Here are some clips:
So many miles, so many changes
by Larry Kirwan, 11/18/14
“Where once Irish embassy and consulate officials
preferred the lace-curtain certainties of D.C. and NYC, now they travel
nationwide to festivals and cultural events, as willing to listen as to
lecture. And still I feel that a certain potential is unrealized – and I’m
not talking about investment in Ireland, or boosting tourism; no, rather a
meeting of minds, or even more importantly perhaps, a union of hearts
between the home country and the Diaspora…
“Irish America is often seen to be rigid and static.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The social changes of the last few
years have been startling: legalized gay marriage is sweeping the states along
with a general forbearance, if not total, acceptance of this alternate
life-style. But then there’s always been a latent Libertarian streak in
American culture that encourages people to be what they are.
“How odd then that cosmopolitan New York City should
provide the one major issue with which Irish Americans can be whipped every
year. Though there was initial relief on both sides of the Atlantic when the
LGBT group from NBC was invited to march in the 2015 St. Patrick’s Day parade,
it has since come to be seen for what it is – a short-term effort to stop
the hemorrhaging of sponsorship...
“We can argue ‘til the cows come home about Catholic doctrine
and who should or shouldn’t march, but it’s time to put all that behind us and
use plain and unvarnished logic…
“We’re a big people, we handled Know-Nothings and the
tragedy of 9/11; we can take cultural change in our stride, and in a couple of
years both the Irish in Ireland and Irish America will look back and
wonder what the fuss was all about.”
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Letter ("Lost the Plot") 10/21/14
"One
has to wonder if years of marching to the sound of bagpipes has taken its toll
on the hearing and senses of the NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee for its
current decision to allow OUT@NBCUniversal to march in the 2015 St. Patrick’s
Day parade would seem to indicate that they are certainly tone deaf and addled.
That
an LGBT group would march in the NYC parade was a moral, never mind pragmatic
inevitability, and it is not my intention to question that. If the decision was
made to allow an Irish or Irish American LGBT group to march many of us would
breathe a sigh of relief…
However,
in its continued impersonation of the Keystone Cops, the parade committee has
thrown the baby out with the bath water… the parade has now become “Irish
Optional” with participation and placement up for sale…
Meanwhile,
groups that are Irish American the other 364 days of the year… [are] pushed to
the back of the parade to march up empty streets and past an empty reviewing
stand as the committee has long since retreated to a warm room where they can
pat each other on the back over a cocktail.
The NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade
committee has lost the plot… They have “taken the soup” and have sold their
soul, and the parade, to corporate sponsors.
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