Actor’s pitch line

“I was accepting this award and I did know what to say. I’d been thinking for some time about what it meant to be Irish living in America, because obviously, having come here in 1987, my sense of being Irish and my sense of being American are things that I constantly think about.”
The chair in which Byrne is reflecting on his transatlantic sense of self is in a corner of a Greenwich Village hotel where he once lived after his apartment was flooded.
It’s a welcoming place, a bright and warm space. As if inspired by an “old familiar,” and along with his reflections on identity, Byrne is especially thinking about space and place.
As such, the Dublin-born actor is the leading voice in an effort to develop an all embracing Irish Center in Manhattan, a place where Irishness, in all its forms, can be nurtured, expressed and perhaps even explained.
“I would say that I am probably still as Irish as I was the day I left in 1987 in many, many ways but there’s a part of me for sure that has been influenced by living in this country, obviously. But after a time you begin to ask what does it mean to be Irish, Irish American,” said Byrne, whose career has recently hit a new high mark with his Emmy Award nomination for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, in his case the role of “Paul” in the HBO series “In Treatment.”
“If you live in a city like Dublin, you’re constantly surrounded by a kind of invisible community,” said Byrne. “You can walk from O’Connell Street to Stephen’s Green and you’re bound to meet somebody; you’re part of the community without feeling privileged or feeling that it’s something you’re entitled to. It just is the way it is.
“And when you leave your city of birth, or belonging, and you move to another place, something fundamentally changes inside you and you become part of the place that you go to; and in a way you don’t ever belong to the place that you’ve left in quite the same way again,” Byrne said.
“There’s before you leave, and after you leave. It’s an interesting phenomenon the way the returning Irish person is treated. For example, in Tom Murphy’s play “The White House,” which is about a guy who goes back, he goes into the local pub and it’s about how he’s perceived and treated.
“The person who never leaves the town has a different view of the world than you have, so there’s the conflict between the returning person and the person who has never left. It can be a benign kind of conflict, but sometimes it can have an edge of malevolence about it, that there’s some kind of betrayal at having left the tribe.”
This, Byrne said, could transfer itself to a view of people, and, in the case of Ireland, Irish Americans returning to look for their roots being seen by the native Irish as somehow na