Going full circle
Native land's new prosperity has many reversing their exodus
Second of two parts
DINGLE, Ireland -- Once there was a neighborhood near the Brookline-Boston line known as Little Kerry because so many of the residents hailed from this lush, rustic county in the southwest of Ireland.
Today, here on Kerry's Dingle peninsula, there is a concentration of so many families who once lived in Massachusetts that the locals call it Little Boston.
A 19th-century famine made the Irish the world's most storied nomads, creating a diaspora numbering 70 million. But now Ireland's sudden prosperity is luring back those who would rather live and raise children in the land of their birth.
After a century and a half of wandering, the Irish are coming home. And the country they've come back to, like the places they've left behind, is changing indelibly as they move.
The Irish government estimates that, worldwide, about 150,000 Irish-born people have moved back to Ireland since 2001, up to 20,000 of them from the metropolitan areas of Boston and New York. US Census figures document the American exodus: There were 160,000 Irish-born living in the US in 2000; since then the total has dropped by 20 percent, to an estimated 128,000.
In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, Irish soldiers went to the European continent to fight other people's wars. They called this exodus the Flight of the Wild Geese. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the term was used to refer to the immigrants who left a colonized, impoverished Ireland to build other countries -- America, in particular.
With Ireland now one of the richest countries in the world, with a standard of living and quality of life that top more than one financial index, the Wild Geese of this generation are returning, in droves. Boston, once referred to in the west of Ireland as "the next parish over," is supplying many of those returnees.
The Irish government says several thousand who have lived in or around Boston have moved back since 2001; immigrant advocates suggest the figure is much higher. Among the biggest advertisers in the Irish Emigrant, a weekly newspaper distributed mostly through the city's Irish pubs, are freight services that ship containers back to Ireland. And one of the fastest growing cable TV outlets in Ireland is the North American Sports Network, which allows returning Irish expatriates to get their Red Sox or New England Patriots fix.
Some are going back because they're homesick. Others to avail of the opportunities in a newly prosperous country. Still others because of an increasing hostility toward immigrants in the United States, a hostility -- or at least an unwelcoming wariness -- that many Irish are stunned to encounter in Boston, long seen as America's most Irish-friendly town.
Mary and Robbie Griffin had a great life in Boston. He worked in construction, she worked taking care of elderly people. They would meet other immigrants, many of them from Kerry, down at Peter-Dick's, a Dorchester pub where they easily mixed with other regulars -- police officers, firefighters, teachers, and construction workers, many of them the children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants.
But they longed for home. They knew that the poor, repressed Ireland they left in the 1980s had been transformed, and decided to give it a go. Seven years ago, they bought a piece of land overlooking Dingle Harbor. At $80,000, it was a bargain by American standards, and even by Irish standards today. They spent $200,000 to put up a sprawling 10-bedroom house, running a bed and breakfast business to support their three daughters, aged 6 to 14, who were born in Boston.
Mary misses Boston a bit, but she likes the pace of Ireland better, and the support of an extended family. Like many Irish immigrants who lived in Boston and other parts of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, she and Robbie had become legal US residents, taking advantage of special visa programs steered through Congress by New England politicians of Irish ancestry. They moved back to Ireland not because they had to, but because they wanted to.
"We came home, because this is home," she said.
There are only about 1,500 people living in and around Dingle. There are, by some accounts, more than a dozen families that have moved back here from the Boston area in the last five years, and nearly two dozen children who were born in Boston now going to Dingle area schools.
"If this is Little Boston," Mary Griffin mused, "it's not so little anymore."
Murphy, 42, moved to Boston in the Irish immigrant heyday of the mid-1980s, when the town was crawling with young, ambitious Irish folk. He got a job rehabbing kitchens. One day, in the early 1990s, he and some other Irishmen were taking apart an old bar in Kendall Square, in Cambridge. It was snowing, and Murphy had parked his pickup truck out front, illegally. When he came out with a section of the bar to put in the pickup, he saw a Cambridge police officer standing on the sidewalk.
"Jayzuz," the officer said, shaking his head, betraying an Irish accent. "We'll miss this place."
Then the officer looked at Murphy sternly.
"You know you're illegally parked here," he said, as Murphy recalled the encounter.
"I'm sorry, sir, but. . ."
"Ah," the officer said, his eyebrows arching. "Where ye from?"
"County Kerry, sir."
"Christ," the officer told him, "I'm from West Cork meself."
Dennis Murphy left the truck parked illegally for three hours. He didn't get a ticket.
That Boston is gone -- or mostly so -- and so is Murphy. He moved back home a decade ago, but has returned several times to visit. After Sept. 11, 2001, he noticed a distinct change. The accent that used to draw smiles now can draw furrowed, suspicious brows from immigration officers and even ordinary Bostonians. The young Irishmen who took Murphy's place in the construction crews wouldn't dare park illegally, knowing that a routine license check could land them in handcuffs and on the next flight out of Logan.
"There's a hostility," Murphy said. "It's intimidating. I never thought I'd say that about Boston, of all places, but it's true."
The return to Ireland has its bumps as well.
Some of those returning home who made their living in the building trades or service industry in America say they face stiff and unexpected competition back home from Eastern Europeans, especially the Polish. Talbot Street, one of Dublin's most famous thoroughfares, is now lined with Polish shops and cafes. Young women who made good tips working tables on Cape Cod and pulling pints in Brighton have returned to Ireland to find those jobs have been filled by other Europeans. Throughout Ireland, a visitor is as likely as not to be served by a waiter or waitress whose accent was honed in Gdansk rather than Galway.
Dennis Murphy, who now runs a guesthouse in Dingle, said he does not begrudge the Polish anything.
"The Polish are doing for our economy what we did for the economy around Boston in the 1980s and the 1990s," he said.
Seamus Brennan, the Irish Cabinet minister for social affairs, said in an interview that about 20,000 Irish people are moving back to Ireland every year. The country's population of just over 4 million people is growing at a rate not equaled since just prior to the potato blight of the 1840s, when there were 8 million people in Ireland.
The country needs the influx to feed an economy that has been Europe's fastest-growing for more than a decade. In January the Irish government established its first "green card" system, which allows employers to recruit highly skilled workers from outside the European Union. Michael Martin, the minister in charge of trade and employment, said he expects about 10,000 such green cards to be issued each year.
But there is in Ireland, for the first time in its history, concern about inward immigration, not from its natives streaming back from Boston, New York, and London, but from eastern Europe, especially Romania, and from Africa, especially Nigeria.
The Irish government's attitude about immigrants, both its returning citizens and foreigners who want legal status, has shifted dramatically. In the 1980s and '90s, the government basically took a hands-off approach. Now the government is encouraging people to come home, while for the first time taking an active role in lobbying for the undocumented in America.
Brennan said the government had funded research projects to assess the needs of returning Irish, and last year published a "Returning to Ireland" guide, outlining existing health and welfare benefits.
Last year the Irish government also created an "Irish Abroad" unit and has thrown its weight behind the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, a US-based group that is advocating passage of a bill sponsored by US senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John McCain of Arizona that would grant amnesty for some illegal immigrants and create a system by which others could apply for legal status. The bill has the support of the Bush administration, but it is opposed by many Republicans, who have framed the immigration issue as one of law and order.
"There is a wider recognition by the government of the contribution successive waves of Irish immigrants have made both to their new homelands and to Ireland, where many sent money back to their families, and our obligation to these communities," said Austin Gormley, a spokesman for the Irish government.
Ray O'Hanlon, author of "The New Irish Americans," said that while he has no doubts the Irish government wants its native-born to return, he is less sure of how well they understand the plight of the undocumented in America.
"There are many undocumented Irish in America who have too much to lose that they won't even risk traveling back to Ireland when relatives are sick or have died, or for weddings and births," O'Hanlon said.
Throughout the 1980s and even well into the 1990s, when Ireland's unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent, successive governments did little to prevent up to 30,000 people from leaving the country each year. But now, as the Irish government acknowledges its obligations to citizens who felt forced to leave the island, politicians have had to deal with what they call "the mammy factor," mothers in Ireland whose children are living illegally in the US, demanding the government do more to assist them.
But most of those returning to Ireland are doing so willingly.
Tom Griffin was one of 52 civil engineers who graduated from University College Dublin in 1986; 49 of them left Ireland.
Griffin went to Boston, where he married his American wife, Ellen. Their marriage made him a legal US resident. They lived first in Watertown, then Dorchester. Griffin became a US citizen nearly a decade ago, but a few years ago the couple decided to move to Ireland, near Lispole, a small village in Kerry where Griffin grew up. In Ireland, there is a great demand for engineers.
"We liked Boston, but we decided this was a better place to bring up a family," Ellen explained.
With five children, two of whom were born in Boston, the Griffins pay about $1,500 a year for health insurance; in Boston, with three fewer children, they were paying $10,800.
A recent United Nations study ranked Ireland ninth among the 21 most industrialized countries in child well-being, using 40 indicators to measure how well children are educated and cared for. The United Kingdom and the United States were dead last in the rankings based on, among other things, poverty levels and the quality and cost of health care.
"The weather can get to you; the winters are dark," said Ellen, whose father was from County Mayo but settled in Connecticut. "But there's a good quality of life here."
Two of their children are citizens of both Ireland and the United States. All five of their children are citizens of the European Union, which means they can live and work in at least 27 countries, a number that will likely grow as the children do.
"The world has changed so much," Ellen said.
"They made an exception for me then," said Murphy, home in Dingle for a wedding. "I don't know why they can't make an exception for people now."
Now 42, with a green card and a little money in his pocket, Murphy can afford to return to Ireland for regular visits, while so many of the younger Irishmen he works with are unable to travel back, because they wouldn't be able to get back into the United States.
Murphy blames the Irish government for not doing more for undocumented immigrants. He notes that the Irish government has taken heat from its citizens for allowing Shannon Airport to be used as a stopover for US troops going to and from Iraq, but that such an unpopular gesture has produced no tangible benefits for Irish people looking to move to or stay in the United States legally. He thinks the Irish government should push for a bilateral visa deal with the United States. Last year, for example, about 5,000 Americans moved to Ireland to work, according to FAS, the Irish job training agency; about a third of that number of Irish went to the United States looking for work.
Murphy said that despite his legal status, he is almost always treated with suspicion and sometimes disrespect by US immigration officials when he returns to Boston from trips home to Ireland, a creeping hostility he says did not begin until after Sept. 11.
"Every year, the hostility seems to get worse," he said.
Hostility, however, is a two-way street. Anti-Americanism is a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, its growth fairly contemporaneous with Ireland's growing prosperity -- an irony, given that the US investment has fueled Ireland's rapid ascension to the ranks of the world's richest countries. There are more than 600 US companies operating in Ireland, their more than 90,000 employees accounting for 5 percent of the Irish workforce, and 70 percent of those working for non-Irish companies.
The Irish, like most Europeans, are overwhelmingly and vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq. James Kenny, who last fall completed a three-year posting as the US ambassador to Ireland, suggests the Irish hostility he experienced was more anti war than anti-American.
"I think the relationship, both ways, was sort of taken for granted, by both sides," he said during an interview in Dublin before leaving his post. "We're going to have to work at this."
Kenny worries that the growing trend of the Irish "giving up on America" -- that is, fewer moving to the United States and more moving back to Ireland -- is not a temporary phenomenon. He said that as the Irish look east, toward the European continent, where they are legally entitled to work and settle as members of the European Union, or to Australia, where the Irish are welcomed with the laissez-faire attitude they enjoyed in the United States for more than a century, "There is a real danger that the Irish will simply not come to the US in anywhere near the numbers they have for nearly two centuries."
Even those who are allowed to enter the United States legally on three-month work visas are increasingly declining to take advantage of that program.
In 2001, a record number of college students from Ireland -- 13,405 -- went to work in the United States on so-called J-1 visas. Traditionally, about half of the students who came for summer jobs came through Boston, and many worked on Cape Cod. By 2006, the number of J-1s had been cut in half, to 6,800. Many Irish students say they avoid the United States because of the difficulty of getting Social Security numbers they need to work, the hostility directed at immigrants, and the horror stories they hear about summary deportations and intimidating interrogations.
"It's not worth the hassle," said Elizabeth Walsh, a 20-year-old Irish student who last summer got a waitressing job in Brussels instead of on Cape Cod, where her sister and many of her older friends had worked legally in previous years.
Sipping a cappuccino outside a cafe in Dalkey, an upscale seaside town south of Dublin, Walsh described how a friend two years ago sought a J-1 visa to work in Boston. She said because of bureaucratic delays, her friend's request for a Social Security number was not processed by the time she tried to board her flight. She said her friend was reduced to tears by an immigration officer who detained her at Shannon Airport and interrogated her, accusing her of trying to sneak into the country. Her friend missed her flight to Boston.
"She had done everything properly," Walsh said, "and they still treated her like a criminal."
The blooming affluence in Ireland has dramatically altered the relationship with "the next parish over" and the rest of the United States. Instead of seeing America as a place to start a new life, an increasing number of Irish see it as a place for a vacation or a bargain hunt. An all-time high of 500,000 visited last year -- a 30 percent increase in just three years -- meaning that, when measured by a percentage of national population, there are more Irish visitors to the United States than from any other nation, according to the Department of Homeland Security. When measured in sheer numbers, Ireland, with just 4 million people, ranks 14th among nations sending visitors to the United States. Some of those numbers reflect repeat visitors: It is now common for Irish women to spend just a few days in New York or Boston to shop, their savings on designer clothes more than paying for the flight.
Citing those annually increasing visitor numbers, Aidan Browne, a Dublin-born Boston-based attorney who does business in both countries, believes the talk of anti-Americanism is exaggerated. He said the Irish are unlike any other Europeans: They are European by birth and political outlook but American in their economic views because of the historical links between the countries, especially immigration. While some in Ireland view America as a behemoth too quick to use its military might, there are just as many who admire American respect for individual rights, creativity, and the opportunity that lured Browne and so many of his generation to the United States.
But Browne, who became a naturalized US citizen two years ago, said the Irish practice business like Americans, favoring low corporate taxes to stimulate economic growth instead of the high taxes in most other European companies.
"The Irish are more like the Yanks than they'd care to admit," Browne said.
Paudie Fitz and his wife, Caren, lived in Boston for 17 years, half their lives. They had, like many immigrants, gone over, thinking they'd stay just a couple of years, make a little money, move home. But they got very comfortable in Dorchester. Paudie built up a successful painting business.
Still, they believed their children could have a better life in Ireland. And so, in the late 1990s, Paudie bought a piece of land in Garfinny, just outside Dingle, for a little more than $20,000. They built a house for a little more than $100,000. And they moved back to Ireland a few years ago.
Paudie manages the Senior B football team. Some of his players are teenagers. The rock of the team is Miceal "Mickey" Chournear, who at 36 is an ancient in an ancient game. While intercounty matches and those involving premier squads draw huge crowds on Sunday afternoons, the B teams like the one Paudie Fitz coaches play matches whose spectators are usually dictated by the time of play and the weather.
Besides Paudie Fitz's children, and Mickey Chournear's 5-year-old son, there was no one else watching the match on this rainy, summer's evening.
The next day the weather cleared and Paudie Fitz and three other families headed off to a remote beach. Their children -- a dozen of them ranging in ages 5 to 13, most of them wearing green and yellow Kerry football jerseys -- frolicked on the slate-gray sand.
"You see those kids?" Paudie Fitz said, pointing to the newest Wild Geese, the ones who came back. "Every single one of them was born in Boston."
Some of the Wild Geese complain about a greed and materialism that they don't remember in the Ireland they left 20 or more years ago. They see gangland murders -- five in six days in Dublin in December -- and carnage on roadways clogged with fast new cars. Housing prices have skyrocketed in Ireland, higher than Boston. And they wonder if they have made some Faustian deal with prosperity.
Maidhc (Mike) O Se, 64, is not one of them. He remembers the poverty that drove him to leave Kerry in 1955. He joined two brothers and a sister in Chicago. He drove trucks to Boston.
"I was never one day out of work," he said.
He worked in a Sears distribution center. He traveled to Alabama and marched in civil rights protests in the 1960s. He came back to Dingle about 10 years ago. He is well known here as one of the best traditional musicians around, a virtuoso on the button accordion.
"I wish I could have stayed in my native country," he said. "No one should have to leave their native country just to find work."
Now, the Irish don't have to. That reality has dramatically altered their relationship with the United States in general, and with Boston in particular. The Irish are increasingly coming to America as affluent visitors, not economic refugees. But as the Irish experience in America continues to change, some Irish complain that their long history in, and contributions to, the United States will be forgotten.
Two years ago, Dick Spring, Ireland's former deputy prime minister and foreign minister, arrived in Chicago to deliver a speech to an international affairs conference. During an interview in Dublin, Spring recalled that US immigration officers at O'Hare Airport were not impressed by his diplomatic passport. They put him in a room and interrogated him.
"I saw the ugly side of America for two hours," said Spring, who is married to an American and who is close to Bill Clinton, having played a prominent role in the Northern Ireland peace process in the mid-1990s. "It was easier, and more pleasant, to get into China."
Eventually, Spring was given a stamp, and a stern warning not to stay more than three days. He then left to deliver his speech.
His topic?
Why America is losing its friends abroad.
Kevin Cullen can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 