The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image

Throughout her career, NYU’s Professor of Irish Studies Marion R. Casey has been a prolific researcher, writer and commentator on the Irish experience in America. Her new book, The Green Space, examines “the variety of factors that contributed to remaking the Irish image from downtrodden and despised to universally acclaimed.”

The Green Space, Casey writes, is like a “virtual storage unit in which everyone has the key,” sort of like Wikipedia. She shows how the mass media and the marketplace make the evolving Irish-American persona superficial and silly. A similar impulse for caricature, she suggests, also comes from the Irish Government, Anglo-Saxon bias, and occasionally, the Irish-American community itself. Often, the super-charged Irish-American persona ends up shaping Ireland’s own self-perception, as it relates to hawking knit sweaters and Irish coffee or hosting American-style St. Patrick’s Day parades.

There’s a lot of good material here on signature Irish-American groups such as the American Irish Historical Society and Ancient Order of Hibernians.

By Marion R. Casey

NYU Press/ 336 pages/ $35

cloth/ April 2024