Hugh Linehan: Ireland doesn’t do nostalgia. We’re happy to let others do it for us
Spare a thought for the White House speechwriters currently thumbing glumly through the collected works of Heaney and Yeats in search of fresh meat for their boss’s address to the Oireachtas and his speech in Mayo
Perhaps that’s true. But one very powerful, highly sentimental strain of Irish nostalgia does exist. It just doesn’t originate in Ireland. From the mid-19th century onward, waves of migration to the big cities of the US northeast created a market for drama, stories and songs lamenting the misery of Irish exile and usually declaring a fervent desire to “be back in [insert evocative name of townland here]”. There was also a lot of talk about mothers.
But Biden himself now embodies a powerful American nostalgia for an imaginary time when twinkly-eyed old Irish pols delivered for their blue-collar voters and cracked deals in smoke-filled rooms. In the era of Hunter Biden’s laptop, that vision looks a little frayed, and the extraordinary age at which this president will seek re-election seems symptomatic of a society unable to escape its past, but it’s probably enough to see off the far more malevolent revanchism of Magaworld.
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