So recommends Jay P. Dolan, emeritus professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Long established as one of the leading scholars on the history of the Catholic Church in America, the Bridgeport, Conn.-born academic developed a second specialty after a six-month sabbatical teaching at University College Cork in the 1980s.
“That pushed me more towards looking more into Irish history and Irish-American history,” said the 72-year-old Dolan.
Thus began a “love affair that intensified over many years.”
His new book “The Irish Americans,” say his publishers, is the first work on the subject aimed at the general reader since “The American Irish: A Social and Political History,” which was written in the 1960s by the journalist and diplomat William V. Shannon.
Dolan’s book is a product of 18 years of researching for and teaching a class that attracted 100 or so students annually.
“The kids in Notre Dame just ate it up,” the professor said. “It was very successful.”
One reason were the colorful personalities that dot the political landscape: the Daleys, the Kelly-Nash machine before them in Chicago, the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds, Tammany leader Charles Murphy, his predecessor Richard Croker, Al Smith and Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, to name a few.
Another was the ethnicity and roots revival since the 1960s.
“Being ethnic allows you to belong to a group that has a rich heritage,” Dolan said. But the Irish have always willing to proclaim their origins, he added.
His father opened a bar called Dolan’s Corner in Bridgeport in 1944 and people got a free drink every St. Patrick’s Day if they turned up wearing something green.
That patron saint’s day was particularly special for Joseph Dolan and the former Margaret Riordan. She gave birth to their second son on March 17, 1936.
They were tough times for a couple that already had a 5-year-old. Dolan senior had gone broke and lost his restaurant during the worst years of the Great Depression. But he recovered sufficiently to open the bar and later extended his business operations into nearby Fairfield, where he opened a steakhouse. By the 1960s, he was a successful businessman, the traumas of the Great Depression firmly behind him.
In the first year of that decade, Jay Dolan, a graduate of Fairfield Prep, was ordained a priest. His career early on followed the same trajectory as that of Notre Dame professor of theology the Rev. Richard McBrien, who described his colleague as “a first-rate American church historian and a nice person besides.”
McBrien added: “We go back many years — to the late 1950s when we were seminarians together at St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Conn., and later at St. John Seminary in Brighton, Mass., before Jay went off to study theology in Rome.”
Dolan left the priesthood, however, in 1971, and subsequently married Patricia McNeal. They have two sons, now 32 and 31.
He has remained very active in the church. “I’m a Vatican II Pope John XXIII Catholic. He’s my pope,” he said “I guess that makes me a liberal Catholic.”
A career as a professor was the natural choice after his years as a priest. “I was always good at academics,” said Dolan, who previously had been planning to work as a college chaplain. “I was able to write, and write well,” he said.
“There was a lot of hard work, sweat and a few tears along the way that enabled me to achieve a certain notoriety in my profession,” he said.
Novelist and essayist Peter Quinn said: “Jay Dolan is a walking embodiment of the phrase ‘a gentleman and a scholar.’ His groundbreaking work on the history of the Catholic Church has been profoundly influential, and his writings on Irish America are incisive and important.”
Quinn added: “I can’t think of a scholar or historian I admire more than Jay.”
Fr. McBrien said: “Although I haven’t seen a copy of his latest book on Irish Americans, I’m confident that it is up to the same high standards of research and writing that we have come to expect from his previous books.”
In “The Irish Americans,” Dolan’s concentrates on three areas where Irish influence was disproportionately large – the church, politics and the labor movement – and a fourth that made the group quite distinctive, nationalism. Only the Poles, he said, a rather less numerous and more recent immigrant group, showed a similar commitment to the cause of self-determination back home.
Clearly, though, it’s in the church that Irish influence was felt most. Even today about 40 percent of the clergy are of Irish ancestry, Dolan said, and New York has yet to have a non-Irish archbishop.
Although less well known today, the Irish presence in the top ranks of the labor movement was considerable. “You don’t see it so much with the Italians and the Germans,” Dolan said.
Irish trade unionists tended to come in two varieties, moderates concerned with bread-and-butter issues and militant radicals — which, he said, foreshadowed later ideological divisions in the community.
Dolan has left out of his account other areas of endeavor such as literature, sports and music. While Irish-American fiction was an important part of his Notre Dame course, he doesn’t consider himself an authority on the subject. “It would have taken me another four years to do,” he said.
The book, he said, is a “narrative, a story,” which begins in the 18th century. When the historian first read deeply on the subject, he was astounded at the extent of the Irish presence in America, both Catholic and Protestant, in the generations before the Famine. He was surprised, too, at the level of trade between this country, particularly Philadelphia, and Ireland.
Important personalities in the early parts of the history are County Meath-born military leader William Johnson, Declaration of Independence signatory Charles Carroll and Thomas Addis Emmet, the United Irishmen leader who became a prominent New York lawyer.
The Irish story in America becomes largely a Catholic one from the Famine onwards.
“The poorest of the poor never left Ireland,” he said of the watershed event, “but those who were able to get out arrived with rags on their back.”
He pointed to Patrick Kennedy, perhaps the best-known Famine immigrant, who died of cholera in Boston 10 years after he fled County Wexford. His wife, who was born Bridget Murphy, subsequently opened a store and his son, Patrick Kennedy Jr., went on to become a businessman and an important politician in the city. The politician’s son, grandson of the bedraggled immigrant, amassed a huge fortune.
Dolan agrees with sociologist the Rev. Andrew Greeley’s position that the Irish have been the most successful immigrant group in America.
It’s just one reason why more than 40 million Americans identify themselves as Irish.
Dolan quotes sociologist Michael Hout who has looked at what people of dual (or multiple) heritage write on a census form: “Given a choice, they pick Irish.”
Why? “They choose Irish,” writes Dolan, “because of the positive traits associated with that group – gregariousness, wit, charm – and because this choice enables them to identify vicariously with the underdog and claim as their own the Irish success story.”
The historian is himself entirely of Irish ancestry, though only his Riordan grandfather was born in Ireland. He doesn’t know very much about the other bloodlines.
“That’s the next book,” he said.