The glass suddenly shattered outward in the big window of the General Post Office, known to the locals as the GPO. Armed men, many wearing the yellow armband of Irish Volunteers, others in various military uniforms, had used their rifle butts to announce their arrival. It was the first warlike sound made, the first of many, in what would become known throughout the world as the Easter Rising. Shortly thereafter, a uniformed man by the name of Padraig Pearse came out to read a Proclamation to the confused and somewhat rattled crowds of passersby. He announced the birth of a new nation, the Republic of Ireland, free of the tyranny of Great Britain and determined to chart its own course among the other nations of the world. Later that day, they would use captured wireless equipment in the GPO to send out what would become the very first radio broadcast the world had ever heard: their Proclamation in Morse Code. It was Monday, April 24, 1916. Easter Monday.
Great Britain, already immersed in the Great War, and with a large standing army, acted swiftly to put down the rebellion. It poured thousands of troops across the Irish Sea and into Dublin, supported by artillery which was trained on the buildings and streets of central Dublin. Their gunboats navigated part of the River Liffey and blew apart other fortified positions of the Irish rebels. By April 29th, Dublin mostly in ruins, it was over, and the rebels surrendered.
The Rising might well have ended there, except for the arrogance of the local British Commander, Gen. John Maxwell, who chose to hold trials and execute fifteen of the leaders, one by one, over a period of several weeks. Each volley of shots echoed louder and louder in the souls of the Irish people, and by mid-May, the Rising had matured into the full anger of the Irish Rebellion, with fighting raging across the soon-to-be nation.
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We were just about recovered from the flight from O’Hare to Dublin, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother, who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fears.
Our mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, the gaiety of a joyful family reunion spiraled down into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was Monday, April 21st, 2003. Easter Monday.
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Those two Easter Mondays, separated by some 87 years, somehow mark both the close proximity and the great distances between Ireland and America. They stand out in my mind as signposts in the timeline of my life and the lives of my ancestors. One marked the reasons my Irish family emigrated to America and the other marks the passing of a person so significant in our family’s return to Ireland.
There are millions of American families who can trace their origins to Ireland. Between 1846 and 1950, more than 6 million emigrated. Among them were three of my four grandparents, and the parents of my remaining grandmother, Theresa Oates. It didn’t take them long to establish themselves, get the jobs, start families, buy homes, and build neighborhoods.
People don’t emigrate from countries where life is good. When there is money in your pocket, food on the table, and opportunities to better yourself, people stay put. Take any one of them away and they will head for the door. The tyranny of British rule, the inability of an Irishman to own land within his own country, the failure of crops, particularly the sustaining potato, and a general sense of futility drove millions to the ports of Queenstown (now Cobh), Dublin, Belfast, and Liverpool.
They didn’t so much move as they were pushed to their new destination and new hope 4,000 mile to the west, in the United States. Most of them never thought they would return and most didn’t. Their voyage was long and difficult. I can remember asking my Grandmother Wogan several times if she would ever go back to Ireland, even pointing to the planes flying over our home in Chicago. In her mind, those planes didn’t go to Ireland.
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But where most Irish-American families look on Ireland as their distant origin or maybe just a nice place to visit, my family went in a different direction. In 1977, my sister Mary Ann and her husband Jim Heneghan made the decision to move their small family from a bungalow on New England Street in northwest Chicago back to Jim’s home in the Partry Mountains. His village was Tourmakedy in County Mayo, a dozen or so miles from Westport or Castlebar. They had several reasons for considering such a move, but chief among them was the health of Jim’s parents who were ageing and beginning to fail in health; most of his siblings were here in Chicago.
Most of my siblings were in some process of starting their own families, as was I, so I recall we took the news of the move with some surprise, thinking it temporary at best. I recall helping to load a large shipping box that was dropped by a crane truck in their back yard. We loaded the box with their furnishings and tied it all down for travel by ship. Then they packed their bags, scooped up their young son JJ and headed to the airport. At the last minute, Jim received news on his U.S. citizenship, which meant he would have to follow Mary Ann about a week later. So my sister took the step into this unknown new life with just herself and her son.
She had been to Ireland once before, following her high school graduation, when she vacationed there with her cousin, so the culture was not entirely new to her. What she found upon arrival in this fairly remote part of Ireland, was a badly neglected house and farm, and two people very much in need of assistance. She set about the business of turning things around. Tapping into her bottomless supply of humor and wit, she dubbed her new location “Shangri-La” from the movie about a magical, mythical kingdom.
And so she settled into her new life, adding three more children to her family, and was joined a year or so later by another sister, Terese. “Tassi” as named by our nickname-addicted mother, initially worked in a nearby shirt factory, and in time met Eddie, her future husband, and started her own family of six. Their two homes are about a mile apart from each other.
The Ireland of the late 1970’s would be very different from the Ireland today. When my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979, we had to break the tragic news to my sisters at the local pub which had the only phone available. They knew that a call from America to the pub was bad news. Mary Ann, nicknamed “Minnie” by our mother, could not leave her young family and was herself expecting. Tassi, still single at that point, came home for the funeral. I remember at the time feeling that my sisters lived in a very distant land.
It was later that summer that we pooled our funds to buy our mother a plane ticket to stay a few months with her daughters. We didn’t know it then, but that trip would in great measure define the remaining 25 years of her life. Mom spent at least two to three months each year in Ireland, growing strong bonds with her children and grandchildren in both nations. She came to prefer the spring, the time of “lambing” when the baby lambs were born. She enjoyed the backbreaking work of pulling the sod from the bog, then critical for winter fuel. She brought with her bags and bags of delicacies not then available in Ireland, like Hershey’s Kisses and, most especially, Duncan Hines cake mixes. She was gregarious by nature, so she made friends all through the area in and around my sisters’ homes. She embraced her life in Ireland every bit as much as she embraced her life in Chicago.
And over the years, Chicago and County Mayo go closer and closer to each other. By the time my wife and I could manage to travel, Ireland was much closer and much more within financial reach. Consider that very first ticket we bought my mom in 1979. That $600 would have felt like $2,300 today, according to economic scales. And yet today you can fly there for roughly the same $600, some 40 years later.
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Without that long ago Easter Rising in 1916, no one today would consider making Ireland their new home. The country that emerged from “The Rising” on Easter Monday was a long time coming, but by the 1960’s could claim its own destiny, its own economy, and the tides of emigration slowly began to recede. And from 1979 until 2002, our mother’s annual trek to Ireland prompted us to renew the family ties with our own travel and we did so more than eight or ten times until her passing on Easter Monday, 2003. The distance between Ireland and America shrank from several weeks at sea to 7 or 8 hours in the air.
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Last June, I stood in front of the General Post Office in Dublin with my wife, my children and their spouses, and our five grandsons. The GPO is now both a functioning post office as well as a museum to the cost of Ireland’s freedom. My mind was filled with thoughts, memories, and emotions.
I thought of those fifteen martyrs to their cause. I thought of my sister Minnie’s late father-in-law, James Heneghan, Sr., an Irish rebel who fought in County Mayo. I recalled my sister describing how she and the women of the village prepared his body for the funeral at his death years later. I thought how different that experience must have been for her, growing up in Chicago. I thought of my mother’s many visits that slowly closed the distance between the two countries. I thought of the sacrifices and hardship that went into forming an Ireland where Americans would return and make their lives and raise their families.
Mostly, I felt a quiet pride and a sense of being blessed in being there with our little band of twelve.
My grandsons took their first “crossing” in stride, not at all impressed by the miracle of flight, but very much into the history of this new city. A few days later, when we reached my sisters’ farms, they dove out of the cars and ran headlong into the fields to see the lambs and bullocks up close. In that moment the distance between the two countries seemed to disappear altogether.
I guess I will always be a little haunted by Easter Mondays, but it’s a good thing to be a little haunted at times.