The Madden / Meehan / Keena / McGonigle story
I'm Boston-Irish from a diverse immigrant neighborhood. Big, extended family dinners were competitions over whose stories got the most laughs. Most belonged to unions. Irish music and books and decorations cluttered our homes. I journaled about the peace process when I was 11 years old. The Dropkick Murphy's came around when I was 14.
There were 50 languages spoken in my high school, and I wanted Irish. I was told it would be useless. Instead I studied French alongside my Haitian neighbors, then Mandarin in college. I studied abroad in Beijing and got myself invited to the Paddy's Day party at the Irish Embassy there. I wanted to emigrate to Ireland and saw that as a step towards the goal. Then, I got a big scholarship that kept me in the U.S. Did I mention I'm first generation college / professional class? Between 3 and 6 generations, and I was the first.
My immigrant ancestors arrived between An Gorta Mór and the Irish Civil War / the U.S. Immigration Law of 1924. I'm the 6th Madden since they left Kilnahone, Co. Cork and landed in an Irish tenement slum in Boston's South End, for three generations until it was demolished. It is now the site of the Cathedral public housing projects.
My McGonigle family left Clonmany during a campaign of violent evictions of native Irish. The son of an old yankee family got himself disowned to marry Grace McGonigle. Their children and children's children married Irish Catholics too, and I'm the 4th generation of Boston-Irish Fiskes.
My grandmother who helped raise me though, she was the daughter of a laborer from Curry, Co. Sligo and a maid from Killinure, Co. Westmeath. They arrived in Boston just before new immigration laws cut off our chain migration of Westmeath Keenas and Farrells and Sligo Meehans. I learned just recently that her dad grew up in a bilingual, Irish-speaking household near a ruined abbey named for his Meehan ancestors, Cloonameehan. They bought a triple decker in Boston, and thanks to redlining and U.S. housing policy it was sold in the 1970s for the same $30k the family paid in the 1930s. It is now worth $3 million.
They are all housing stories. Eviction, slum clearance, public housing, redlining. I work developing affordable housing. I wrote a memoir about housing called Bittersweet Lane: Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis that features my immigrant ancestors stories. I've learned a way to tell Irish history through housing.
The Irish culture that raised me - my Teamster grandpa and nurse grandmother, my working class uncles, our Boston community's commitment to reunification, music and literature from Ireland and Irish-Americans both - all that culture taught me about struggle and solidarity. Conservative Irish-Americans are loud and they color how the diaspora sees us, but I want the whole Irish diaspora to know that the anti-colonial strain has always been a part of our culture and community too. The renaissance in Irish language and culture happening on the island now is not lost on the diaspora. The connections are getting stronger. I used to have to take the red line to Harvard Square to get a copy of the Irish Times. Now it's in my pocket and I can stream GAA matches at home.
My daughter doesn't have an English name; she has Irish and Korean names. Last night she said, "Oíche Mhaith 아빠." Whatever future comes, we can survive it together, in solidarity with others, drawing on our mythology, culture, and history, and finding strength in the laughter of our children. Saoirse don Phalaistín.