An excellent thread on Slugger-O’Toole about American-British-Irish Diplomacy. Certainly cerebral, it is also a bit elitist…attending conferences with the great and the good like Peter Jay and Sean Donlon is a timely reminder that there are some Sluggerites who simply move in more rarified circles than the rank and file blogger like myself.

But the subject matter………Diplomacy is actually…….all hokum. Relations between United States and Ireland have always been non-existant. Well….certainly “Official” United States. I would argue that the relationship between “Alternative USA” and Ireland, including the North are actually much stronger.

The mid to late 18th century “Scotch-Irish” (sic) who sent letters from Philadelphia and New York to Belfast and Lisburn were perhaps the only real example of an embryonic or fledgling USA doing anything constructive. They influenced their United Irishmen cousins.

On 17th March, the Taoiseach will be in Washington DC handing over that bowl of shamrock to President Obama. The successors to Jay and Donlon as British and Irish ambassadors will be in attendance…….but it is just optics.

The nature of stuff that I have been writing recently ………7,960 words so far (and I am not even 25% there but it will be savagely edited) means that I am writing about a wide variety of themes which are coming up in other forms elsewhere. For example as part of the seminar, I have been asked to write a short piece on American intervention in Ireland. Intervention?

Well of course asking me to write a “short piece” on anything is an optimistic ambition…..and of course the piece I am writing is over-long. But I have used as my starting point..the Ulster-American Folk Park near Omagh in County Tyrone…………tracing as it does with dubious history……the story of the Scotch-Irish migration to the United States. As a sign of our inclusive times the original museum (as I recall it) seems subverted by the addition (as it seems to me) of native-Irish migration.

History by Tea-Towel…..hat tip to the homesteads of Ulyses S Grant and Andrew Jackson and Mr Dunlap, the Strabane-Philadelphia printer. Frankly it never seemed to me that the Ulster-American Folk Park was anything more than a reprisal for the “Irish” obsession with John F Kennedy.

And throw in Billy Kennedy’s books on the Ulster-Scots in the Shenandoah Valley, Appalachians etc and not to mention those Ulster-Scots dictionaries and grammars (sic) and Scottish country dancing and the invention of the Ulster-Scots as “we are a minority too” is complete.

Not that the “Irish”-Irish dont have their American myths. The part in the 1916 Proclamation paying tribute to “our exiled children in America” is pure fantasy. Any Fenian involvement in North America was dead by 1900 and probably even still-born in the American Civil War. Any fanciful notion of Thomas F Meagher (in the North) or his racist counterpart John Mitchel (in the South) that a short lived and bloodless war would train a second “Wild Geese” Army in warfare…..was buried at Antietam, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg.

“Official United States” thru Woodrow Wilson blocked any “Irish” involvement in post-war Europe. And isn’t that whole Good Friday Agreement thing undermined by 9/11.

Irish Nationalists were I think simply relieved that the Good Friday Agreement had happened three years before. It would have weakened their case as civil righters/ “freedom fighters” . I think unionists were  disappointed. They had always claimed Americans in Boston bars were contributing to IRA funding. And 9/11 would have strengthened the “law and order “/ counter terrorism case.

Yet I am inclined to think of four examples from the 1840s….the Famine Years. The Choctaw Nation raised $710 for victims of the Irish Famine. The Choctaw Nation now based in Oklahoma have received one State Visit…that of President Mary Robinson in 1995……that is nice but really a lot of Irish people who survived the Famine were later involved in the wars against the Native Americans.

Frederick Douglas the former slave was helped to escape from USA by some Irish people and spirited away to live in Ireland for a while and he was scathing about the conditions in Dublin. And while he is immortalised in a Divis Street mural, there is no reference to the black people lynched by Irish migrants during the New York City Draft Riots in 1863.

And Captain Marye who sent a shipment of grain from his Virginia lands to Ireland would not know that in December 1862 his land would be fought over by Meagher’s (Union) Irish Brigade and McMillan’s (Confederate) 24th Georgia Infantry (mostly “Irish”) at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

These were engagements with “alternative” America. And the fourth example…the execution of prisoners from the San Patricio Regiment of the Mexican Army in 1847. While airbrushed out of American History….they are still officially traitors to the United States of America…even though they deserted from fighting an unjust war against Mexico.

But could a President of the United States pardon traitors? Well…..yes. When a President leaves Office, he has some powers of pardon……and President Jimmy Carter pardoned Dr Samuel Mudd, the Maryland physician who treated assassin John Wilkes Booth after he had shot dead President Lincoln. Carter was of course the first President from the “Old South” since the Civil War.

So it is certainly possible for President Obama to do the same for los San Patricios. But somehow he wont do it. But it would be at least a more substantive gesture than wearing a nice green tie when he shakes hands with Taoiseach Enda Kenny on St Patricks Day.