Book Review: ‘On Every Tide,’ by Sean Connolly - The New York Times

My sister Nancy with Muireann Walsh - 

proprietess of a pub in Costelloe, our ancestral village.

Resemblance?

We know little about our ancestors.  My mother gathered a lot of information - we have the names of towns and villages in County clare, Galway and east toward Cork.  But the only one born in Ireland in our family's memory was Thomas Costello.  He arrived at Castle Garden,  The Battery about 1860.  He walked from Costello [Casla in Gaelic] to Galway where he boarded a ship to meet his brother in Brooklyn.  

Thomas  lived to  his mid-eightie , after retirement with my grandparents Teresa Costello and George Washington Conk, Sr.  So my Dad, born in 1920, knew him well.

Teresa and George went back with my parents in the 1970's when at least one kind  man declared he knew the Costelloe family and the story of the boys who lost their parents in the famine.  It doubtless helped that the pub was named Costelloe's - as it was when I took Taisy there in 2002.  Nancy (Clare Ann) is the most recent returnee.  You can see from the picture above that the apple has not fallen far from the tree.

- GWC

Book Review: ‘On Every Tide,’ by Sean Connolly - The New York Times

By Fintan O’Toole

Oct. 21, 2022

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ON EVERY TIDE: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World, by Sean Connolly

In June 1963, on his sentimental journey to the land of his ancestors, President John F. Kennedy told an adoring crowd in Cork, Ireland, “Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or gold, or some other crop, but Ireland has had only one export and that is its people.” The remark was meant kindly. Kennedy’s own ascent to the White House made the mass exodus from Ireland look like a rags-to-riches story with a glorious ending. Yet, for those who had stayed in Ireland, J.F.K.’s observation cut a little too close to the bone. If a country’s only export is its daughters and sons, it cannot be such a great place to live.

The raw numbers do tell a grim demographic tale. In 1841, a census recorded Ireland’s population as 8.2 million. In 2022, despite the global population having grown around eightfold since the 1800s, and even after a recent period of rapid population growth on the island, the figure for Ireland and Northern Ireland together is only seven million. We must be very careful about exceptionalism, but this decline really is exceptional. All the more so because, with the horrific exception of the potato famine of the 1840s, the Irish have not died in large numbers in wars or disasters.

Rather, they have departed — and after the initial flight of refugees from the famine, the Irish left home by choice, generation after generation. Between the 1830s and the 1950s, eight million people emigrated from an island not much bigger than Maine. (Around another million have since left, most of them in the 1980s when the Irish economy experienced a long recession.) Once gone, moreover, the Irish generally stayed gone.