I am hardly what people mean when they refer to ‘Irish-Americans’, nor should I care to be so identified: when My Fellow Americans use the term, they have in mind some pathetic, sentimental mythos of immigrants escaping the Famine and ‘the English’ and flocking to Ellis Island and All That. The Kennedy Family Myth, for example: which is hilarious, in a pitiable sort of way, as the Fitzgeralds (and I am a Geraldine long since) were Cambro-Normans who became Hiberno-Normans, ‘the Old English in Ireland’, every Fitzmaurice and Fitzgerald of us, and the Kennedys (likewise appearing in my ancestry) descend with me of the Scots Clan Kennedy, Clann ’icUalraig, of Cassilis and Ailsa. Hardly the fabled ‘plain people of Oireland’…
All the same, my pedigree includes Flann ‘na Sionainne’ mac Máel Sechnaill, Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig, Cellach ‘of the Hard Conflicts’ mac Cerbaill, Tiege Aibhle Ó Cearbhuill of Éile, and many another notable and honored Irish figure.
And for centuries the Irish political class: conniving with the tyrant Bonaparte; conspiring in 1914 with the Wilhelmine Reich … and launching a rebellion in 1916—agreed upon with Germany before the Great War began—even as the 16th (Irish) Division at Hulluch was being gassed by the Germans; far too friendly with the Third Reich; striking hands with every global threat from the Soviets to Gaddafi to Arafat to the ayatollahs; and mired in immemorial Jew-hatred: has been such a stinking disgrace that I’m ashamed (and angry) to share any ancestry at all with anyone in the whole of that damned Republic.
So, Yes: Happy S Patrick’s Day. Thank God he was what we’d now call Welsh or Cumbrian.
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 
Fascinating indeed.
However, I have never heard of official support for the independence movement in Ireland from the Imperial Government (obviously not the Third Reich ;-)) in Berlin before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.
After August 4th, however, I suppose it all fell into place – my enemy‘s enemy is my friend, as the saying goes (and it often is true or partially true, though not always).
Best wishes to you,
a German
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The Howth gunrunning, like that to the Ulster paramilitaries and the SS Ypiranga’s to the Mexican revolutionaries, cannot I think have happened without the Wilhelmine Reich’s tacit if plausibly deniable assent. But opinions may well differ.
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There is no evidence, as far as I know, that these shipments were anything but regular arms sales.
Especially the arms for Ireland were purchased under the pretence that they were intended for Mexico.
The case with the Ypiranga ( which was new to me) was definitely not intended as a provocation, as historian Friedrich Katz has stated.
However, it is obviously time for me to leave your blog behind, since the narrative of Anglo-Saxon historiography obviously has to be maintained at any cost…
But maybe, it’s 1916 in America again now.
Lord have mercy on my people. Amen.
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I shall be sorry to see you go, and disappointed that it be over a set of statements as to which—because they deal with matters which tend inherently to avoid a direct record and must be considered with inferences and the circumstantial (something Señor Prof Katz shall have known, by the way, from his father’s dealings in the Spanish Civil War)—I said opinions and conclusions may well differ.
I hardly know which is more to be regretted:
that you feel impelled to leave;
that I may have written so unclearly as to suggest Ypiranga was precisely part of the same covert and carefully unrecorded and unofficial machinations as those which I concluded from inference the Imperial German (and the Dual Monarchy’s) intel communities were engaged in vis-à-vis Ireland;
that, as I can only conclude from your reference to ‘maintain[ing] at any cost’ some notional ‘Anglo-Saxon historiography’ as a parti pris matter in which you think me engaged, you consider that I am intellectually dishonest;
or that ‘it’s 1916 in America again now’ and I am likely to support any non-centrist and illiberal position here were it ‘1916 in America’.
It’s all equally sad.
With regret, then, and respecting your right to follow your conscience even as I reject your premisses, I can but wish you well to fare. You are always welcome back, you know.
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