| I've not made any arguments that we are pre-disposed, as a race, to these traits. I made no mention of the heritability of these traits. Describing my comment as racism is a complete nonsequitor. My comment was on the state of the predominant Irish culture at the time of the diaspora. By 1800 Ireland had been victim to hundreds of years of British misrule, shortly followed a major famine. Our culture was devastated, our institutions were devastated, our life expectancy was in the mid 30's. We had little experience in self-governance, little experience of Democracy, Catholics were banned from most universities, couldn't fully own land until 1778. It was even illegal for Catholics to teach elementary school, so childhood education was in an unimaginably desperate state. Worst of all, Irish immigrants (unlike the H1Bs of today) mostly came from the lowest rungs of society in this already destitute nation and culture. When my Irish great great grandmother came here she was 16, sent to America by her stepfather (along with her younger brother) because he no longer wanted to care for another man's children. She was fortunate enough to have come from a family of domestics for a wealthy estate, so she spoke well, and could cook and clean. She was comparatively lucky. Even so, it took multiple generations before my family pulled out of poverty, in NYC, and became a normal middle-class family. Trying to assimilate a population like that into a nation with limited government and social institutions, as the US was in the 19th century, is a recipe for disaster. And it was, for a long time, a disaster. |