We Must be Talking

  A Chaotic Country         Gerry OShea Sean O’Casey’s most accomplished play, “Juno and the Paycock,” was set in the Dublin tenements during the Irish Civil War. The country was in disarray, with reports of internecine atrocities dominating the daily news stories. The play includes a major work strike involving the livelihood of a family member, Mary, who also is pregnant without a partner, and her brother, Johnny, a freedom fighter, is marked for execution for informing on a comrade. The world that O’Casey portrays is a miasma of sadness and negativity. Shakespeare’s words in “Hamlet” come to mind: “When sorrows come, they come not in single spies but in battalions.”   No wonder that Captain Boyle, the ineffective paterfamilias in the play, seeing the desolation all around, utters the oft-quoted line just before the curtain comes down: “The whole world is in a state of chassis” (chaos) I think of Captain Boyle’s pronouncement when I...

  The Recent Irish Election        Gerry OShea Unlike most countries, the two large parties that dominate Irish politics were not formed along class lines. Their history goes back to a vote by delegates at a crucial Dail meeting on January 7 th , 1922, which narrowly approved the Anglo-Irish Treaty with 64 in favor and 57 opposed. Many of those on the losing side rationalized that they were not bound by the result of the vote in the Dail because they had sworn an oath to an elusive Republic that superseded the vote in parliament. After a disastrous 11-month civil war, Eamon De Valera, the main spokesman for the Treaty rejectionists, founded a new party called Fianna Fail in 1928 that promised to push the country in an aggressively Republican direction. He was elected Taoiseach (prime minister) in 1932 and continued in that position until 1948. Ironically, it was his successor, John A Costello from the Fine Gael Party, which rejected much of the...

  Moral Perspectives in America      Gerry OShea The clear division between the traditionalists and progressives in the American Catholic Church has become more glaring during the last few decades. A more free-thinking membership has largely supplanted the old-time religion involving weekly attendance at mass and regular confession of sins to a priest. In my Yonkers neighborhood stretching along McLean Avenue from Broadway on the west to Bronx River Rd., which is still populated by large numbers of emigrants from Ireland, three Catholic schools have been closed in the last few years, and the number of people attending weekly mass has dropped dramatically from just a generation ago. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey highlights a major difference between Catholics identifying themselves as supporters of the Republican and Democratic parties. 82% of Catholics who are Democrats feel that global climate change presents a serious moral problem, while among Repub...

  Trip to Honduras        Gerry OShea I recently returned from a four-day visit to San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras. I was accompanied by Vincent Collins, his wife Linda, and Patricia Alarcon Cavalie. We were representing the New York-based charity HOPe, which has a project in the region of Choloma on the outskirts of the city. All of us, except Linda, are members of the organization. HOPe was founded in Yonkers by a group of Irish people in 1997, the 150 th anniversary of the worst year of the Irish potato famine. The members of this group, led by Pat Buckley from Killarney, felt that bemoaning the awful laissez-faire policies of the British Government, which caused the Irish disaster, was an inadequate response to the Gorta Mor tragedy.   We looked for other ways of honoring the lives of the million or more Irish people who died from starvation or related diseases in their family huts or on the streets, or in the coffin...

  Election Reflections       Gerry OShea On a post-election day when I lived in Dublin, I recall meeting a local man who was very involved with one of the political parties in the previous day’s contest. I asked him for his views on the election. I still recall clearly his answer: “The election was fine but the f----ing voters turned on us, despite all we did for them.” This response will resonate with many Democrats as they reflect on the recent presidential election. After all, the health of the American economy is deemed by experts to be so strong that it claimed a cover-page headline in the prestigious Economist magazine, stating in bold letters that the United States economy is the envy of the world. They compared the employment statistics, wage increases, and growth of GDP with those of all the other major countries and found the United States ahead in these measurements. Add the good news of major gains in the stock market, which usually p...

  Guns in America                 Gerry OShea More than 43,000 people were killed by guns in the United States in 2023. That accounts for one death every twelve minutes. More than half of these deaths were suicides or accidents, and almost 19,000 were homicides. In addition, guns were named as one of the leading causes of death among young children and teenagers.   A mass shooting is defined as an incident resulting in the death or injury of four or more people. By this measure, there were 656 mass shootings in the United States last year. In 2022, the previous year, the statistics show close to 48,000 gun deaths and 647 mass shootings. Two of these incidents, separated by ten days in May of that year, one at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the other at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, account for a total of 31 deaths, among them 19 children. In both tragic cases, the gunman used an AR...

  The Place of Women in the Catholic Church       Gerry OShea   Every student in a Catholic seminary learns a core principle governing all levels of authority in the church. It is enunciated in Latin to copper fasten its importance: Roma locuta est; causa finita est . When Rome pronounces on any topic touching religion or morality, the case is closed. Still, on October 7 th, 1979, during Pope John Paul 11's papal visit to the United States, Sr. Theresa Kane, daughter of a Galway couple residing in the Bronx, welcomed the pope to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington and then pleaded that the church find ways to fully include women in all its power structures. Sr. Theresa, a Mercy Sister, was speaking as president of the Leadership Conference of Catholic Women, a consequential group with members from nearly all the church orders of nuns in America. She urged the pope, known for his strict adherence to the status qu...

  Final Thoughts on the Election        Gerry OShea A recent study examining party affiliation among adults in the United States revealed that the biggest slice of the electorate, 43%, define themselves as Independent, meaning they are not committed to either political party. According to the same report, Republicans and Democrats can each claim the solid allegiance of just 27% of voters. The uncommitted multitudes like to explain that they assess each election based on the policies presented by the various candidates. They boast that they cannot be taken for granted and are sometimes disdainful of those who vote based on party allegiance. An acquaintance of mine, Sean, a fellow Irishman and declared independent voter, long retired from the NYPD, who reads the Irish Echo every week and so is clear about my political preferences, approached me last week to confide his voting dilemma. He told me that he has no time for Harris and les...

  Election Ruminations Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher considered the most brilliant thinker during the second half of the 19 th century, favored strongman rule and was dismissive of the burgeoning socialist and trade union movements in Europe at that time. He discussed two conflicting tendencies evident in pursuing political power, both relevant today as we hear the rhetoric used by the leading candidates in the November presidential election. Reflecting on Greek mythology, Nietzsche identified their revered gods Apollo and Dionysius, sons of Zeus, the top deity on Mount Olympus, as revealing a historical division in the struggle for political power and importance. In this model, Apollo is the good guy, representing the rational and thoughtful approach to dealing with the inevitable clash of interests that arises in every community. All conflicts must be resolved through negotiation and persuasion; reaching a consensus is central to settling contentious disputes...

  A Toss-up Presidential Election          Gerry OShea The polls suggest that there is at least a 50 – 50 chance that the electorate will choose a woman for the first time as president on November 5 th . This history-making possibility is even more significant because the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, is also a black woman. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to three million but lost in the Electoral College, a remnant of a past era baked into the American constitution. The United States, alone among the world’s democracies, does not accept the popular vote as determinative of victory in national contests. Everybody, regardless of gender, is capable of both toughness and tenderness. However, for some people, women are associated with softness and with an aura of weakness in confrontational situations, which raises questions about a female’s ability to confront foreign bullies in a crisis situation in the Oval Of...

  The Decline of Trade Unionism          Gerry OShea While defending the United Mine Workers in an arbitration dispute in 1903, Clarence Darrow, the renowned left-wing attorney, extolled unions as “ the greatest agency that the wit of man has ever devised for uplifting the lowly and the weak, for defending the poor and the oppressed, for bringing about a genuine democracy among men.” This grand and noble sentiment should be posted at the entrance of every union hall to remind members of earlier, more idealistic times when, under leaders like Cesar Chavez and Mike Quill, promoting a fairer society was an important part of their agenda. One of the main reasons for the Democratic Party's growth was that a sizable number of workers belonging to unions saw the need for a political party focused on their concerns, especially in the economic area. Nearly all the leaders of the labor movement – past and present - preach that the Democrats in ...