LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The column in question by Michael Godfrey
EVEN in faraway California I enjoy reading your newspaper on a daily basis. Why? Well, I’m one of those people who belong to the Irish diaspora and my family roots are in Co Carlow.
The family left sometime shortly after 1853, forced out by the Great Hunger. Our family lost knowledge of that lineage back in 1922 and I discovered it only in the past year through a combination of DNA testing and archival research. With an Irish grandfather, I can certainly count myself as Irish, since that qualifies me to apply for citizenship.
I’m not sure how that would sit with your columnist Michael Godfrey, who this morning wrote derisively of Irish people born outside of Ireland. Here’s what I found both offensive and ludicrous: ‘Don’t get me wrong – like practically everyone else in this country, I have English cousins. My late uncle emigrated to England in the 1950s, where he met and married an Irish woman from Gorey. The couple had four children and, as youngsters, like thousands of other first generation Irish/English, they came “home” to spend their summers with the rest of the gang, such as it was.’ I find it ludicrous for Mr Godfrey to say he has ‘English’ cousins, when his cousins were born of two Irish parents. I also find it offensive when Mr Godfrey puts the word home into quotation marks, as if to suggest these ‘English’ cousins had no right to call the country of their parents ‘home’. He even seems to think one needs to know how to pronounce the word ‘taoiseach’ to qualify as true Irish.
Fortunately, I can pass that test and I even know what the word means. But I wonder what Mr Godfrey would have to say about the government’s recent awarding of citizenship to a man based solely on his 100% Irish DNA? As Gaelic is not passed through DNA, I suspect the newly-minted Irish citizen does not speak a word of it, let alone ‘taoiseach’. But there you have it: he’s a 100% Irish citizen who’s never even been to the country.
In my view, that’s 100% forward thinking on the part of the taoiseach and his team in Dublin.
