DORCHESTER, Mass. Mike Doyle’s Kinvarra Pub in this gritty Boston neighborhood is the sort of “third space” that sociologists say is essential to bringing community and a sense of belonging to urban residents. “You can tell them sociologists they got that one on the nosey,” said pub regular Ernie Sullivan with a laugh.
The Kinvarra: Apologies on three wide-screen TVs!
The parochial character of this particular watering hole doesn’t mean its customers aren’t up on world affairs, however. “Oh yeah, we watch the news every so often,” says Sullivan. “Sometimes when we’re changing the channel from the Bruins to the Red Sox in the spring Mike will hit the wrong number and we’ll get CNN.”
It was just such a fortuitous slip of the remote control that alerted the Kinvarra’s patrons, who are overwhelmingly Irish-American, to rising calls for reparations for past misdeeds around the world, from slavery in America, to Korean and Chinese “comfort women” pressed into sexual service of Japanese soldiers during World War II, to Armenian victims of the Ottoman Empire.
“That’s the right thing to do,” says Sean “Butchie” McGrath. “But what about me? When do I get my reparations?” he asks, and his friends chime in that they’d like some as well.
Why, this reporter asks, does a crowd of men drinking $2 Bud Light drafts think that they’re entitled to a monetary payments–apart from self-pity–and from whom?
Oliver Freakin’ Cromwell
“Oliver Freakin’ Cromwell, from the English, in that order,” Butchie McGrath replies without hesitation. “Cromwell invaded Ireland in the 17th century, and killed me great-great-great-great-great grandfather Liam,” he says as his eyes grow misty with tears. “I lost the paperwork on it,” he adds, “so they’d have to take my word on it.”
McGrath and his friends suffer from what pathologists have come to refer to as “Irish Alzheimer’s,” a variant of the degenerative disease characterized by loss of memory. “They forget everything–car keys, social security numbers, children’s birthdays–except the grudges,” says Dr. Philip Mainwaring of Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s hereditary, and there is no known cure.”
“As long as you’re handin’ em out, I’ll take some reparations.”
While historians have validated just about every call for reparations heard to date the Cash-for-Cromwell Campaign, as it is informally known, has thus far attracted no academic support, and some say ethnic and religious prejudice is the reason. “It’s them English professors,” says Tony Doerr, an expert on Boston Red Sox batting averages and obscene limericks, an Irish poetic form. “If they apologize for Cromwell, they’ll have to apologize for the Potato Famine,” he says, referring to a 19th century catastrophe in which more than a million Irish died from hunger while absentee English landlords exported food from their plantations in Ireland. “There aren’t enough Andy Capp Pub Fries in Boston to pay off that debt.”