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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
74 November/December 2020
D
ONALD TRUMP could repatriate Apple and
Goole, rip up the Good Friday Areement,
and next March
th
spend the day on the
reens at Mar Al Lao.
Expect anything from the United States
nowadays.
That’s why I’m sounding the alarm from Scranton,
Pennsylvania, birthplace of Democratic presidential
nominee Joe Biden, though not somewhere he spent
much time after the age of ten.
That’s also why I’ve been trying to give Ireland fair
warning.
But, for whatever the reason, it looks like I’ve worn
out my hundred thousand welcomes in the land of
my grandfather’s birth. Judging from Irish media’s re
-
cent reaction to my recently released novel, ‘Paddy’s
Day in Trump Town’, you’d think I accused local lads
of peeing on the Blarney Stone and then wrote a nov
-
el exposing their gross national sacrilege.
Which, I did, of course.
But that doesn’t excuse bougie Irish publishers,
smug radio talkshow hosts, pompous book review
-
ers, and other elite social commentators of the Gael
who ignore my Siren’s wail about our mutually bleak
future if America’s 45th president gets re-elected.
I blame the Irish for Trump’s ascendancy in the first
place.
Had countless long-ago Irish ancestors not giv
-
en birth to brave immigrants and sent them to my
Northeastern Pennsylvania part of America to mine
anthracite in underground hard coal country, their
descendants’ bigotry would never have propelled
Trump’s your fault
By Stephen Corbett
Trump – and
Biden - are
culturally Irish
Omadhaun Trump over the top and into the White
House. These same lads, the “Irish Guys” as I call
their racist, sexist, white male social club in my
book, are now doing anything and everything in their
power to guarantee Trump’s re-election. That terrible
prejudice once endured by the Irish themselves is
what my disturbing novel is all about. And now once
again in November Irish America will push this bigot,
this imposter, the man who threatens life itself, back
towards oce.
My tribe of Irish Americans shat on what the sham
-
rock symbolised.
And that’s news, not good for the Irish tourist in
-
dustry, corporate media and the island economy, of
course, but news nonetheless.
I know both sides of this sharp Celtic dagger.
As a two-fisted, award-wining newspaper colum
-
nist for decades, I created a career knocking out poli-
ticians who were crooked in that Irish-American way.
Government ocials once arrested me and my boss
-
es for doing journalism in America. But we fought
the corrupt system, winning one of the nation’s most
prestigious journalism honours for our service to a
free press.
My tribe of Irish Americans
shat on what the shamrock
symbolised.
INTERNATIONAL
November/December 2020 75
cold-shouldered my warm, personal inquiry the
way she might stare down a spoiled salmon salad.
Radio legend Pat Kenny, who loved talking with me
on the air when he reached out during the 2005 Mi
-
chael Jackson pedophile trial I covered for a small
California paper and Sky News ignored my collegial
email. Christ, after three emails, I couldn’t even get
a response from Declan Varley, novelist and Galway
Advertiser editor.
Because these blatherskites get timid when it
comes to Trump, tourism and outlaw troublemakers
like me, Ireland better beware. Weak-kneed press
clerks and publishing prima donnas stifle creativity,
freedom and the unbridled hunt
for truth.
Let them eat peat.
Leo Varadkar will be much bet
-
ter o next time he heads to the
White House if he talks of the bog
rather than the golf course.
Remembering what part of the
bog you came from will set us
free.
Jesus didn’t say that.
I did.
And Paddy’s Day in Trump Town
is better than the Bible.
So thanks to your wanker Amer
-
ican cousins our worst man might somehow win
again. If the orange menace does emerge victorious
from the darkness of our soul, the Irish will feel the
global pain and change utterly.
I’m warning you, Ireland, because I’ll always love
you.
So kiss me, I’m Irish-American. On second thought,
keep your distance. COVID-19 and bad American
Presidents can both be deadly, for in Ireland-loving
Trump and Biden are encapsulated the limitations of
the Irish-American dream. And you haven’t, let’s face
it, had much trouble with the incumbent.
As the big, loud Yank host for numerous CIÉ bus
tours, I also sang the praises of the auld sod and es
-
corted mostly Irish-American tourists on their often-
times first and last trip to the land of their forebear-
ers north and south. Oh yes, I know the appeal.
So does self-consciously Irish-American Biden.
But he’s no Brian Ború.
When I interviewed Biden on my radio show in
2008, he told me how he listened to me whenever
he was working late in his Senate oce in Washing
-
ton, D.C. and got homesick for Scranton. The truth is,
until then, Biden had never heard of me.
When Biden and I met face-to-face in 2011, Biden
humiliated a decent man who just lost his house in
a flood. After a heartfelt, tearful struggle the man de
-
cided not to rebuild because he had rebuilt after a
previous flood and could no longer face the gruelling
uncertainty for him and his family. Biden questioned
whether the man’s dead father and grandfather
would have quit.
As I stood glaring at the vice president, Biden
looked at me with his toothy grin and said, “You can
smile, Doctor Death”. I left the room before I created
an international incident.
Ah, the clumsiness of the Irish-American politi
-
cian. McCarthy, Daley and Buchanan; Pence, Spicer
and Conway.
Isn’t it grand?
I just turned 21 when I first set foot in Dublin in
1972. During three leisurely months living in a third-
floor Ranelagh bedsit, I drank nightly in Humphry’s,
finished as runner-up in a National Stadium boxing
tournament, drank tea with the late Victor Bewley,
and journeyed by train and bus to walk the sacred
land of my coal miner grandfather’s birth in Corna
-
mona, County Galway.
None of my lovely background apparently matters
to the Irish literary and media gentry.
One beautiful people publisher in Dublin, whose
roots run deep in my family’s Gaeltacht village,
Biden questioned
whether the man’s
dead father and
grandfather would
have quit -
ah, the clumsiness
of the Irish -
American politician.
McCarthy, Daley and
Buchanan; Pence,
Spicer and Conway.
Trump nd Vrdkr: trying not to think of bogs
Scrnton ny dy in Mrch
