Posted by Jim on September 3, 2014
Cardinal Timothy Dolan comes on as grand marshal and NBC gay group march in St Patrick’s Day Parade.
Photo by: Irish Voice
by Debbie McGoldrick @ IrishCentral
A gay group of employees from NBC will march in next year’s New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade behind their own banner, a source with knowledge of the ongoing parade controversy has told the Irish Voice.
On Wednesday, September 3, at a reception at the New York Athletic Club, Cardinal Timothy Dolan will be named as the grand marshal of the 254th St. Patrick’s Day parade, set to step off on Tuesday, March 17.
In a historic move aimed at defusing the storm that erupted this year over the exclusion of gay banners in the march, the addition of a banner identifying gay NBC staffers is a compromise forged at the insistence of several New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee members, including Dr. John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and Francis X. Comerford, chief revenue officer for NBC-owned TV stations.
NBC, the long-time broadcast home of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, was prepared to drop its coverage unless a compromise that resulted in the inclusion of a gay group was brokered.
The withdrawal of parade sponsorship last year by Guinness was also a huge factor in bringing about the change, according to a former grand marshal.
“Once an iconic company like Guinness showed it was standing up pretty much everyone else had to follow,” said the source, who revealed that Guinness had met with parade figures on several occasions since to help seek a compromise.
The NBC network has a large and visible presence on Fifth Avenue for the event, and a majority of committee officials and trustees are on board with the inclusion of gay NBC staffers in the line of march.
It is unknown whether this development will lead to a more widespread gay presence next March 17 – for example, if the NBC marchers will be accompanied by other participants who would also like to identify as gay.
This year’s parade was marred by sponsor withdrawals and politicians who refused to take part due to the ongoing exclusion of gay groups marching with their own banners.
Though the parade committee has for years steadfastly maintained the policy, it was freshly highlighted in February by new Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said he would not take part in the event unless gay groups could also march. He was the first mayor to boycott the parade since David Dinkins, who also protested the exclusion of gay groups and worked to broker a solution that ultimately never arrived.
De Blasio was quickly followed by a succession of New York politicians also opting out of the march, including City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who called for a council-wide boycott of the event and was more or less granted her wish as only a handful of the 51 council members took part.
More damaging for the parade itself was the withdrawal of long-term sponsors Heineken and Guinness.
“Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all. We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year’s parade. As this has not come to pass, Guinness has withdrawn its participation. We will continue to work with community leaders to ensure that future parades have an inclusionary policy,” a Guinness statement at the time said.
Though some establishments also chose to institute their own Heineken/Guinness boycotts in support of the parade’s policy against gay banners, a concerted effort has been in place behind the scenes since March 18 to broker a compromise acceptable to all interests in advance of next year’s march.
The consensus, according to several Irish Voice sources, was clear – a repeat of this year’s sponsor withdrawals and attendant negative publicity was unacceptable and clearly damaging to the well-being of the march from many standpoints, including financial, political and public relations-wise. It is also believed that another long-time parade sponsor, the Ford Motor Company, was prepared to end its financial support unless a compromise was put in place.
“Having to go through this year again in 2015? No way,” said one source. “It just couldn’t happen.”
For 19 years, John Dunleavy has been the chairman of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Dunleavy, 75, a native of Co. Westmeath, has been handily elected to the post by affiliated parade groups – AOH groups, county organizations – who vote every two years. He is next up for election in 2015.
“There’s no question that John is popular with the people who vote. He goes to every dance, every funeral and shakes every hand,” said an Irish Voice source.
“For a long time, he has done a great job organizing the parade. No one wants to take that away from him.
“But within the parade leadership, he has worn out his welcome. Times have changed, but John doesn’t want to change and it’s damaging the parade.
“It’s time for a new direction. How does the parade survive if we have all the same negative headlines as we had last year?”
John Lahey, the current committee vice chairman and parade grand marshal in 1997, and Francis Comerford, who held the same honor in 2012 and sits on the committee’s board of trustees, have led the effort to reach a compromise for next year’s event. Both executives are deeply committed to the long-term viability of one of the oldest and most famous parades in the world, say supporters.
Whether Dunleavy is agreeable to the NBC gay marchers “doesn’t really matter,” says one Irish Voice source.
“The reality is that there will be a gay marching contingent in the parade,” the source added. “There has to be.”
Asked if grand marshal Cardinal Dolan is aware of the plan, the source said, “He’s the grand marshal, so you would have to assume yes, he’s aware of what’s happening and he is okay with it.”
Posted by Jim on September 1, 2014
To the music of “The Rising of the Moon”
Who is Ireland’s enemy?
Not Germany, nor Spain,
Not Russia, France nor Austria;
They forged for her no chains,
Nor quenched her hearths,
Nor razed her homes,
Nor laid her altars low,
Nor sent her sons to tramp the hills
Amid the winter snow.
Who spiked the heads of Irish priests
On Dublin Castle’s gate?
Who butchered helpless Irish babes,
A lust for blood to sate?
Who outraged Irish maidenhood,
And tortured aged sires,
And spread from Clare to Donegal
The glare of midnight fires?
Who scourged our land in ‘Ninety-Eight,
Spread torment far and wide,
Till Ireland shrieked in woe and pain,
And Hell seemed fair beside?
Who plied the pitch-cap and the sword,
The gibbet and the rack?
O God! that we should ever fail
To pay those devils back.
Who slew the three in Manchester,
One grim November dawn,
While ’round them howled sadistically
The Devil’s cruel spawn?
Who shattered many Fenian minds
In dungeons o’er the foam,
And broke the loyal Fenian hearts
That pined for them at home?
Who shot down Clarke and Connolly
And Pearse at dawn of day,
And Plunkett and MacDiarmada,
And all who died as they?
Who robbed us of MacSwiney brave?
Who murdered Mellows, too,
Sent Barry to a felon’s grave,
And slaughtered Cathal Brugha?
Not Germany nor Austria,
Not Russia, France nor Spain
That robbed and reaved this land of ours,
And forged her heavy chains;
But England of the wily words
A crafty, treacherous foe
‘Twas England scourged our Motherland,
‘Twas England laid her low!
Rise up, o dead of Ireland!
And rouse her living men,
The chance will come to us at last
To win our own again,
To sweep the English enemy
From hill and glen and bay,
And in your name, O Holy Dead,
Our sacred debt to pay.
Posted by Jim on
by Bernadette Kelly
I was raised to be proud of my Irish heritage. But, looking back, I realize I learned very little about actual Irish history. For many Irish Americans, St. Paddy’s day celebrations were about all the connection we had.
One name I did hear growing up, from my grandfather, was that of James Connolly. But it was another 20 years before a friend in radical politics gave me a book by Connolly and I really discovered this man — someone any Irish American, or any human being, could be proud of.
James Connolly was born in 1868 to Irish immigrant parents in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died in 1916, executed by the British for leading the famous Easter Rising in Dublin. During his 48 years, he lived in Scotland, Ireland and the U.S. In all three countries, he devoted his life to fighting for the working class and all oppressed people.
Most Americans have never heard of James Connolly, even though he was deeply involved in one of the most active periods of U.S. labor and socialist history. Connolly was at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), along with Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and other radical luminaries. He saw international solidarity as an indispensable tool for labor to defend itself against capitalism.
Connolly was a man ahead of his times in many ways. His clear feminism is one of these.
During Connolly’s heyday, the battle for female suffrage was coming to a head in England, Ireland and the USA. In Ireland, many of the male nationalist leaders fighting to end English rule opposed suffrage, or refused to take a stand on it, because they feared alienating their supporters. Even some great movement leaders like James Larkin feared that women of the middle and upper classes would use the vote against the working class. In those days, the issue of votes for women, like abortion today, was too hot for some to handle.
But Connolly saw suffrage as a human right, regardless of how women chose to use it, and steadfastly supported it. In raising his voice for the vote for women, he never forgot that the working class was made up of two sexes, and that poor and working women needed this right far more than their better-off sisters. Said Connolly, “It was because women workers had no vote that they had not the safeguards even of the laws passed for their protection because these were ignored. They had women working for wages on which a man could not keep a dog.”
And this revolutionary not only thought that women should fight side by side with men, he actively encouraged it. As he said so eloquently, “None so fitted to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what is a fetter.”
At that time, even more so than now, women speakers in the labor movement were a rarity. Once, after addressing a solidarity meeting for women textile workers, Connolly surprised his daughter Nora by announcing her as the next speaker. Nora had been laboring tirelessly behind the scenes for this cause, and her father obviously thought that if she was good enough to organize, she was good enough to speak.
Of the 220 members of Connolly’s Citizen Army who fought in the 1916 Easter Rising, 27 were women. That very fact sparked an irreversible radicalization in Irish women’s consciousness and expectations. An overwhelming British force crushed the revolt, and Connolly and several others were executed. Constance Markievicz, a unique female leader in the Citizen Army, was sentenced to life in prison.
Connolly’s commitment to women’s rights was part of the soul of that rebellion. This shines through in the “1916 Proclamation,” which declared a guarantee of equal rights for both Irish men and women as one of the aims of the Rising. For Connolly, Irish freedom from British rule and women’s emancipation were inseparable. As he put it, “Of what use to such sufferers can be the re-establishment of any form of Irish State if it does not embody the emancipation of womanhood. As we have shown, the whole spirit and practice of modern Ireland, as it expresses itself through its pastors and masters, bear socially and politically hardly upon women.”
As the nationalist movement in Ireland became more conservative, Connolly fell out of fashion, and for decades many of his writings remained unpublished. But now, happily, you can find them on the web — including the stirring chapter “Women’s Rights” from his book The Reconquest of Ireland (at www.marxist.com/women&marxism). And many of his books, such as Labour in Irish History, are still in print.
Connolly wrote about Irish history because he knew that both lessons and comfort could be drawn from the stories and struggles of those who went before us. If you want help understanding these “interesting times” we live in, my advice is to become acquainted with Connolly. It beats the heck out of drinking green beer.
Posted by Jim on August 31, 2014
Posted by Mike McCormack
In 1913, William Martin Murphy fired all his employees who had joined the Irish Transport and General Worker’s Union led by James Larkin and James Connolly and urged other Dublin employers to follow suit. Larkin and Connolly knew this lockout was a death threat against the Union, so they led the workers in a general strike signaled by the walkout of the Tram workers at 10 AM on August 26. It was a daring move for, although labor unions were not new, they were easier controlled in Ireland where police and government troops supported employers.
It is ironic that 33 years earlier the Land League had introduced a ban on work and services against the landlords which was so successful it became a standard tactic. Named for the first landlord’s agent against whom it was used, the Boycott was essentially a strike, and Connolly, – a student of Land League tactics – knew that well. He had been a union organizer ever since he was blacklisted in Scotland for trying to organize workers against the captains of industry in that country. After that he went to America as a paid organizer for the American labor union movement and even founded a monthly newspaper called The Harp specifically for the Irish in labor.
It is therefore strange that formal labor unions started so late in Ireland since the Irish were so active in the fight for workers rights and the formation of labor unions in other countries so many years earlier. In America, for example, there had been associations of journeymen in colonial times, but they were primarily craft guilds to maintain standards. When the industrial revolution came in the 1800’s, a demand was created for a labor force that was unskilled and highly exploitable. The abuses that accompanied the growing industries led to a cry for a protective force for workers and a few groups were formed. Unfortunately, the financial panic of 1837 reversed any progress made. It wasn’t until 1866 – after the Civil War – that the first major labor union was formed; however its main goals were to eliminate cheap convict labor and restrict immigration. The first major activity with worker’s rights as the focal point took place in 1874 as a strike paralyzed the Pennsylvania Coal Fields for a year. Frank Gowan, President of the Reading Railroad which controlled the mines, called in the country’s leading Union Buster – Alan Pinkerton, who ran a detective agency specializing in “industrial protection”. Pinkerton’s spying, deception and prejudicial testimony before a stacked jury led to the hanging of 20 men. The Workingmen’s Benevolent Assn was beaten, and the mines reopened; management had won, but organizing continued. In 1877 a nationwide strike over wage cuts crippled the railroads and Federal troops were called out. Over 100 were killed and 300 injured by U.S. troops before the strike was broken, but the picture of strikers being killed to protect the profits of millionaire railroad owners at last moved the public. Their anger was evident at the next nationwide election and many railroad politicians fell. The labor movement began to flex its new political muscle.
Then, on Sep 15, 1882, a handful of laborers, organized by Peter McGuire, began a march uptown through lower Manhattan, carrying signs that read “Agitate, Educate, Organize” and “Less Work, More Pay.” Mocked by fashionable New Yorkers they continued their trek as more and more laboring men, women, and children joined them. By the time they reached what is now called Union Square, there were over 10,000 strong and cheered by thousands more in the Square. It was the first real Labor Day. Since that day, organized labor has never looked back. By 1894, when Labor Day was declared a national holiday, there were 22 national trade unions and 5 states were already celebrating Labor Day as a state holiday.
The laborers who dared to organize and confront the bosses were a courageous group and we are proud of the significant contributions of the Irish to that movement. They were the Irish immigrants who came after the Great Starvation of 1845 and beyond; farmers who crowded into cities and took jobs as unskilled laborers in factories, mines and construction. Poor and uneducated in a strange land, they were highly exploitable, and when abused, they banded together. Herb Gutman. the late American Labor Historian pointed out that it was the immigrants who supported the organization of labor in large numbers. The Irish had seen their people and economy destroyed in Ireland and were determined that it would not happen here. From the very beginning of the unions as a workers protective society, the Irish were there. The 20 men hanged in the Pinkerton Union busting in the Pennsylvania coal fields were all Irish; they were members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians who were given the label: Molly Maguires. They made it possible for men like John Mitchel to give the Mineworkers the solid union they have today. Irish women did their share too. Unlike other immigrant women, many Irish women came alone and immediately entered the work force having no one to depend on. They worked in textile mills, telephone companies, and as domestic help; later moving to clerical and shop work. Unable to work in the field of politics which denied them voting privileges, they became active in union organization. Mary Harris Jones from County Cork organized for the United Mine Workers; Lenora O’Reilly went from child laborer to member of the Knights of Labor and co-founder of the Woman’s Trade Union League; Aunt Sara McLaughlin rose to the top of the Textile Mill Union as organizer; and Julia Sarsfield O’Connor became the first female office in the Woman’s Trade Union League when she was elected President. The story was repeated again and again.
The late John Lawe of County Roscommon once told me how he started at the 5th Ave Coach Company which ran a fleet of green buses in New York. It was called Ireland’s gift to America since most of its employees were Irish. John began as a sweeper cleaning out the buses. In May 1985, when he became President of the Transport Workers Union of America, he joined a respected Irish-American labor fraternity that included Teddy Gleason, head of the Int’l Longshoremen; Paschal McGuinness head of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners; John Sweeny, head of the Service Employees Union; John Kelly of the Professional Employees Int’l; Jack Gannon of the Firefighters; Richard Kilroy of the Railroad Men; and Jimmy Duffy, head of the Int’l Brotherhood of Operating Engineers. These are only some of the leaders in a long tradition that goes back through Tipperary’s Bill Treacy, Kerry’s Mike Quill, and Matt Guinan, and on and on.
Back to the beginning, the Irish were not only involved, but led the way. It took years to succeed in America because of severe anti-union forces; but it took longer in Ireland where Crown opposition was much more severe. That is why Ireland’s labor leaders like Larkin and Connolly remain heroes to this day. And that is also why the Tram Workers Strike in 1913 was such a watershed in Irish history. It was the first major labor confrontation on Irish soil; it was copied from the success of the American movement, which in turn was copied from the Irish Boycott. And the wheel just keeps on turning. Enjoy your Labor Day.
Posted by Jim on August 28, 2014
RÉILTÍN
Written and directed by Paul Mercier
Arlene’s Grocery
95 Stanton Street, New York City
16 – 20 September
Fíbín are delighted to be making their first appearance at the 1st Irish Festival with the world premiere of Réiltín.
Réiltín is the most exciting Irish cultural experience to come to the US in recent years with a soundtrack that reflects a new Ireland. Accompanied by immersive visuals this is a show not to be missed!
Told in Fíbín’s trademark visual style, Réiltín is a coming of age story of a young Irish woman in the middle of an economic crisis. Réiltín is 20 years old. She is a fallout girl, an economic casualty. This is not how her life was supposed to be – she was destined to be a singer. She needs to escape her dead-end world before it is too late. She is back to perform the gig of her life that will decide her future.
The performance marks the first Irish language company ever to premiere in the US. It features the amazing and powerful Dublin singer Clíona Ní Chiosáin.
This dynamic collaboration between well-known Irish writer and director Paul Mercier (writer in residence – Abbey Theatre, founder of Passion Machine Theatre Company, writer of Studs, and TV hit, Aifric ), composer Simon Noble, and singer Clíona Ní Chiosáin is a culmination of 4 months of development between the artists.
Please contact the 1st Irish Festival for more information + Tickets:
1stIrish.org
www.fibin.com
@Fibinteo
www.facebook.com/fibin.fibin