Inside File Behold the 44 million

By Ray O’Hanlon

There is confusion over the exact number of Irish Americans in the land. "IF" mentioned the report a couple of weeks back by Francis X. Clines of the New York Times in which Clines pegged the present number of Irish Americans at 22 million, a figure exactly half that of the fabled 44 million that has been accepted and repeated for years now in just about every context imaginable. Wrote Clines: "Census figures show a 45 percent drop across 20 years in the number of Americans — currently 22 million — who claim some Irish heritage."

But figures from which census? It was the 1990 Census that asked people to list what they considered to be their primary ancestry, but the famed figure of 44 million Americans is deeper rooted and can indeed, as Clines reports, be traced back to the 1980 census. The 44 million were not all entirely Irish in ancestry but did consider themselves Irish enough to be viewed as Irish American.

As for the Clines 22 million figure? Close but no cigar. With the help of some concerned readers, "IF" plunged into that corner of cyberspace occupied by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Now, this column’s navigational ability in cyberspace is roughly on a par with that of Christopher Columbus — don’t quite know where you’re going but keep going and you’re bound to hit something. And hit "IF" did. Based on the 1990 census, the bureau, on Feb. 18, 1998, logged in a figure for Irish Americans of 22,721,252, of which 22,451,511 were born in the U.S. This roughly matches the Clines figure. But Clines did not go far enough. The 22.7 million figure appears to be made up of people who consider themselves wholly Irish American. Deeper into the bureau’s corner of the internet galaxy, a reader with navigational abilities far outweighing those of "IF" found a graph with a figure of 39 million Irish Americans. This total comes under the heading of "Top 15 Ancestry Groups: 1990."

The 39 million Irish Americans made up 16 percent of the U.S. population at the time and were second in number to the largest ethnic group, German Americans, who came in at 58 million, or 23 percent of the population. Americans declaring themselves as English-rooted came in third in the table at 33 million, or 13 percent. This figure of 39 million is presumably made up of a combination of Americans who consider themselves primarily and/or partially Irish American, the "some Irish heritage," as Clines put it. But this figure still falls short of the 44 million mark.

"IF" plunged back into the computer cosmos, at one point ending up on a page for the visually impaired when mentally confused would have been far more appropriate. Eventually, however, something came up. The Census Bureau lists Irish as an ethnic category but it also lists "Scotch-Irish" as an entirely separate category on top of yet another category designated as solely "Scottish." There are, according to the bureau’s 1998 insert, 4,334,197 Scotch-Irish Americans. Now if you add that figure to the 39 million on the PDF graph you are nudging right up to the 44 million. Indeed, if one goes back to the graph an even higher total for "Scotch-Irish" of six million souls turns up.

Does all this solve the mystery? "IF" is open to advice or contradiction on this one. But on the surface, at least, it’s a case of just about all Irish Americans, wholly or in part, still present and accounted for.

Neander-gal

"IF" was doubtless not the only Discovery Channel viewer who was riveted by the recent special on the fate of Neanderthal Man, an ancestor of modern Homo Sapiens who took their leave of our planet roughly 35,000 years ago. The reason, in part at least, for the demise of the Neanderthals was the arrival on the scene of another, more advanced, ancestor of ours, Cro-Magnon man. The DC special, with actors made up and dressed to look like the hardy Neanderthals, was supposed to depict the Dordogne area of central France as it appeared in the middle of an ice age circa 33,000 BC. But, of course, the Dordogne doesn’t quite drum up ice age images these days — even in the depth of winter. The place is as lush a corner of La Belle France as you’re going to find.

So where was this two-hour-long drama filmed? Turns out it was shot on location in Glenveagh National Park in County Donegal in the late winter/early spring. Glenveagh, with a few special effects such as computer-simulated snow if mother nature didn’t full cooperate, apparently looks now much the same now as the Dordogne did 35,000 years ago: rugged and mostly treeless. The gas thing is that in the middle of shooting there was an unexpected burst of warm weather that had the actors boiling alive in their animal skins and layers of facial makeup.

Anyway, and this is not going to concern any of us now, but given the way the Dordogne looked all those years ago, does that mean that Donegal is going to be producing its own wine one of these millennia? Not that we can hang around for 35,000 years. But with the old global warming you never know. Chateau Letterkenny anyone?

Mary quite contrary

Boy oh boy, but does Mary Robinson keep us all guessing or what? Robinson’s career path has been, to say the least, an upwardly sloping curve: lawyer, member of the Irish Senate and president of Ireland. The move to the United Nations, where she currently holds the human rights portfolio, may have been a dip in a technical sense given that head-of-state is about as high as anyone can go on this earth, but there is no doubting the prestige that Robinson, from Castlebar, bestowed on the auld sod when she ran off the opposition in both New York and Geneva.

But Robinson is not a happy camper again and feels constrained by all the protocol and shenanigans so beloved by the world’s sovereign, if not always sincere, nation states. So there is talk of a job in the private sector. The Ford Foundation has been mentioned and there are doubtless other foundations about that would desire the services of a woman who has made a career of rocking systems from the inside.