Posted by Jim on October 24, 2018
Please join us for our upcoming special event.
100th Annual St. Brigid Celebration
125th Anniversary of the LAOH in the USA
Dear Sister & Brother Hibernians and Friends,
You are cordially invited to join us on Sunday, February 10, 2019, at this joyous occasion. Each year the LAOH in Kings County celebrates our Patron, St. Brigid of Ireland; this year will be our 100th Annual Celebration in Honor of our Patron, St. Brigid of Ireland. At this same event we will also be celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians in the United States. So, you can see why we are so excited and wish to have our friends join us at this wonderful celebration.
Please join us on this special occasion. It is not every day that an organization gets to celebrate their 100th Annual celebration in honor of their Patron Saint and their 125th Anniversary in the same year. We will have displays on St. Brigid and the history of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians.
Lunch will include a full sit-down meal, full top-shelf open bar and desert. Giando’s is known for their fabulous food and awesome view of the New York Harbor. Our celebration will begin with Mass at 12 noon. The restaurant will be open for guest at 11:30am, please arrive early so everyone may be seated for the beginning of Mass. Valet parking is included with your Lunch ticket. Afterwards we will have music and Irish dancers for your enjoyment. Tickets are $95.00 per person – please see attached flyer for details.
LUNCH Ticket DEADLINE is January 20, 2019
We will be printing a Souvenir Journal in conjunction with our combined celebrations on this our 100th Annual St. Brigid Celebration and the 125th Anniversary of the LAOH. Please see attached flyer for details. Journal DEADLINE is January 20, 2019.
St. Brigid is the Patron Saint of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians as well as the Patron Saint of Ireland. St. Brigid’s Feast Day is one of the LAOH national holidays which is celebrated by Hibernians across the country. St. Brigid is known throughout the world for her kindness and charity towards others; it is St. Brigid that we emulate when we practice our Motto: “FRIENDSHIP, UNITY AND CHRISTIAN CHARITY”.
It is our tradition in Brooklyn that when we come together with our family and friends to celebrate St. Brigid, we also bestow the prestigious LAOH Kings County St. Brigid Award; this award honors a sister who exemplifies our Motto of Friendship, Unity, and Christian Charity. So please bring your family and friends and join us on this special day!
THANK YOU for your continued support of our annual St. Brigid Celebration for these past 100 years. We look forward to sharing this day with our friends.
If you wish to be included in our journal or attend our celebration please fill out the attached form. If you have any questions please contact Chairperson, Ms. Mary Hogan at 917 699-9290. You may also email Mary at LAOHBKLYN@AOL.COM.
Thank you for your continued support of this special event.
May the blessings of St. Brigid be with you and your family always.
Yours in Friendship, Unity and Christian Charity
Chairperson 100th Annual St. Brigid Celebration/125th Anniversary LAOH
Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians Inc, Kings County
Posted by Jim on October 22, 2018
Susan Collins, Brett Kavanaugh and Irish-Americans On the Right
In the aftermath of the appointment of the decadent Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS, Michael Shaw Mahoney discusses ultra conservative Irish America.
Susan Collins has difficulty speaking. The Republican senator from Maine suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that dams her flow and gives her oratory a broken, halting quality. Susan Collins does not have the gift of the gab, but the senator cannot help it.
The senator does have control over the content of her comments, however, and earlier this month, on the day before the US Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she was quite clear about her allegiances. There’s no mistaking her loyalty to white men who want to control women’s reproductive rights. Collins is also a dedicated apologist for powerful men accused of sexually assaulting women. There’s little doubt that some of these men are guilty as charged. How did the tag Republican get affixed to these Americans, and how did Susan Collins, the descendent of an Irish immigrant to New England in the early 19th century, become their defender? She and the Grand Old Party (GOP) have certainly drifted many, many miles from the cabin door of Abraham Lincoln.
We Americans are taught at an early age that Honest Abe grew up in a little cabin and read the family Bible by candlelight. It’s an old yarn, and it’s true. The Lincoln family lived on two hardscrabble farms in LaRue County, Kentucky, right smack in the middle of the state, and the family Bible still exists. A massive thing with butternut pages, it rests in a glass case a stone’s throw from where baby Abraham was likely born. The Great Emancipator’s humble origins, his rise from rural poverty to the leadership of the fight against bondage and oppression, made him a likely candidate for adulation among the thousands of Irish who survived the coffin ships crammed with the refugees of the potato blight. Lincoln’s ascendency to the White House coincided with the rough assimilation of Ireland’s cottier class to the dog-eat-dog world of America’s teeming eastern cities, to Boston and New York in particular. Battered by hunger and indifference, those bereft of the lumper landed in a ring of competition and carnality. For some Lincoln must have been a sympathetic figure. But not for all.
In 1863 after Lincoln introduced a draft to augment the Union armies during the American Civil War, many recent Irish arrivals to New York City protested. They were none too keen on getting shot for the rights of the black man. Not long off the coffin ships, these incorrigible Irish rowdies, many of whom spoke English as a second language, burned and looted a good chunk of Manhattan. They also turned on the city’s blacks, hanging some of their victims from lampposts, setting fire to others. In the mayhem, the indigent survivors of an agricultural disaster gave the lynch mob its muscle, and in their powerlessness to combat being used as cannon fodder by a nation they hardly knew, the crazed Irish had to find someone lesser, someone to serve as a scapegoat. Lincoln be damned, they must have thought, emancipation be damned.
The Irish immigrant ancestor of Susan Collins did not come over during the Famine. Arriving in the 1820s, he set up shop in Maine, well away from urban squalor, and began a sawmill, the prototype for a company still run by members of the Collins family. We don’t know what that ancestor thought about the race question in America. However, a conservative, entrepreneurial streak soon began to take hold in the Collins family. Its patriarchs bought into the American Dream, the Horatio Alger rags to riches trope that, one must admit, the Collins clan brought to fruition. They stocked away enough acorns to keep them from the chill and vulnerability of an Irish life lived in America’s ghettoes where Paddy, Mick, and Mary struggled to be white and stay one broken rung above blacks, where they watched the arrival of other tribes, the Italians and eastern Europeans who came from lands that Donald Trump, if he lived then, would dismiss as “shithole countries”. The family of Susan Collins had a buffer and built a tidy fortress.
Which brings us to the curious case of one Brett Kavanaugh, America’s little darling. Through some twist of fate, the newest member of the United States Supreme Court shares a surname with one of Ireland’s most celebrated poets. They have little in common. Poets do not generally weep nostalgically about their high school workouts with their kegger buds, in Brett’s case the charming Tobin and Squee who, after four years of towel snapping and Delaware beach bacchanalia, became alums of the Jesuit institution Georgetown Prep and a school girl named Renate, the earth girl they claim was easy.
Brett Kavanaugh failed his job interview in front of an entire nation, but thanks in large part to the vote of Susan Collins, he now holds down one of nine seats on the Supreme Court. Collins was not swayed by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault, nor was she nudged to a NO vote by the implorations of numerous law professors and the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Brett Kavanaugh belongs to a special species of Irish-America. He’s a member of an acquisitive breed of bourgeois Roman Catholics expert in the art of shape shifting to become, at least on the surface, super WASPs: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (i.e. untouchable white dudes with lots of power).
Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Georgetown Prep, is not an elite American prep school, like say Andover, Groton, or even Woodberry Forest in Virginia, where Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) learned some of his chops before returning to El Paso and the border along the Rio Grande. No, Georgetown Prep is a Jesuit school. It’s a Roman Catholic high school dedicated to athletics; unlike Belvedere in Dublin, which can claim James Joyce, Georgetown Prep is second division. For Americans who tuned it, the school now has a reputation for producing fit beer drinkers and professional date rapers. Bret Kavanaugh also went to Yale – he’s quite proud of that apparently – but he could never have become a member of Skull & Bones, the secret society at Yale that looks like the tomb of Roman patricians and can claim Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger as members. Skull & Bones is a WASP nest.
The desire for power and respectability has shaped many so-called Irish-Americans, a group with many subsets and a group more accurately dubbed Americans with Irish surnames. There’s Irish by DNA, Irish by passport, and Irish by imagination or fantasy. Choose your definition. Depicted as violent simians in Victorian cartoons, Irish immigrants to America in the 19th century, as noted previously, had to stomp on blacks and other immigrants to become more fully white and American. While the Roman Catholic Church certainly shoved conservative family values down the throats of Irish immigrants and still exerts a disproportionate influence given the Roe vs. Wade debate, social class in a supposedly classless society became the greasy plane upon which some Irish slid to the right. An old friend Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, a graduate of Yale University and Georgetown Law School, recently wrote:
The transformation from Irish to Irish-American fascinates me too, especially because I have so much feeling for the former and so little for the latter. I’m far less inclined to lay the blame (for right wing conservatism) at the steps of the American Roman Catholic Church – not least because it’s hard to best the 20th century Irish Church for conservative strictures. The example of Italian-Americans overlaps with that of Irish-Americans to an extent that suggests an alternate, and to me more likely, pair of explanations: the logic of American racism combined with that of American anti-Catholicism, creating an endless desire in both groups to differentiate themselves from an abjected black American underclass and to strive for complete access to and acceptance by wealthy WASP power – see the WASP-emulation of places like Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep. Where that Roman Catholic Irish-American insecurity is most acute, the striving for white power is most conspicuous and craven. Fox News, with its cast of swollen talking heads, has made the reputations of several now prominent Irish-Americans. Bill O’Reilly, forced to leave the network under a cloud of sexual harassment charges, became the trusted talisman of millions on the right wing. O’Reilly has always promoted the idea of American exceptionalism, reaping the profits from quickly cobbled biographies of white men leading the way in America’s manifest destiny. Bill O’Reilly is the descendent of a potato farmer from County Cavan who fled Ireland early in the lumper blight.
Another Fox star, Sean Hannity, grew up on Long Island and likes to point out that his Irish grandparents from counties Cork and Down were humble, hardworking folk who earned everything they had. Hannity is now the minister of propaganda for Donald Trump. Joseph Goebbels never did the job so well. The vast majority of GOP voters, the ones Hillary Clinton infamously dubbed “deplorables” in the 2016 presidential election, see O’Reilly and Hannity as the great white hope. They have no awareness that these right wing chest thumpers with Irish surnames descended from Irish men and women who suffered endless abuse, who in some cases were even murdered. In 1855, a Know-Nothing mob in Louisville, Kentucky set fire to tenements occupied by Irish and German immigrants, killing 26 people on a tragic day now known as Bloody Monday. That stain on the Nativist movement of the 19th century was a precursor to Charlottesville, though on Bloody Monday the hate was primarily directed at Irish canal diggers in particular and Roman Catholics in general.
The painful history of Irish second-class citizenship has faded. The vilified immigrant has become the demagogue who now scapegoats more recent arrivals. O’Reilly, Hannity, Steve Bannon of Breitbart, and yes Brett Kavanaugh too, have joined the motorcade of shiny golf carts. They have entered the inner sanctums of cigar smoke: fully white, fully protected, fully committed to holding the fort against the brown barbarian hordes.
The American political parties, it must be stressed, made an ideological flip in the 20th century. The Republican Party of Lincoln slowly morphed into a reactionary party of social conservatives friendly to the interests of the wealthy while the Democratic Party, formerly so entrenched in the South, moved away from its support of segregation and Jim Crow. The parties would be unrecognizable to their supporters of a century ago. The GOP of Susan Collins, a political party now kidnapped by Donald Trump, has little in common with the republicanism of those who fought against Franco and fascism in Spain. Nor does it resemble the “good old IRA” that confronted the British Empire in the era of Ireland’s War of Independence. Trump supporters of the ‘Merican variety would undoubtedly brand James Connolly a commie libtard. Michael Collins feared the wealth gap that Republicans in the United States ignore or openly work to widen. Collins wrote in 1922, “What we must aim at is the building of a sound economic life in which discrepancies cannot occur. We must not have destitution or poverty at one end, and at the other an excess of riches.” Michael Collins was opposed to hacienda economics. Admittedly, the American GOP does share – at least until recently – the social conservatism of Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil, an Irishman and party also known to wear the republican scarf in all kinds of intricate knots. The historian R. L. Foster writes in his seminal book Modern Ireland: 1600-1972:
But ‘Republican’ could stand for anything from merely anti-British to agrarian-syndicalist-revolutionary, not to mention exclusivist-Gaelic-Catholic; it was a moral stance as much as a political affiliation. The dust from the Kavanaugh hearings has settled. The boy-man who loves his calendars and beer is a Supreme Court justice. He works with Ruth Bader Ginsburg now. Some decisions have an impact the sages, prophets, and lesser prognosticators, like the dogs in the street, can foresee at the time. When Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith returned from London, having given away a sizeable chunk of their island, many Irish instinctively knew there would be hell to pay and more war to wage. They were right of course. Susan Collins (no relation to the Big Fella except maybe in the distant mists) also made a momentous decision; in the end, nobody was really surprised by her Yes vote for Kavanaugh. She nailed her colors to the mast for all to see. She let the boys bust out the rum and flog the blackguard who decries the captain suffering from sunstroke. Collins has let the boys flog the women too. Especially the women. We will have to wait and see how her party loyalty, her alliance with forces deaf to the cries of the Irish departed, affects the United States and the generations of Americans to come. In the meantime, the ropes are pulled tight around the wrists and the lash is raised on high.
➽ Michael Shaw Mahoney, (MA Queen’s University Belfast) is a teacher and father of two from Louisville, Kentucky.
Posted by Jim on
Jingoism can’t disguise DUP’s reckless Brexit agenda
By Sinn Fein deputy leader Michelle O’Neill
There are many great ironies of the DUP’s current position on the Brexit
debacle.
Arlene Foster’s party claims they cannot resile from their ‘blood red’
lines of no extra checks on goods coming from Britain to these shores
because that would apparently undermine the constitutional integrity of
the union they cherish.
It’s a far cry from the days when, at the height of the BSE crisis, Ian
Paisley pragmatically declared that our cows are Irish.
But it also ignores the fact that the DUP’s view of the world,
particularly on social, moral and religious issues, simply would not be
tolerated elsewhere in that union.
Marriage equality, women’s healthcare rights, language rights and
inquest rights are all taken for granted everywhere else on these
islands.
Not so here in the north of Ireland where the DUP is still not prepared
to countenance 21st century rights for 21st century citizens.
Clearly, there is very little unity in the DUP’s union.
Despite this, the DUP leadership has made it clear that our economic
future is a secondary concern in comparison.
Arlene Foster is preparing to have a train crash Brexit in pursuit of a
narrow agenda with no regard for the majority who voted to remain or for
any of the people of the north.
The disunited union must be protected at all costs and to hell with the
economic consequences for the north and for future generations.
It is a gross act of political and economic vandalism, the price of
which will have to be paid by the ordinary people who live here.
They are refusing to accept the warnings of business leaders, experts
and the majority of citizens that the north cannot withstand exclusion
from the European Single Market and Customs Union.
They thumb their nose at the flexibility of the EU negotiators who have
offered a backstop solution that effectively provides the north with the
best of both worlds – unfettered access to both the European and British
markets.
Instead, they take their lead from hard Brexiteers like Boris Johnson
and Jacob Rees-Mogg who pine for the days of empire when the natives
would take what they were given and be grateful for it.
They regurgitate the myth that the rest of the world will be queuing up
to sign trade deals with post-Brexit Britain.
This ignores the cold hard economic reality that no nation is going to
give a better trade deal to a country of 70 million as opposed to an
economic bloc of 420 million.
But try as they might, the DUP can’t wish away economies of scale,
demand and supply or basic economics.
And no amount of flag-waving jingoism can disguise the reckless agenda
they are pursuing.
This disastrous approach will continue to play out like a slow-motion
train crash over the coming days and weeks as the Brexit negotiations
reach a critical point.
Time will tell if the DUP will pull back from the brink.
However, the fear is that, 21 months after the collapse of Stormont,
this is a party that has lost the run of itself. Intoxicated by
arrogance and the feteing by the right-wing of Tory Party, the DUP may
no longer even be capable of political pragmatism in the interests of
the people it claims to represent.
Thankfully for us all, they do not speak for the majority on Brexit.
And they do not have a veto on either the Irish Government or the EU27.
So whatever plays out in the coming days and weeks in the Tory civil
war, Dublin and Brussels must ensure the people of this island do not
become collateral damage in either.
Posted by Jim on
Concerns are growing that a failure to negotiate a solution to the
issue of the border after Brexit could spark a return of serious
violence in the north of Ireland.
The Dublin government clashed with the unionist DUP after they accused
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of scaremongering over the potential for
conflict.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney then accused the Tories and
DUP of ignoring or denying the risk for political reasons.
“There are some people who just don’t want to know because it doesn’t
suit the political narrative that the Northern Ireland border issue is
a really important issue for relationships on this island,” he said.
DUP Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson had condemned Varadkar’s decision to
show EU leaders in Brussels a newspaper story about a 1972 bomb attack
on a customs post in Armagh. He said it “scrapes the bottom of the very
deep barrel of threats, deception and rhetoric” and that it was
“despicable, low and rotten”.
Three IRA Volunteers, four customs officials and two lorry drivers died
in the attack at a British customs clearing station in the border town
of Newry.
Mr Varadkar said he used the story — just one of thousands of violent
incidents which have taken place at the border in recent decades — to
make sure that there was no sense that anyone in the Dublin government
was “in any way exaggerating” the “real risk” of a return to conflict.
The exchanges came after another week of fruitless efforts to convince
British negotiators to honour a promise of a ‘backstop’ that would
guarantee no return of border checks, first made in December last year.
Under pressure from the DUP and the far right within her party, British
prime minister Theresa May has suggested a future “expiration date” for
the backstop — a date when the border could once again be
remilitarised. That was quickly rejected by EU and Irish negotiators.
There have been statements and commentary by a number of unionist
hardliners on the potential of violence.
Earlier this month, the DUP were accused of making “dog whistle” calls
to loyalist paramilitaries after party leader Arlene Foster’s said she
had ‘blood red lines’ in the Brexit negotiations. A DUP official was
then reported as commenting that the party planned a “guerrilla war”
against any new regulations dividing Ireland and Britain. Loyalist
Jamie Bryson this week threatened a violent unionist reaction that
would “dwarf” the flag disturbances and Drumcree riots if their demands
for a hard border are not met.
A former British Army chief, General Richard Dannatt, has joined police
chiefs by warning of the possibility of a return to bloodshed in the
event of a hard border. Prominent Tory and TV celebrity Stanley
Johnson, father of senior Tory figure Boris Johnson, also made the
headlines when he blithely dismissed concerns over renewed conflict by
saying: “If the Irish want to shoot each other they will shoot each
other”.
Mr Coveney said his government was “trying to protect a very precious
peace and normality on the island of Ireland”. He said Mr Varadakar’s
comments were warranted and the Taoiseach was “dealing in facts”.
“If you speak to families living in the border area they will talk in
very emotive terms about their fears of the re-emergence of that border
infrastructure and it’s important to be honest about that.
“It doesn’t suit some people’s political narrative. It certainly
doesn’t suit people who advocate for Brexit because this is very
awkward and difficult to deal with but it’s the truth,” he added.
Mr Coveney said he believed a no-deal outcome was still very unlikely,
but in the event of a no-deal scenario, his government had no physical
contingency plans for border infrastructure as it would not be
accepted.
“I’m not going to create the impression that somehow by accident we’re
going to fall into a situation of being forced to reintroduce border
infrastructure” he said.
“I trust the British prime minister in terms of her [backstop]
commitments – it has been made in writing,” he added.
Although there has been an effective ceasefire, a number of republican
armed groups are understood to remain intact and to be in contact with
each other. A recent statement from Oglaigh na hEireann (ONH) indicated
it had held local discussions with the ‘new IRA’ and the INLA (Irish
National Liberation Army), as well as the previously unknown ‘North
Derry Republican Group’.
Sinn Fein leader May Lou McDonald said there could be no excuse “for a
return to conflict under any circumstances or provocation”. She added:
“It is reckless to risk progress, our agreements, and all that has been
achieved over the past decades. No leader or politician of integrity
would be prepared to play chicken or poker with our future and our
peace.”