2015
After a group of Irish exchange students died when a balcony they were standing on collapsed in Berkeley, CA, the New York Times report of the incident focused on the students’ potential levels of intoxication. Irish-Americans and those following the story in Ireland immediately protested, suggesting that the Times was guilty of trafficking in centuries-old anti-Irish sentiment. Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of the Times, covered the backlash:
The complaints center on descriptions of the program as “not just a source of aspiration, but a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara.”
Those who wrote and tweeted called this, and other passages in the story, “victim-blaming.” The real problem, they said, was structural defects in the building. And they objected to depicting the young people as extreme partyers, in part because it perpetuates a stereotype. A former member of the J-1 program, Brendan O’Sullivan of North Carolina, wrote to me, “The only thing missing” from the story was “a picture of a pint and a kid with red hair falling down drunk.”
1860
By 1865, one out of every four New Yorkers had come from Ireland, and New York was widely recognized as being one of the most Irish cities in the world. St. Patrick’s Day parades were an opportunity for Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans to come together in celebration of shared cultural and political heritage. To some native New Yorkers, though, the parade was something more sinister. The New-York Times in 1860 wrote of that year’s events:
It must be confessed that there were a great many persons very much intoxicated, for the fact was made painfully evident all over the City on Saturday last. The policemen had their hands full. Business was lively at the Tombs. An unbroken procession defiled through its doorways, of officers in waiting on men and women in all stages of intoxication, from that balmy condition in which a man swears eternal friendship to all the world, and is anxious to embrace every one he meets, to that in which he is unable to walk without tying knots in his legs, though supported by an official friend on either side.
Drunken women with infants in their arms, men argumentatively disposed to establish logically the fact of their own sobriety, and victims of pugilistic skill, with too much color about the eyes, were yarded like cattle in the fenced enclosure for prisoners in the Court.