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Rob Glover is an associate professor of political science and honors at the University of Maine. These are his views and do not express those of the University of Maine System or the University of Maine. He is co-leader of the Maine Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications. Members’ columns appear regularly in the BDN.
Recently, my Irish passport arrived in the mail. It was the culmination of years of research, tracking down documents, and tangling with various bureaucracies to prove I was sufficiently Irish to be granted citizenship.
I expected to feel triumphant. Instead, given the state of our country, I found myself staring at it with a strange mixture of gratitude, sadness, and an overwhelming sense of irony.
I am an American, born nearly 70 years after my grandmother departed Ireland for good. My eligibility for citizenship is a product of Irish policies that recognize that country’s unusual history of emigration, an attempt to maintain ties with the millions of Irish descendants flung all over the world. Ireland formalized citizenship by descent in the 1950s and has since cultivated a broader strategic relationship with its diaspora.
That history has given me an extraordinary gift. As an Irish citizen, I can now live and work indefinitely in Ireland or anywhere else in the European Union. At a moment when the future of my own country feels ominous and uncertain, I have sometimes jokingly referred to this process as seeking an “escape pod.”
The joke becomes considerably less funny when I think about how I got it.
My grandmother was two years old when she left Ireland with her mother and four siblings. They travelled first to Canada and in February 1913 by train to Boston, where someone was supposed to meet them and help them get settled.
No one showed.
I think about this a lot. My great-grandmother stood there in an unfamiliar city with five young children, no immediate place to live and no obvious way to support them. Whatever plan existed for a new life in America collapsed upon arrival. And somehow, she made it work. I wish I knew more about how.
Family history is frustrating that way. Moments that seem monumental in retrospect were simply days people had to figure out how to survive. There is no record of what my great-grandmother thought as she stood there, where they slept that night, or if she wondered whether crossing the Atlantic had been a colossal mistake.
Presumably, she was too busy figuring out what the hell to do next to record this for posterity.
What I do know is what followed. Her children grew up. Their children grew up. The opportunities accumulated across generations until, eventually, they reached me.
Out of a working-class upbringing, I was able to gain an education and become a professor. I have traveled, written, taught, and built a life of extraordinary privilege compared with the woman who arrived in Boston with five young children and no one there to meet her. Her gamble paid dividends she could not have imagined.
And now comes the absurdity. Because my grandmother was born in Ireland, I have been given yet another opportunity: the legal right of national membership and return. My great-grandmother crossed an ocean with young children and zero safety net. I tracked down some documents and filled out a bunch of forms.
It’s humbling to think about how much of one’s life rests on the courage of strangers who you just happen to be related to.
My ancestors looked west across the Atlantic and saw possibility. More than 100 years later, I find myself looking back across that ocean with something resembling the same longing. They left amid economic insecurity, social and political conflict. Now, I have reclaimed that citizenship they left behind, wondering whether Ireland might someday offer me the same.
I never really knew the people who made these consequential decisions. But I have always possessed a sarcastic sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd. I imagine that I got some of it from them.
And if so, I suspect my great-grandmother would find this whole thing hilarious. She left Ireland so that her descendants might have choices she did not.
One hundred and fourteen years later, I am holding an Irish passport and discovering yet again just how many choices she left me.