unmasked hostility because of ethnicity and religion.

Mary, being younger than Julia or John, certainly had an easier life with more school time and the better living conditions that came after land reform and liberation from British rule. At the age of seventeen, though, the displacement from hearth and home coupled with the vicissitudes of immigration had to have been traumatic and overwhelming. I think the "deeper frustrations" that Mary and Julia faced stemmed from their longing for the safety of "home" while similtaneously resenting those who stayed there. They had to leave while the men in the family, in keeping with Irish tradition, stayed put. In addition to the historical dispossession already mentioned, they were dispossessed by their own family. The conflicting emotions of grief and resentment, the sense of abandonment by family and by the very god that they incessantly prayed to, and the chilling effect of a nonreceptive society not only made assimilation into that society more difficult but also provided fertile ground for maladaptive tendencies such as feelings of inferiority and alcoholism to flourish.

Of all the reasons given for maladaptive behavior among the Irish, two stand out in my mind. One is the epigenetic theory favored by historian Dr. Oonagh Walsh which might explain why the 'malaise' was, or is, still apparent in generations that were born after the potato famine.That genetic effect might also have been increased due to the economic conditions under British oppression in Ireland whereby men had to wait until late in life to get married. It is thought that sperm mutations which could be passed on to later generations caused higher rates of mental disorders in children of older fathers. Mary's father was 40 years old when he married his 17 year old bride.

In addition, marriages between spouses who were too closely related were common in Ireland. This, it seems, would increase the probability of 'dysgenic fertility' to use a rather disputed term. As an example of this, the brides and grooms had the same family name in about 700 marriages out of approximately 750 Connor marriages that I uncovered in Castlegregory and Dingle records.

The second reason, which seems to me to be the best explanation for the wide-spread maladaption among the Irish, is that there is a problem with self-realization among that population both here and at 'home' in Ireland. Starting with the generations that came even before the famine years, the Irish learned to survive by placating their betters - the landlords and officials, that is. To do otherwise could mean eviction and homelessness. That kind of subservience became ingrained in the culture of Ireland. Although the landlords and the British were hated, they were greeted with smiles and were treated with utmost respect and courtesy and insincere flattery. This, perhaps, is another example of the 'deep frustration' Dermot Walsh mentioned. Putting on the false front while supressing true feelings of rage and harboring deep resentment of those who not only made the conditions but also prevented any escape from them resulted in mental health problems, depression. anxiety, and drunkeness in particular. This, after generations of oppression, I believe, caused an inferiority complex that became characteristic of Irish self-identity. It is that feeling of inferiority or the perception that other people viewed them as inferior that made assimilation difficult for the Irish. Their expectation of failure became self-fulfilling prophecies that furthered the tendancy toward depression, hopelessness, and alcoholism. Churches and pubs provided comfort zones filled with like-minded people of equal status where there was no need to honor one's betters.

Paulo Coelho states in The Alchemist, “there is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure”. But what if there are no dreams? What if, as Sesko suggests, "The aftermath of hardship on an entire culture’s psyche could have had detrimental effects on the ways the Irish viewed their own existence, their relationships with God, family members, friends, neighbors, and colleagues that have lasted throughout generations".

In summary then, there was a perfect storm of negative forces that predestined the Irish to suffer the 'malaise which resembles schizophrenia but is really a product of historical dispossession'. The long history of Ireland's failure to overcome the harships imposed by British imperialism and colonialism meant that dreaming of achievement was futile. It could never happen. Even the forces of nature turned on them during the potato famine. God either turned a deaf ear to their prayers or was intentionally prolonging their suffering for some reason beyond the understanding of mere mortals. Dreams of unattainable goals gave way to fantasies that might some day become reality if enough prayers were said and when God thought the time was right. The relationship with God that Sesko alludes to was only the reliance on Catholic dogma which made the Irish believe that suffering and humility would pave for them a highway to heaven. But, it was also apparent that immediate relief could be found at the pubs where friends and neighbors including the depressed, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, and those afflicted only with a 'malaise that resembles schizophrenia' could commiserate over a pint. After several pints, the lilt of Irish laughter would fill the room. There was no need to kneel and beg the pub keeper to do his job. Prayers could be said later, just to be safe.

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