You can’t help but love the way an old-timer in a white aran sweater and houndstooth flat cap tells it. You want to believe in the solidarity of the diaspora. But if what he says is true, the Irish would not have just won their independence; we’d control India, Australia, and, God forbid, Canada.

Instead, what we got was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, signed 100 years ago this week. The treaty promised Ireland self-government under British dominion, as well as an exit plan for the Ulsterman in the counties to the north. With peace restored after centuries of violence, the Irish, naturally, decided to have another war. The victorious rebels now found themselves fighting the IRA and Éamon de Valera, who rejected the treaty as being too favourable to the British.

The provisional government, led by Michael Collins and the subsequent Irish Free State, turned their attention to an important front in the civil war: the United States. The Government lacked diplomatic recognition under the terms of the treaty, but its mission was not to wrangle support in Washington, DC; it was to convince the Irish Americans who had financed and armed Irish revolutionary forces to rally behind the treaty.

Two years earlier, the American-born de Valera had arrived in the United States as a stowaway on the SS Lapland, having just escaped from prison in England. Once ashore, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish Republic raised the equivalent of $70 million for the revolution in a coast-to-coast barnstorming tour, which drew disapproval from American elites. The grandees of Washington may have thought it uncouth to welcome a phantom dignitary from a non-existent country, but local and state politicians knew they would be whipped from office if they ignored the visit.

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Babe Ruth’s Boston Red Sox drew 15,000 fans to its 1918 World Series victory, the club’s last championship for nearly a century. Nine months later, 50,000 people packed the same stadium to witness de Valera speak, flanked on the podium by former Mayor James Michael Curley and every member of the city’s Democratic machine. The rapture from the crowd prompted invitations from the governors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as city leaders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Ultimately, De Valera’s year-long jaunt across the United States helped the Irish win their independence — and once the civil war started, leaders of the provisional government feared his contacts could be mobilised against the treaty. What they did not appreciate was how polarising a figure de Valera had become among the Irish diaspora.

Irish American leaders bristled at de Valera’s imperial attitude; he was happy to cash the checks and happier still to dismiss his financial backers when they opined on how to spend the money. The Gaelic American, the mouthpiece for the republican movement in the United States, opposed the treaty right up until the moment de Valera agreed with it. “This half-breed Spanish-American Jew intends if he can to turn Ireland into a miniature Mexico where defeated candidates for office refused to abide by the decision of the majority rendered at the election and seek to overthrow the will of the people by force,” the paper said in an editorial.

While some Irish American activists continued to oppose the treaty, Free State officials determined the silent majority of the Irish in America were satisfied to hear that their countrymen had received a reprieve from British oppression. The details of whatever government emerged were of little concern. “The most effective propaganda is frequent dignified statements from the government of the Irish Free State showing that it is functioning successfully and is determined to do so,” diplomat Timothy Smiddy wrote in a memo back home.

Smiddy shifted the focus of the pro-treaty forces from winning the hearts and minds of Irish American activists to publicly re-enforcing the legitimacy of the new government. He set about attempting to undo the very work in America that had helped the Irish win independence, pressing US officials who had once turned a blind eye to gun-running to crack down on it. He prevailed upon activists to ignore the pleas of IRA widows when the hat made its way around the pub. He succeeded on all fronts, but nothing helped his cause more than the American Irish’s unity in their own domestic political machines where ethnic solidarity trumped ideological difference.

As for De Valera, he was soon chastened by the civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty. He appeared to have learned a few important lessons from the machine politicians that kissed his ring back in 1919. James Michael Curley, like the Irish rebel leader, did two prison stints for fraud. This did not stop the Boston Irish from sending him to Congress, the governor’s mansion, and on four occasions to the Mayor’s Office. When he was barred from attending the 1932 Democratic convention with the Massachusetts state delegation, he arrived in Chicago alone. The party clerk must have been puzzled during roll call when the Puerto Rican delegation sent forth its new ‘representative’: Alcalde Jaime Miguel Culeo. The people of Boston could forgive any crime or public embarrassment, so long as Curley delivered on the patronage projects that won him the nickname the “Mayor of the Poor”.

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By 1926, de Valera cut ties with Sinn Féin and established Fianna Fáil, pledging to take his seat in the Dáil and achieve republican government from within the Irish Free State. In 1932, Fianna Fáil dominated the elections on a populist platform dedicated to public works projects and social security. He delivered on the social safety net, which kept Fianna Fáil in charge long enough to gut the constitution of any trace of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By July 1937, just two months after someone dynamited George II’s imperial monument in St. Stephen’s Green, the Irish had a new constitution. That “half-breed Spanish Jew” had made good on delivering an authentic and unique Irish Catholic vision for what a Republic could be.

The Sons of Gael who threw their fivers into the hat and their .38s into the barrel throughout the Troubles believed their contributions would deliver de Valera’s romantic vision to their compatriots to the north. Today, you’ll find their American grandchildren on barstools listening in awe to the Old Timer in the Aran Sweater and singing along to “A Nation Once Again”, as indifferent to the particulars on the ground in the old country as their great grandfathers were at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

These youths have embraced smoking and the Clancy Brothers and unapologetic popery to stick it to the secular, technocratic, iconoclastic, opioid-addicted world the dominant protestant class left the United States. Éire is a counter-culture preserved in amber, an escape hatch from a modernity that has left them feeling just as alien as their great grandparents must have felt at Ellis Island.

They have no idea the freedom fighters of the IRA are mere heroin dealers now. That the Emerald Isle has become Europe’s answer to the Cayman Islands, rather than that beacon standing athwart brute materialism. Ireland, freed from the oppression of the Black and Tans, voluntarily followed London’s lead into financialisation and speculation.

It is a nation of bankers and those on the dole, waking up to the realisation that Silicon Valley’s dream of universal basic income exists so the jobless masses can have just enough money in their pockets to pay the billionaire overlord class. The robots aren’t advanced enough to take all the jobs just yet, so they make do with Polish labourers — the only people in Ireland who still go to Mass in the modernist concrete churches.

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By Jenny McCartney

To look at Ireland from abroad is to understand the world of John Swanwick Drennan, the least appreciated of the great Irish poets:

A golden casket I designed
To hold a braid of hair
My Love was false and now I find
A coil of serpents there

The Irish resent the pedestal erected by the diaspora. They desire the same freedom to squander the national inheritance as the rest of the West. Occasionally, Irish Americans — or at least a sliver of its activist class — take notice of the retreat from what made Ireland unique only to be dismissed as Cromwellian interlopers.

When Ireland’s technocratic banker class moved to strike the constitutional protection of the unborn, Americans rallied to its defence (the pro-life movement being one of the last vestiges of Irish Catholic machine politics). Irish authorities, hungry as they are for US investment when it comes to corporate tax dodges, suddenly developed an allergy to American dollars. Just as the Irish Free State appealed to higher authorities in DC to stifle the flow of guns, the ruling class turned to Dublin corporate resident Mark Zuckerberg to successfully disarm the opposition.

One hundred years on, de Valera is as welcome in Ireland today as Curley was at the 1932 Democratic convention.

Within five years, the outbreak of “Murrain”, or potato blight, had led to around one million deaths from disease, hunger and fever. A million more emigrated, and the death rate on some of the “coffin ships” to America was more than 50%.

For those who remained, the decades following the famine saw the percentage of Irish people who never married climb dramatically. With age at marriage also going up, the imprints left on the country’s demographics were multiple. Today Ireland is the only country on earth with fewer people than it had in 1840, indeed it is still well over a million short of that total; for comparison, the population of England and Wales has grown four-fold.

Reading about the Famine is harrowing: something, if I’m honest, I would almost always prefer not to do. The suffering endured is the kind that goes beyond evoking shock or pity. It can tear holes in the everyday understanding of what it means to be human that we, living in more secure, comfortable, affluent societies, have acquired.

There is a Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, but, at the same time, I have never detected a very strong desire among the Irish to linger too long on the 1840s, apart from in song. Written in 1979, “The Fields of Athenry” — with its lyrics “For you stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn” — has become a kind of second national anthem. However, transmuting history into stirring melodies can be a way of taming and repurposing it, not facing it down. And, in the end, the Irish came out the other side — even if for many this meant coming out on the other side of the world — and eventually built a new and stable republic.

Nevertheless, if only at times like this, when an anniversary bell solemnly tolls, we are called back to peer again into that national abyss; to ponder events that would still have been in the living memory of people my grandparents knew when they were young. Lingering over those events brings the usual risks of entering closed circles of anger, lamentation and the apportionment of blame. But, what may be most intriguing about the Famine now are its long-term effects, rippling through the Irish psyche over the course of a century and a half, beneath the surface but with consequences felt in thought and behaviour.

This is a subject that comes up in public discourse every now and then. At the time of Live Aid, Bob Geldof was asked during a television interview about the high per capita contributions the Irish had made to the cause of defeating hunger in Africa.  Why was this so? Geldof speculated that the Famine lived on in the Irish in the form of a deep folk memory and that this lay at the root of their spectacular generosity.

Perhaps. But there was another more proximate and direct cause that did not require pursuing something as nebulous as “folk memory”: namely, the relentless exhortations that generations of Irish people had heard in their churches, homes and schools about the importance of charity and the evils of selfish materialism. These ideas were of course part of Christian teaching the world over, but in Ireland they were preached bluntly, relentlessly. Moreover, in a strange way, Africa didn’t feel all that far away. While it would certainly not be the case now, many Irish people of the Live Aid era would have known men and women, friends and relations, who had served, or were still serving there, in Catholic missions, schools and hospitals.

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But even if Geldof was stretching it with his theory of a folk memory, he was surely right to suggest that the Famine did not simply come and go without making deep impressions on the Irish mind. Other possible repercussions from the Famine demand attention, beginning with the Irish concern with respectability that came to form such a large part of the country’s image and identity until recent times.

Figures such as the Jesuit priest Fr Richard Devane, who campaigned strenuously to keep Ireland free from alien decadence, have a distinctively Irish feel. Among other things, Devane, joining forces with the Legion of Mary, played a large role in the closure of “Monto” in Dublin, reputed to be biggest centre of prostitution in Europe in the 19th century.

And the rearguard action led by Devane and others like him was the defensive counterpart to the positive vision proposed by 1916 rebel and later Taoiseach and President of the Republic, Éamon de Valera, when he beckoned the Irish towards “a land whose country would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God deserves that men should live.”

In my own home city of Cork, our main thoroughfare was dominated and watched over not by the statue of a rebel or a poet or a legislator, but by Fr Theobald Matthew, the temperance campaigner, his hand extended above the heads of the populace in a benevolent but restraining gesture.

But what had this prizing of respectability — this obsession, even — to do with the Famine? No doubt more than one stream fed this river of the Gaelic mind, but we should not forget the effect of the virulent insults that rained down on the heads of the Irish as the tragedy unfolded. For many quarters of the Establishment, the outrageous pain and misery of the Irish peasantry was first and foremost their own fault, a product of their own slovenliness, superstition, stupidity and recklessness. In March 1847, for example, an article in The Times declared the Irish “a people born and bred from time immemorial, in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder and consequent destitution”.

Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury believed that the Famine “had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson”. And, lest there be any doubt, these critics in high places saw the failings of the Irish as ultimately a product of their faith. Here is Lord Farnham: “There is no thinking man who does not perceive in the preponderance of the Roman Catholic religion in this country, the fruitful source of most of the calamities and agitations with which it is afflicted”.

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What to make of all of that? Edmund Burke, Irish-born though dead for nearly 50 years before the outbreak of the Famine, might have identified a different cause for the fragile, ramshackle state of the Irish peasantry of the 1840s. Speaking of the penal laws instituted in the previous century, he saw “a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man”.

Given the callousness of the remarks about the Irish pouring from establishment figures, one might wonder whether, in their “perverted ingenuity”, these laws had a debasing effect on the class who made them as much as the classes who suffered under them.

My purpose here, though, is to ponder what effect the loud and frequent condemnations of their attitudes and behaviour had upon the Irish themselves. A famous observation made by Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher, comes to mind. Fanon once wrote that the first thing the coloniser does is to “plant deep in the mind of the native population the idea that, before the advent of colonialism, their history was one which was dominated by barbarism”.

Perhaps the words of Trevelyan, Farnham and others — Carlyle, for instance, who wrote about the “wild Milesian features” of the Irish poor and their “false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason” — planted themselves deep in the mind of the natives, causing a variant of Fanon’s thesis (originally put forward in a book about Algeria).

In this variant, the colonised would strive to show the coloniser that they were not barbarians, that they would never have these accusations flung at them again, that they could outdo the colonisers at one of the things they, the colonisers, prized most highly and for the lack of which they criticised the Irish so savagely. Moreover, Irish respectability at this high noon of the Victroian era would be of a higher order, less prone to error, because Catholic. There would be no going back to the abyss, no return to the “completely unhinged” society already diagnosed by a Catholic Bishop, John MacHale, at the time of an earlier though less catastrophic failure of the potato crop.

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It is possible to over-egg such speculations. While the statue of Fr Matthew in Cork was unveiled in 1864, 15 years after the Famine, he had actually begun his Total Abstinence Society in the 1830s. And the prizing of respectability no doubt had other causes too. The Famine had exposed the Irish to the human body in its most degraded and, frankly, disgusting states, which may have bred a certain revulsion towards the flesh and in turn a sub-conscious desire to keep corporal urges under lock and key. In the 20th century, darker impulses towards social control may have played a part, but perhaps so did also the building up of the distinctive identity required by a people emerging blinking into the light of nationhood — and, too easily forgotten, genuine, popular fidelity to the Christian moral code.

Whatever the exact balance of forces, the exceptionalism of Irish respectability is, of course, a thing of the past now: largely unlamented, bulldozed away in the wake of social changes so enormous they can probably be seen from space. But, even these changes were themselves, in part, a reaction against the elevation of respectability to one of the country’s greatest social goods. And, if Irish social history is a series of chain reactions, the explosive consequences of the Famine are still being felt today.