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Phil MacGiolla Bháin

Irish eyes on the US election

Updated: 5 days ago


THERE is a saying in my father’s Mayo that ‘the next parish is in America.’ As I walk up Carn Traonach here in Dún na nGall, the expanse of water that I can see on a clear day connects to the eastern seaboard of the continental United States.


By the time you have this newspaper in your hands, our kith and kin in the most powerful country in the world will have only a few weeks before they make what could be a century-defining decision.


That is especially true if they’re in one of the swing states. Political analysts agree that there are only seven of them: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Collectively they hold the keys to the White House.


Registered voters there are, in that moment, this November, among the most powerful people on the planet. For example, in 2016, pollsters and analysts reckoned that the race for the White House could come down to a few tens of thousands of votes in those battleground states.


In 2017, I attended the Web Summit in Lisbon, where one of the speakers was Donald Trump’s social media guy, Brad Parscale. It was clear that they were ahead of the digital game and understood the online world far better than the Clinton camp.


One thing that was pointed out to me in the early months of the Trump presidency was how many Irish names were prevalent in his administration. This was a long way from JFK’s Camelot of my childhood.


Noel Ignatiev’s brilliant book How the Irish became white (1995) tells the tale of how the Irish fleeing An Gorta Mór were met with nativist hostility. Indeed, it’s a story that will not sound unfamiliar to generations of our people in Scotland.


The Martin Scorsese movie The Gangs of New York perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the WASP-dominated Manhattan in the 1850s. The main bad guy in the movie is Bill Cutting, aka ‘Bill the Butcher,’ brilliantly played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The character is based on a real person, William Poole. He was consumed by a murderous racial hatred for those who he called the ‘bog Irish.’ For some reason, this image from Hollywood appeared on a huge Tifo banner at a match at Ibrox Stadium in August 2023. For the record, this nod to a racist murderer who hated Irish immigrants didn’t register on the radar of the local media.


As an ideology, Nativism didn’t die out in the USA when the Irish were eventually afforded white privilege. It’s just that Paddy wasn’t a main target anymore.


The isolationist America First movement in the 1930s continued in that vein. When Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2017, he used the slogan ‘America First’ several times.“A new vision will govern our land, from this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.”


The America First Committee was a non-interventionist pressure group against the American entry into World War II. It emphasised American nationalism and unilateralism in international relations.


One of Trump’s main strategists in 2016 was Steve Bannon, who is clearly of Irish heritage. He gushed that his guy in the White House was ‘a disrupter.’


Most commentators agree that the TV debates are massively consequential. President Biden’s seeming cognitive impairment during the first debate propelled party managers to convince him to stand down in favour of his Vice President, Kamala Harris. In the last debate, the first for Trump’s new opponent, she clearly bested him.


As I write this, the Vice Presidential debate between Tim Walz (Democrat) and JD Vance (Republican) is next up.


I couldn’t help noticing that the two moderators in the TV battle are Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell. See what I mean? Irish everywhere in a country that saw sense in welcoming their contribution. That’s why they have St Patrick’s Parades across that great country every March.


Trump himself is very proud of his German and Scottish heritage—his mother was from the Isle of Lewis. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was a native Gaelic speaker, and English was her second language. She emigrated to the USA in 1930 at age 18.


It is the stuff of Hollywood itself that her son is so down on immigrants. So, as might have been said in The Godfather by a movie mogul of questionable conduct: “Listen here, my Kraut Jock friend!” Of course, Donald J Trump, the walking scandal, is no Tom Hagen, although he often needs the services of a good lawyer.


Whatever the people of the USA decide on November 5, it will impact all of us.


Phil MacGiolla Bháin is an author, playwright and journalist based in Donegal. He was a staff reporter and columnist on An Phoblacht for many years. His novel Native Shore, a political thriller with a strong Glasgow Irish theme, is available at Calton Books


PIC: US EMBASSY IN LUXEMBOURG

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