Irish America salutes 1916

Two ladies share a big stage. The celebration of freedom was in the air as Irish Consul General in New York, Barbara Jones, master of ceremonies for the Irish government’s 1916 commemoration event at Battery Park City, Manhattan on Sunday, addressed the gathering with Lady Liberty standing watch in the background. Photo by James Higgins, higginsphotonyc.com

By Ray O’Hanlon

rohanlon@irishecho.com

The minute’s silence was the chronological equivalent of the Irish long mile.

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So all in attendance had ample time to contemplate, imagine, picture.

Some for sure were transporting themselves, via the mind’s gimlet eye, to the General Post Office in Dublin a hundred years before, almost to the precise moment when Padraic Pearse stepped out under an Irish sky and read the words that would prove to be the greatest weapons brought to bear against the British Empire.

Under a New York sky that was blue, and a sun that had a hint of later months in its strength, the task of imagining Pearse was made radically easier as Captain Peter Kelleher of the Irish army read from the Proclamation in a strong and commanding voice.

The Irish army uniform is based on that which Pearse wore a hundred years ago, so it took no great leap of the imagination.

A couple of eye blinks and, well….

The gathering in Wagner Park was part tribute, part solemn commemoration, part cultural celebration of the Rising.

For months, the Irish Consulate in Manhattan had worked on the details.

The work paid off in a ceremony that featured words, music, and some pageantry, and all against a most spectacular and appropriate backdrop of New York Harbor, the first sight of a new life for countless Irish over the last hundred years and more.

Irish government minister Alan Kelly put a number on “countless” in the specific context of 1916.

Two-and-a-quarter million Irish-born lived in the United States on April 24th, 1916, he told his audience.

And, as was noted more than once from the podium, the Irish of America and the American Irish, the “exiled children,” channeled vital support and resolve back across the ocean to the forces that were being mustered for the fray.

As he always does, author Peter Quinn encapsulated that American dimension in his address from a podium that included an array of speakers and guests including Senator George Mitchell, the Deputy Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, Speaker of the New York City Council, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and Shari Hyman, the president of the Battery Park City Authority.

The speeches were apropos, the musical interludes soulful and stirring, and the national anthems were rendered by Maxine Linehan with a passion that matched an occasion that drew freely on the emotions of all in attendance.

Linehan’s singing was a bookend, the other being that long minute’s silence, an extraordinary interlude in a city not noted for silence.

It was interrupted only by a sparrow’s chirp, a baby’s cry in the distance, and the easily imagined voices of Irish men and women from a hundred years, and just a minute, ago.

 

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