The Irish in New York City - 19 March 1993

A headline last Wednesday morning, "One more time with turmoil" and the subheading "True to Tradition St Patrick's marchers face controversy". No truer words were ever written; perhaps tradition is a little strong. The habit of controversy is very recent, but what the tradition lacks in longevity it is certainly made up in veracity.

A year or two ago, the brouhaha about the St Patrick's Day parade began, as many other social conflicts have done, with the coming out, their word, of homosexuals. I suppose that means it's been about 20 years since men and women in large numbers asserted that homosexuality was a lifestyle of choice not as for many centuries the sin that dares not speak its name. To the Catholic Church, however, whether or not it speaks it name, it is still a sin and that belief is at the root of the never-ending wrangle in this city between the Church and the homosexuals who claim to be good Catholics.

The City of New York, its government, its laws and ordnances theoretically stands in between, though according to who's mayor, it goes along with one side or the other. Last year, our first black mayor, Mr David Dinkins, marched in the parade under the banner of the so proclaimed gays and lesbians. He was often booed along the way and he had several kinds of refuse thrown at him; he has survived. This year, he stayed home respecting a decision of the courts, which came only on the eve of the parade that denied the homosexual group a permit to mount its own separate parade.

I better stop talking about homosexuals in general, because they're not as such a party to the dispute anymore than our all of New York's Irish. The adversaries in this contest are the ILGOs, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation, and the most venerable of Irish Catholic societies in this city, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The gays and lesbians, whom from now on we shall call the ILGOs, were organised only a few years ago and now said to have 120 paid-up members. The ancient Hibernians and their order go back to 1836 to a time when the prevailing Anglo Americans began to be alarmed at the thousands of Irish immigrants pouring into New York from Liverpool and Cork; only 12 years later, the flood would arrive, the starving refugees from the Irish potato famine.

The Anglo Americans were greatly bothered then by the noisy and effective Irish entry into local politics. In 1835, Irishmen had organised to drive the local Whigs from the polls and when the mayor and the sheriff's posse tumbled along to restore law and order, they were put to flight with blinding showers of green confetti and the threat of a brawl. The city fathers consequently retaliated with ordnances just short of laws that sharply discriminated against the Irish in housing and employment.

The year after that Keystone Cops chase between the Irish and the mayor and his henchmen, 1836, the Ancient Order of Hibernians was founded. They've always been the sponsors of the St Patrick's Day Parade here and after the disruption of last years parade by angry onlookers resenting the marching homosexuals, the Hibernians were first in line to claim an exclusive right to sponsor and organise this parade, but they also announced that they would not tolerate a homosexual group.

The city granted the Hibernians a permit, but ignored their threat to ban the ILGOs, where upon the ILGOs appealed to the city to declare that the Hibernians had no constitutional right to ban them. Everything, you'll notice, from playing a radio in public to selling films of close-up sexual intercourse comes down sooner or later to the First Amendment, the free press right of the Constitution.

Well, the city couldn't at that point take on the Constitution. In the end, the whole row went to the courts, but the ILGOs had thought up what they took to be an even-handed fair solution, they asked for a permit to hold a separate parade an hour or two before the big one. The judge said, "no, too big a risk of a literal meeting of minds and bodies" – what we call a confrontation, especially if as the ILGOs wanted, they should march south and at the end meet the oncoming Hibernians. So now denied any legal right to march in the big parade or to stage one of their own, what were they to do?

On the eve of the great day, they announced that they would defy the court and the mayor and the city, most of all Cardinal O'Conner the head of this diocese who always – except last year – always stands under a canopy outside St Patrick's Cathedral nodding and blessing all the groups, the marching bands, the societies, the local units, the drum majorettes, all the emerald tinged bodies that go by: 198 units, 120,000 paraders. So not surprisingly, when the nasty grey drenching day dawned, there were over 4,000 police at the ready and 800 more than last year.

As the Hibernians were assembling, down at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, the Irish Lesbians and Gays set up in marching order and waving banners "Cardinal O'Conner is a bigot in a dress", "ILGOs against bigotry and intolerance", "Freedom for ILGOs" and so on and they marched in triumph uptown exactly one block. At 43rd Street they approached a wall of policemen who, like trainers routinely leading their horses into their stalls, quietly arrested over 200, which was just about the total muster of the ILGO brigade. There wasn't a truncheon, a flailing of a stick or a visible bully. The ILGOs whatever their word said kept to the promised deed, they practised civil not to say differential disobedience, so in about 15 minutes the homosexual rebellion was all over.

The big parade began and for four or five hours, the endless troops of the faithful plodded through rain coming down as they say like stair rods. On the sidewalk outside St Patrick's where onlookers under umbrellas still roused by the cardinal's stinging peroration at the early mass, neither respectability nor political correctness is worth one comma of the apostle's creed. There were some present at the mass who, however, had other sinners in mind, a pity rambled a Republican and a Hibernian, the day doesn't focus on the key issue the British presence in Ireland.

This tremendous argument about the Hibernians and the ILGOs has been going on for months and debated with eloquence, with absurdity, with on both sides bigoted charges of bigotry. In the city council, in the pubs and clubs, on television endlessly, it strikes me that two points were never made not anyway in my hearing or reading. One is ironic and not likely to be made much of by the faithful; it is who was St Patrick? He was a Scot kidnapped at the age of 17 by the brutal Romans in one of their press-gang raids, whipped off to Ireland to be made a pig keeper, which he hated, but being an apprentice saint endured for six years till he yearned to get back to his native land and he did so. But at some point he had a dream in which he was urged by the Almighty to fulfil his true mission to return to Ireland and preach the gospel. He did, he made himself a Bishop, he baptised converts, he ordained priests and allowed them to marry. How about that, Cardinal O'Conner? So his mission in life was not to glorify the Irish but to save them from perdition.

The other point is the legal decision of the judge, which was no more and no less than to approve the Ancient Order of Hibernians' constitutional right to bar the homosexuals. The propriety of this ruling was never gone into by the homosexuals who stayed with heated protests against bigotry, homophobia, fascism and the like. One angry man brought up the analogy of McSorley's Tavern, an old Irish pub downtown that's in the discrimination battles of the '60s had at last to let in women, two women as it happened who were determined to invade any public place where men liked to be with men. But note the word "public" – McSorley's Tavern is public, so is any land or property owned by the city or the state. In such places you may not under the law bar anyone on account of race or religion, but the judge pointed out the Ancient Order of Hibernians is a private society and like any other private club or society owning its own premises it can legally keep its membership to men, to women, to whites, to blacks; it can bar anybody it likes, bachelors, Italians, Englishmen, left-handed people. This is the simple truth in law that the ILGOs couldn't bear to face.

In spite of the Hibernians announcement that they welcomed open homosexuals in the parade, but not marching under a banner that proclaimed them as something special and different, the ILGOs didn't want that, they wanted to use the parade maybe as a celebration of St Patrick but also as an advertisement for open homosexuality.

Why do the Irish, Irish Americans perhaps most immigrants get so much more inflamed about issues than their relatives in the homeland?

Well,for the Irish there's the long history of discrimination against them, into just into my own time, employment agencies posted signs saying "no Irish need apply", mainly though I think that when any immigrant or ethnic group comes into the welter of this seething polyglot city, they make an extra effort to show they're different and to water or exaggerate their roots.

An old Irish friend of mine who I've known for over 60 years wrote to me the other day, his letter arrived coincidentally the morning of our parade. He wrote, "as soon as an Irishman leaves home and enters America, he ceases to be whatever he was, but behaves rather more so".

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