Danny Coleman, who owns the Dubliner restaurant and the Phoenix Park Hotel near Union Station, says: "You know what they call the obituaries, don't you? The Irish sports page. Back home in Syracuse, my brother Michael goes to four and five wakes a week. Wouldn't miss one. I say, Michael, who's this one for?' He says, That guy's father was our mailman when we were little. I think the family should be represented.' "
Immigrant Irish are sometimes startled by St. Patrick's Day green beer, green neckties, green bagels, green leprechaun hats, green shamrocks, jig-dancing, shillelagh toting and the occasional outburst of fistfighting and puking in the gutters. Erin go bragh. Leprechaun lawn ornaments. The smarminess of the Irish Spring soap ads. Winking, drinking, shuffling, snuffling Irish in ads and movies. Running "The Quiet Man" on TV on St. Patrick's Day the way "It's a Wonderful Life" is on at Christmas. Wall plaques reading "May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back, the sun shine warm upon . . . , etc." And they're all descended from kings! King Niall, Shane the Proud, Brian Boru, Rory O'Connor: At various times Ireland has been divided into as many as nine kingdoms, hence many kings, hence many genealogies and crested rings belonging to the American Irish.
This is the romance, and it goes on and on, even though, as Yeats said, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone."
"Of all the tricks which the Irish nation have played on the slow-witted Saxon, the most outrageous is the palming off on him of the imaginary Irishman of romance. The worst of it is that . . . the insubstantial fancies of the novelists and music-hall songwriters of one generation are apt to become the unpleasant and mischievous realities of the next." -- George Bernard Shaw.
There is a bleak romance of perversity, as seen recently in the faces of a great movie, "The Commitments," in which a group of young people rise from the sullen grime of North Dublin with their soul music band, then ruin it all with jealousy, egotism, alcohol, blarney, impossible expectations and, at root, the belief in the inevitability of failure.
"The Irish are great at supporting each other when they're down, but if you start to rise up they knock you down," says Lorna Hovell, born in Ireland and now director of sales at the Phoenix Park Hotel.
There is an even bleaker romance of the Irish Republican Army too, a romance of revenge and the revolution that ended for most Irishmen in the 1920s. Bombings and shootings, mortarings and kneecappings while money and guns are gathered in New York and Boston to support the ski-masked men with machine guns, their faces wracked with the subliminal dysplasia of defiance when they're arrested and we see them in the newspapers.
Gerry Adams, head of the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, has been in Washington, inching his way toward legitimacy, and opening an office he decribed as a "diplomatic mission."
A Britisher at Adams's press conference at the Capital Hilton drawled: "Will you have a military attache?"
Adams has mastered the look of lightly bearded, thick-spectacled gentleness one associates with peacemakers or saving the whales, but it seemed a cover, a veneer like the leather stretched around a blackjack. Then again, he's in a tough business.
Like a lot of native Irish, he seemed less Irish than the American Irish in the room with their shamrock pins, members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians doing slow intense prowls over the television cables, shaking hands and talking as if Everything Was Understood."
"A lot of them have been activists," said Rep. Thomas Manton of New York. "There are a lot of memories of a rural Ireland and a lost time that may never have existed."
On his way out of the room, Adams said: "People are always saying the Irish Americans are romantics. I've never found it to be true."
He walked off in a broil of cameras and lights, and something about him suggested that through an act of will he may have given up watching for the sort of violence he's trying to quell -- the romance of destiny, fatalism, doom.
Rock musician Bob Geldof was quoted in the Irish Echo as saying: "Irish Americans are no more Irish than black Americans are Africans."
Anne Marie Schmidt, a Washington restaurant manager from Dublin, says of Irish Americans: "We don't necessarily call them Irish."
There are 5 million Irish in Ireland, north and south. There are 39 million Irish in America -- almost one out of six Americans claimed Irish ancestry in the 1990 census. Whose Irish are the real Irish?
The faces are everywhere in America.
Side-of-beef faces, faces with fabulously understated blond hair of a color James Joyce described as "oakpale." Smiling mouths and mournful eyes. Mournful mouths and smiling eyes. Faces of bitter precision that look right in octagonal rimless glasses. Tired women's faces that know what's going to happen next, because it's all happened to them before. Pink, round, breathless faces. Knife-edge faces on altar boys gone bad. Flat, merciless faces of mama's boys. Proud, double-chinned fathers standing next to daughters in new nuns' habits. Faces that capture the camera as much as it captures them. Easter portraits with hundreds of children arranged by height, like organ pipes, and the mother holding a baby -- you can almost smell the boiled food and the candles.
And the names! What is it about Irish names, particularly boys' names, regardless of last names? Kevin Shapiro, Brian Priebowicz, Barry Fleming, Murphy Brown, Ryan Ostroff, Tyrone Washington and, for girls, Eileen, Shaun and the popular Kelly, as in Kelly Nguyen. You get the feeling it's the mothers who give them to the sons, at least -- that they like the thought of having a Brian or Kevin for a son -- loyal, brooding, unpredictable, angry, funny, cute, solemn and chaste, even if he takes a drink now and then.
Odd -- there are 58 million Americans who claimed German ancestry on the census, but we don't have our schools filling up with Helmuts and Karl-Heinzes.
Wouldn't a lot of mothers choose Irish faces for their children too?
But who would choose the sorrows that made them?