Redtree Times

Norah McGuinness (Irish, 1901-1980)– River to the Sea, 1959

Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

–-George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904)

I chuckled when I came across the lines above from a G.B. Shaw play that centered on his native land. My reading of this is that he sees it as a transformative place with a beauty that inspires a balloon filled with lofty dreaming and a harshness that bursts that balloon. As a result, those there sit at two ends of a spectrum, either as aspirational dreamers or angry cynics. Very little neutrality.

I don’t know that this is true, either then or now. Most likely it was seen as such by Shaw for its dramatic effect. I can’t really say. But Ireland, as both a real and mythic land, certainly does have a lasting and sometimes transformative effect on people. Few, if any, holidays have people proudly their claiming ancestral roots in any country like they do for St. Patrick’s Day.

I have written a number of times before here about my Irish ancestors. My great-great-grandfather worked on the railroads being built here in the Northeast in the second half of the 19th century and his family settled in the Binghamton, NY area. Most of his family worked in the tobacco industry, either as leaf strippers or cigar rollers.

Like any family, it was marked by periods of happiness, endless hard labor, and tragedy.

A typical American story.

Below is post from a few years ago that I am sharing on this St. Patrick’s Day, mainly because I like the painting and the song.

My thoughts on this holiday always go to my mom whose birthday fell on this date. She would have been 94 today. I grew up thinking we had Irish blood through my mom’s family since her mother’s family name was O’Dell, which sounded pretty Irish. Found out through genealogy that it was not Irish at all.

It was originally Wodell when they first arrived here in the 17th century. The name shifted over the early American generations to O’Dell.

Actually, they were English. Very English.

Turns out that the Irish part of my ancestry came through my dad’s side. Took many years to find much on it but with DNA testing and the greater access to records via the web, I found that these ancestors, the Tobin family, came out of Barnlough in County Tipperary in Ireland in 1852 as a whole family unit, coming through NY then heading to Rhode Island. Both parents died within months after landing here and their children, many of adult age, dispersed across the region with some heading west and settling in Chicago in the expansion that took place in the second half of the 19th century.

A typical American story.

For this St. Paddy’s Day, I thought I would share a piece of art above from a well-known Irish artist and illustrator of the 20th century, Norah McGuinness. I really liked– and felt a kinship with– her use of color and forms in this piece. She worked in a visual language that I can understand.

Also, let’s hear an Irish song. Well, it’s an Irish song written by an American that has become a very popular song in the Irish culture. It’s The Galway Girl from Steve Earle. The version below is from the Irish musician Mundy who had a hit with this song in Ireland in 2008 that topped the charts for several weeks. I think you can hear why it caught on so well.