Saint Paddy’s Day in America: the week when everyone is “just a little bit Irish” and all the green plastic hats, the leprechaun decorations, and jokes about the holy art of binge drinking emerge like clover in a spring field.
As I was describing my weekend to our most recent KnotWork storytelling guest, Dee Mulrooney, Irish America will give you a hangover, even if you only have one beer in a plastic cup.
This weekend, my 13 year-old Irish dance performance troupe put on three shows.
The lovely theater, full of families excited to celebrate their dancers. The road-race/parade, compete with the guys pushing shopping carts selling inflatable pots of gold and creepy orange wigs. The corned beef and cabbage supper at the church hall with the shamrock decorations and mass cards of Saint Patrick placed on every table.
The first show, which was essentially a recital, was simply lovely. It’s always a thrill to see those young women fill an hour with artistry and athleticism before a crowd that’s there for the dance. The other two shows… This is when I realize why I always feel out of place in a room full of flags representing the country I’ve spent most of my life studying.
I’ve nearly always felt at home in Ireland, but almost never in Irish America
Though I have Irish ancestry from three of my four grandparents and I was born in one of the most Irish parts of America, I didn’t grow up with a sense of Irish-Americanness.
As you may have heard me mention on the podcast a couple of times, I have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and the cringey-sweetness of Ron Howard’s Far and Away to thank for starting off what would be a lifelong passion when I was just thirteen. I was a lonely kid who fell in love with a movie star, but that romance faded fast. What would remain was the soul connection with the stories, the land, the language, and the feel of a place that was three thousand miles and three or more generations removed from my own.
By the time I found myself in the Irish Studies Department at Boston College, fully immersed in the poetry of Yeats and Nuala Ní Dhomhnail, the contemporary Irish drama of Marina Carr, and the fiction of Colm Tóibin and Emma Donoghue, there was barely shamrock to be seen. (Except the one that Saint Patrick was said to show to King Laoghaire when describing the mystery of the trinity, but as this was depicted on stained glass rather than draped in green tinsel, it had a different energy to it.)
Does this all bear repeating? Aren’t we past the “Stage Irish” cliché?
Simply put: Yes, because no.
Sunday night, I watched the Academy Awards for the first time in memory. I was exhausted after all that dance-momming. Folding laundry and watching Jamie Lee Curtis’s charming acceptance speech was all I could handle. Plus, it was a huge night for Irish film and as you know from our recent KnotWork Storytelling episode, In the Company of the Banshee, I have had this year’s Golden Globe winning picture on my mind.
Oh, but Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel just couldn’t help but make the bad Irish jokes from the stage, could he?
Even trotting up a stand in for Jenny the Donkey couldn’t make up for the hackneyed “fighting Irish” one liner. And that was after the straight up stupid Saturday Night Live skit the night before that tried to make fun of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s accents and fell back on the “drunk Irish” line.
So yeah, I’m totally with the “mischief maker” and truth-teller extraordinaire, musician Áine Tyrell who called out the lazy comic and the long tradition of “punching down” and trotting out the Irish stereotypes.
A Brief History of “Stage Irishness”
Ireland is known as the place where the English practiced and perfected their colonialist skills. “Punching down” has been part of the picture since the beginning.
Even as Irish creatives have taken the global stage, they’re still haunted by old stereotypes wrapped up in the idea of the “Stage Irish.”
It was Shakespeare who offered up one of the first caricatures of an Irishman in Henry V. And then, it was the nineteenth century when playwrights perfected the cliché of the buffoonery and “paddywhackery” that still leaks into pop culture today.
“Oh, it’s just a wee joke, stop bing so sensitive” somehow pales when you put it like this:
…The stage Irishman fell into two categories: the “parasite-slave and the braggart-warrior”; the former observes a catalogue of stage-Irish clichés that quickly betray the theatrical caricature of the insecure Celt... (degrading).. himself and his native country for the diversion of the Anglo-Saxons, while the latter feigns idiocy via “the predictable equipment of blarney, bulls, and brogue', in order to advance better his world.” - The Stage Irishman in Modern Irish Drama, John Hargaden
Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edward Martyn founded the Irish Literary Theater in 1899 in Dublin to counteract this centuries’ long trend and give Irish authors a chance to put on Irish plays for an Irish audience. Though it only lasted a few years, the ILT gave birth to the Abbey Theater, which has been the country’s national theater since 1904.
Here’s How I Prefer to Observe Saint Patrick’s Day
This week, when so many around the world are painting the world green, I do the same, but I prefer to add a nice rich rose tweaked with gold as well. Those are the colors that seem to emanate from the Dublin-born, Berlin-based artist Dee Mulroney.
And rather than hanging out with someone wearing a travesty of a “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” tshirt, I prefer that my company is dressed like an “82 year-old cigarette smoking, cocktail drinking hamanic alchemist, who transmutes women’s pain through storytelling, song and spoken word.” I prefer to chat with Growler, a woman in robes that evoke both the Blessed Virgin Mother and a blessed vulva, and who speaks “with a tongue like a lash and a heart of gold who is wise as witches, from an area of inner-city Dublin called the Liberties.”
Don’t mind us, founding fathers of the Irish American parades and fraternal orders. Walk on by, voices of pop overculture who see the Irish as one of the last ethnic groups you can still take cheap shots at.
Or wait, what if you lads do pause and take notice of what’s actually taking place on Irish screens, stages, and amongst the people who are really talking about Ireland?
We’re over here talking feminism, diversity, rectifying colonialism, and the revolution of art as medicine. We taking on identity, trauma, and healing as we’re telling stories, revealing truths, splitting our sides laughing, and shedding tears in equal measure.
Being with Dee, who consciously works with the alchemical aspect of transmutation in her art and uses this process to deal with difficult topics, including, abuse, death and loss, offers living proof that you cannot diminish Irish identity into a Guinness punchline or flatten it to fit on a tourist brochure.
My KnotWork Storytelling journey has brought me into the company of women who are living this expansive definition of Irishness. I’m deeply grateful to Laura Murphy, who works so passionately on behalf of the Mother and Baby Home survivors using her poetry and presence as channel of imbas forosnai (inspiration that illuminates) to change the nation’s conversation. As does Kathy Scott at The Trailblazery, who places healing from the intergenerational trauma associated with Irish identity at the heart of her community work.
These women, and so many others, show us that Ireland is a wildly complex, increasingly diverse country that is riddled with internalized pain and a history of repression, even as it soars with beauty, innovation, and resilience.
The View From Here
As an American of Irish descent who has read the books and taken the classes, built the relationships, watched the films, and listened to the music, I know something of Irish culture, but I know it’s always going to be something different than being of the culture of that country that almost feels like home.
As an American of Irish descent who has been to the parades and lined up for the boiled dinners, I do have an intimate understanding of the vast disconnect between the way Irishness gets enacted in the diaspora and what’s really happening in the land they say they love.
The vast majority on this side of the Atlantic still haven’t gotten the memo that Ireland is a pro-choice, marriage equality nation that is neither monolithically Catholic or white, nor universally inebriated and combative (with the odd poet thrown in).
And from my experience, there’s not much interest from that old school contingent when it comes to discovering the “new version” of Ireland, which is actually a huge spectrum of identities, passions, and experiences that would prove as vibrant as that rainbow meant to show you to the pot of gold.
But just as Ireland has changed in the twenty years since I lived there, and just as it has changed in the eight years since Dee started to embody Growler on the streets of Dublin, the wider world will change its understanding of Irish culture.
Eventually. With the help of voices and art by Dee and others. With the help of those of us who feel connected to Irishness while living in America and refuse to get lost in the old tropes of Irish America.
And, in the meantime, I’ll keep showing up to events to support my dancer and have a few more conversations that begin “Actually, I have a podcast about Irish mythology and storytelling” and, over time, more eyes will light up than glaze over.
This Week’s Episode of KnotWork Storytelling: Driftwood Man by Dee Mulrooney
“Driftwood Man” is a timeless tale of longing and belonging, existential homesickness and ultimately coming home that is both deeply Irish and unmistakably global.
Our Guest
Dee Mulrooney is a multi-disciplinary Irish artist. Inhabiting a female body, and all that it entails, is the main preoccupation of her work. She explores exile, class, displacement, social history, longing and belonging through various media, including painting, drawing, film, storytelling, and performance.
Since the rise of the Me-Too movement, the female voice has been gathering momentum and power. Despite the universality of the female experience as a theme in art, it has been largely under-explored. Within this context, Dee’s performance art is provocative and has a political point to make, highly social, collaborative and community building.
She is driven by story and symbolism, how we remember and interpret history and women ́s role and their bodies within that.
Dee has exhibited and performed dozens of times in Ireland, England and Berlin. Projects and collaborations include, Bridget ́s Flamin show 2023, HerStory Illuminations 2023, sell out shows at the Dublin Fringe and Cairde Sligo Arts Festival 2022, Burning Woman Festival 2022, Healing Bridges Festival 2022, “Stay with me” Tuam babies exhibition 2021, and many independent shows in Ireland and Berlin. In 2019, she co-formed the feminist “ Holy Cvnt Collective.”
Find Dee at deirdre-mulrooney.com, on Instagram, Tiktok, and FB
Our Conversation
Exile and emigration: Dee wrote this story as she and her family were moving from Dublin to Berlin. She is an artist who presents the visceral, fragile nature of the body, who began creating when it became necessary to leave her beloved country to find safe, affordable housing for her family
What it is like to walk the earth as a woman always homesick for Ireland. What calls the Irish diaspora and those with a soul connection to that land, and how it is to hold that when you might live on distant, colonized lands.
Creativity as medicine
Our cultural obsession with perfect health, perfect success, which is so different from the ancestors. What if we rejected anti-aging and embraced “Auntie Aging”?
Dee’s identity as an artist and as a person with a working class background and how she “makes art in the cracks of the day”
The inception and experience of being Growler, the 82 year-old cigarette smoking, cocktail drinking vagina with a tongue like a lash and a heart of gold who is wise as witches, from an area of inner-city Dublin called the Liberties.
A celebration of the feminine and women, but also of men and the masculine, and the non-binary times we’re living in, too.
Dee’s collaboration with an Irish publication, The Wild Word, which calls in the stories of marginalized voices: and artist Eva Garland.
The inspiration for Driftwood Man came from a puppet made by Christian Wingrove-Rogers.