Spreading the Craic
As the Club prepares to throw its St Patrick’s Day bash on March 1, Irish Members explain the importance of retaining ties to home.
It’s something almost all Irish understand: sooner or later, it’s time to leave.
“After graduation, I wanted to do something,” Member and Galway native Ciaran Gannon says. “I wanted to get out of Ireland.”
“I wanted to live in a city that’s featured on CNN,” explains fellow Member Paddy Hogan. “In my university class, a third did postgrad, a third did jobs they weren’t terribly happy with and a third emigrated.”
“You knew growing up in Ireland that it was just too small a country to stay,” says Club governor Christina Siegel, who, like Hogan, is originally from Dublin. “From a very young age, you’re encouraged to travel and learn different languages and to open opportunities for yourself.”
The population of Ireland proper sits just below 5 million, but an estimated 800,000 Irish citizens live abroad. Most have settled across the Irish Sea in Britain, and sizeable communities can be found in most Western countries. Gannon, Siegel and Hogan have lived across the globe over the years, and now they are three of the 1,500 Irish that call Japan home.
According to a 2013 United Nations report, there are even six sons and daughters of Éire living on the islands of St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean and two on St Helena in the South Atlantic.
Unlike the Club’s Members, those Irish in the first waves of emigration had little choice on whether they stayed or went. Leaving the homeland out of economic necessity was a disaffecting process for many, but absence sometimes makes the heart grow fonder. Now, many of the global Irish serve as willing evangelists of the home they’ve left but have never forgotten.
“Going away and being able to carry the flag of your country is a wonderful thing,” says Siegel, 43. “I do feel that my role as an Irish citizen is to promote Irish culture and encourage people to visit. For a tiny nation, there’s a lot of value there and I do want to promote that.”
St Patrick’s Day does much of the promotional work itself. No other national day approaches the international scope of St Patrick’s Day’s festivities. Even in Tokyo, as Hogan points out, the annual St Patrick’s Day parade in Omotesando is a stunning example of Ireland’s soft power.
The city, he says, would never consider spending taxpayers’ money to close down the streets for Bastille Day or Cinco de Mayo, but St Patrick’s Day has been a fixture on the municipal calendar since 1992.
Aside from a famous beer and an iconic accent, what is it about Ireland that drives some form of a St Patrick’s Day bash in major cities across the globe every March 17?
“When you think about the best of Irish culture, what is it?” Hogan, 50, wonders aloud. “Guinness beer, Irish stew? We’re not bringing fine cuisine or anything. Whatever the Irish have, they’ve bottled it.”
“I’ve always said our biggest export, besides the Guinness, is the people,” Siegel says.
In particular, those who left Ireland for a shot at the American dream are primarily responsible for the modern iteration of St Patrick’s Day. Denigrated like most immigrant communities in 20th-century America, early Irish-Americans wanted a way to publicly celebrate their heritage.
At the same time, the Irish nationalism movement was gaining steam. While voicing support for decolonization was taboo on the streets of British-ruled Dublin, pro-independence rallies became a way for Irish-Americans to embrace the democratic spirit of their new home.
Those early St Patrick’s Day festivities offered a chance for Irish-Americans to show their pride in both their new homeland and hybrid identity. In that sense, the day began as a celebration of the story of immigrants everywhere.
Gannon, 43, spent several years living alongside Irish-American communities in Philadelphia and Chicago and observed this legacy of ethnic egalitarianism (aided by a few healthy pints) at the cities’ St Patrick’s parades.
“It’s definitely an identity thing,” he says. “What is America? What is it built on?”
Look no further than the whimsical slogans of St Patrick’s Day. The most popular, right after “Kiss me, I’m Irish” is “Everyone is a little Irish on St Patrick’s Day.”
“We’re not at all possessive about Ireland or being Irish,” Siegel says of the national character. “We’re delighted to have more people celebrate.”
For many of the global Irish, maintaining their spiritual connection to the Emerald Isle is not always easy. Gaelic football, one of Ireland’s national sports, was a pillar of Gannon’s childhood and teenage years in Galway and Dublin.
“That’s all I played growing up,” Gannon says. “But as soon as I left Ireland for Australia, I started playing soccer and I kind of never looked back. I never played Gaelic again.”
In 2017, the Gannon family moved once more to Tokyo. In search of a new social network, he joined the Kanto Celts, a team in Tokyo’s amateur soccer league. Then, two decades and nearly 10,000 kilometers from home, a teammate tipped him off to an unlikely opportunity to keep his Irishness alive: the Japan Gaelic Athletic Association’s Gaelic football squad.
“I just fell into it here,” Gannon says. “Going to those Gaelic football sessions is like bringing me back 20 years.”
The association introduces new players to the world of traditional Irish sports and organizes competitions for experienced players like Gannon. For the last two years, Gannon has joined the Japan chapter in Bangkok for the annual Asian Gaelic Games, which features events in all of Ireland’s traditional sports.
Gannon’s Irish heritage is not his alone. In 2017, his family, including Matilda, 11, and Charlie, 9, made the trip to the Gaelic Games as well.
“Until I started playing with this team here, Charlie didn’t even know what Gaelic [football] was,” Gannon says of his son, who occasionally joins his father’s practices and attended a Gaelic football camp during the last family trip back to Ireland. “He’s really good in goal. His positioning’s good, his hands are good and his kicks are huge.”
The game is Gannon’s way not only of staying connected to home but fostering the same connection with his family. Siegel, too, is reminded every March that she has a part to play in the long history of Irish abroad.
“I kind of assume that my children know a lot about Ireland just because I do,” she says. “Then they ask me valid questions about their heritage and their culture and I’m reminded that I really do have to be proactive about it.”
Tokyo may seem an unlikely place for an education in everything Irish, but the street parades, Irish music festivals and the Club’s own St Patrick’s Day party on March 1 prove just how global Irish culture remains.
No matter how, where or why Members choose to celebrate, it’s unlikely any Irish in attendance will disapprove. Hogan notes that the Irish, the Irish adjacent and the merely Irish at heart will gladly welcome any partygoers that neglect to dress in green.
“If you’re turning up for an Irish party,” Hogan advises, “just bring your wit and charm.”
Words: Owen Ziegler
Image: Benjamin Parks
Photo (l–r): Paddy Hogan and Matilda and Ciaran Gannon
First Friday: St Patrick’s Day
March 1 | 6–8pm