When John Steinbeck came 'back to Ireland'

The website Steinbeck Now notes that John Steinbeck "returned repeatedly to his family roots in Northern Ireland". Steinbeck's grandfather Samuel Hamilton was a Scots-Irish immigrant who settled as a farmer in California’s Salinas Valley in the 19th century. The 1962 Nobel Prize winner's Irish forebears hailed from Mulkeeragh, an area outside Ballykelly in County Londonderry. His grandfather was born on October 7 1830 and emigrated 17 years later, leaving for New York at the time of the Great Famine.

Irish Americans looked and sounded like Orangemen



Cartoon of Bernadette Devlin by Aislin (Terry Mosher)

The words in title are the words of Bernadette Devlin, the youngest person ever to be elected to Westminster, and the figure in the cartoon. You can read her Maiden Speech in the Commons, April 22 1969, here. On her rise to the London parliament and prolific profile her face was seen around the world and she travelled widely, including to America. She was the figurehead of Ireland's discriminated-against and the disposed and had the sympathies of Irish-Americans. A hearing from Irish-America was as natural so as to breath, since animosity based on "England's historic wrongs" were closely and long held. As the Spectator wrote in 1882:

"The hatred of England is cultivated by the American branch of the Irish race “as a sort of religion,” we can well believe. The history of the last two or three years shows it to be so."

Hey Irish America! Arthur Guinness was a Protestant, a Unionist and Irish and British

'England get out of Ireland', St. Patrick's Day Parade 2014, via Long Island Catholic Examiner, Deirdre Haggerty here.

[This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post, here and includes a number of corrections and an update.]

(Update below)

Irish America needs to go buy a book and learn some history. They don't have a baldy notion. Here's some context.

March 17th every year, every where is the day to be Irish. To celebrate Ireland. To celebrate Irishness. But for many, being Irish is a very exclusive and static thing. Padriag Reidy (@mePadraigReidy) alluded to it in the Guardian and rightly slapped it down, saying that'"authentic" cultural events are for faschists.' But I want to take this further.

I'm like Padraig, I'm Irish. But unlike Padraig, I'm from Northern Ireland, I'm a Protestant and I'm a Unionist who sees himself as both Irish and British.