Frequently, Donald H. Akenson has chided some historians of Irish America for
discussing our subject in isolation from other branches of the diaspora. He says
that this has led to falsification, or the substitution of myth for reality. Akenson
labels associations of the term Irish with the term Catholic, which are often made
by others and by me, as racist. He insists that roots in a country rather than reli-
gious affiliation delineates nationality, and that those of Anglo-Irish Protestant
and Ulster Presbyterian stock are just as Irish as are Catholics. To prove his point,
Akenson refers to religious identification surveys by the National Opinion Re-
search Center, Gallup Poll, and Graduate Center of the City University of New
York that indicate that most of the forty million plus Americans claiming such a
heritage are non-Catholics.

Citing relatively rapid economic and social mobility in Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, Akenson disputes Kerby Miller's
thesis that premodern Gaelic and religious facets of their cultural inheritance left
Irish Catholic emigrants psychologically disabled for the competitive, Protestant,
capitalist, urban-industrial, English-speaking world outside Ireland. Their suc-
cesses indicate that most did not exist as unhappy, dysfunctional New World aliens
lamenting their “exile” from the Old World. Akenson also dismisses experiences
with and memories of British oppression in Ireland as the main source of Irish-
American nationalism, suggesting that poverty and nativist prejudices in the
United States have been more important.

Pointing to large Irish Catholic rural settlements in Canada and Australia,
Akenson ridicules my explanation that inefficient agricultural skills and Catho-
lic and Gaelic gregariousness and communalism directed Irish immigrants to
American cities. He insists that Canadian and Australian examples prove that these
immigrants were capable of efficient large-scale farming and of adapting to the
isolation of rural life. Comparing the Canadian and American situations, and cit-
ing 1870 census figures that locate only 44.5 percent of Irish immigrants in cit-
ies with populations greater than twenty-five thousand, Akenson rejects the ur-
ban identity of Catholic Irish America, implying that the other 55.5 percent were

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