My introduction to an Irish-American sense of history was not in Boston or New York but in the American Midwest. I was visiting the eccentric House on the Rock in rural Wisconsin. The receptionist told me proudly that she was Irish. ‘My people were driven out during the Famine by Cromwell… and Strongbow.’ I admired her compositional virtuosity in bringing together the 12th-century Cambro-Norman warlord Strongbow, the mid-17th-century hammer of the Gaels (and the Scots) Oliver Cromwell, and the Irish landlord clearances of the 1840s — all in one short sentence. What’s more, her declaration chimed with the self-mythologising of Irish-Americans who trace their origins back to the Great Famine of the 1840s.
It’s a trope that Joe Biden, the first Irish-American Catholic president since Kennedy, is happy to adopt.
