What is Irish culture, anyway?
My name is Owen O’Toole, I’m 18, and while I proudly identify as Irish, I need to know more about my ancestral homeland. As my high school, Regis, prepares a trip next year to Ireland (“a pilgrimage” as us members of Regis’ Gaelic society affectionately call it), I want to understand what Irish culture is all about.
From the mid-19th to the 20th century, the Irish diaspora, emerging from the devastation of famine and lack of work opportunities, poured through the bottleneck of Ellis Island, searching for economic prosperity. My great-grandfather, realizing there was no work on the family farm (he had six brothers) or anywhere else in Ireland sailed from “the sweet cove of Cork” for America in 1926. My great-grandmother, unlike her future husband, had gone to secondary school so at 17, with diplomas in hand, she headed for the land of opportunity. She had the unfortunate luck of arriving in New York on Black Thursday, October 28, 1929, the day the stock market crashed, and the Depression began.
I think of my great-grandparents, their struggles as strangers in a strange land, their sorrows and successes. I want to honor them and all my ancestors by embracing the essence of Irish culture—not as an outsider but as the bearer of a history that continues to shape me.
I know that Ireland today is not the Ireland of my great-grandparents. Ireland has the highest rate of university graduates in Europe, is leading the world in communication technology, and Ireland was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. Today’s Ireland would be unimaginable to my great-grandparents, yet I believe the essence, the soul of what they called the “old country” remains.
The Welsh have a word, hiraeth. While hiraeth translates to “nostalgia” in English, it carries a more abstract meaning—a mix of nostalgia, grief, and longing for a homeland of the past, and the certainty and clarity of culture it came with.
I sat down with my good friend, debate partner, pilgrimage partner, fellow Irishman, Emmet O’Sullivan because I can learn about Ireland from his experience. He spends summers with his Irish relatives on their land, farming, and roving over the family’s bog. For Emmet, visits to the bog meant learning more about his family history. Emmet’s great-uncle, the elder of the O’Sullivan family, Gaga, reasoned, “The strength is not in the bog. The strength is in knowing where we came from.”
The famous gift of the Irish people, storytelling, is part of his family’s tradition, as integral as the bog: Great-great Aunt Bridget tragically lost her life aboard the Titanic at just twenty-two; his mother’s late uncle James J., a community educator affectionately called “The Poet,” wrote and recited poignant verse; the local seanchaí, Johnny Galvin, would often join them with tales from the crossroads.
The tradition continues today with newer stories, younger storytellers. Emmet listens and notes, “With every story that I heard, the layers of my family history were revealed to me, deepening my respect for the struggles and talents of my ancestors.” By listening to the storytellers tell their stories, Emmet came to appreciate the resilience and richness of Irish life.
And while the bogs of Ireland provided much-needed heating fuel for centuries, today turf is recognized as a carbon-inefficient “dirty fuel.” Modern Ireland is very sensitive to Global Warming, so its climate reform mandated the ending of using bogs for energy. But the spirit of its tradition lives on. Emmet says, “A roaring turf fire from a well-harvested bog symbolizes a heritage handed down from generations; turf transcends fuel: turf is the birthright of an Irish farmer.”
Technology, television and social media are everywhere in Ireland yet its culture endures, not in the performative acts on St. Patrick’s Day, but in the stories passed down from those who came before, and in the shared sense of hiraeth. It calls us back to a place we’ve never truly known but yearn to understand.
When Emmet and I step onto Irish soil, we’ll know this journey is about more than sightseeing. It’s about listening to the whispers of the past, feeling the pull of our heritage, and piecing together fragments of an identity that had to bend and break to survive in foreign lands.
We aim to honor the legacy of our ancestors by embracing the essence of Irish culture—not as outsiders but as bearers of a history that continues to shape us.
In pursuit of this heritage, we are ready to redefine what it means to be Irish Americans, connecting our past with our present in a way that feels true, authentic, and deeply ours.
Irish culture whispers. It whispers in its poetry, in its verdant scenery, in the ancestors and fables which precede us.
For us pondering Irishmen, it’s our job to listen.
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