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On any given Tuesday night in 2014, you could find my friend Addie and me at the Half Door, an Irish pub in Hartford, Connecticut, filled with locals and our fellow college students. Tuesday was $2 pint night, so we drank pints of Guinness and Smithwick’s, danced to the Smiths cover band that was always playing (called the Miths), and took shots of Jameson.
That last part was important. Addie and I both believed that Jameson was “Catholic”—that is, aligned with Irish independence in the struggle against British colonialism. We’d absorbed this idea by osmosis during our heavily Irish American Catholic upbringings. This meant that Bushmills, of course, was Protestant—or “Proddy,” as my dearly departed Grandpa Joe was fond of saying, according to family lore—and drinking it would be akin to a betrayal of our Catholic roots and the struggles of our ancestors. And so Jameson it was.
More recently, I got to thinking about the Jameson–Bushmills divide, and the whole thing started to feel a little suspect. Indeed, some cursory Googling reveals that the brands themselves have no particular denominational or political affiliations. But the myth is so strong, so often repeated among Irish Americans, that I had to know more. Where did it come from? Was there even a kernel of truth in it? And why did it seem so important, to my family and to many others like it? I downed a shot for good luck and set out to discover just why it was Jameson that had to be in the glass.
As I say, it was my grandpa whom I most strongly associate with upholding the family’s adherence to our Irish Catholic roots—including whiskey preferences. But, truth be told, he died when I was very young, and most of my memory of him is fabricated from family stories and photos. He was short, just under 5-foot-2, and he had a chip on his shoulder about it. He was proud of his Irish heritage; my uncle told me he often said, “The Irish were the first ones to build something great,” in reference to the neolithic tombs and hill forts that predate the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. He had a traditional Catholic funeral, the last member of my family I can remember receiving that rite. The smell of the incense is seared in my mind.
But the thing is, apparently, he was raised Protestant—and probably never actually called anything “Proddy.” I didn’t expect to find this out when I started digging into the whiskey divide. In my memory, Grandpa Joe is a quintessentially Irish Catholic man. But my Uncle Timmy revealed to me that he was raised Episcopalian and converted to Catholicism to marry my grandmother. When I asked my mother if she remembered what he thought of the Jameson–Bushmills debate, she vaguely recalled that Grandpa didn’t want Bushmills in the house—but she also had thought he had been joking every time he referred to his Episcopalian childhood. She always assumed it was just a ruse to avoid going to Mass.
While Grandpa Joe’s background was more complex than I’d known, my mother and her three older siblings had a staunchly Catholic upbringing. They went to Catholic school, some of her brothers were altar boys, and as a child my mother had early ambitions of becoming a nun. But one of my mother’s siblings was raised a bit differently. My Uncle Timmy was nine years younger than my mother, so instead of growing up with multiple siblings causing chaos in the house, he came into his own effectively as an only child while his four older siblings were starting families. He was curious and asked a lot more questions than his siblings ever had, particularly of Grandpa.
Uncle Timmy, full name Timothy Curran, is now a middle school history teacher. While pursuing his graduate degree, he often wrote about the flawed nature of oral history among Irish Americans. We talked recently about family lore, identity, and what it was like going to South Boston bars in the early 1990s; he recalled lots of Clancy Brothers songs and a pot being passed around for “the boys over there fighting the British.” (Supposedly, when Timmy asked if the money was for the IRA, his friend implored him not to say something like that so loudly.)
What he doesn’t recall is whether his father had an opinion on Irish whiskeys. When I told him what my mother said about Grandpa not wanting Bushmills in the house, he quipped, “Yes, but only because he was a vodka drinker.” Which is true: Grandpa Joe was advised by his doctors to drink only clear liquor for his health, and my Grandma Chris preferred only the finest Canadian whiskey that came in the finest plastic jugs. So if it wasn’t from my grandpa, where had I absorbed this idea that Jameson was Catholic and Bushmills was Protestant? And was it based on anything at all?
I asked Belfast native Jack McGarry, a managing partner at the Dead Rabbit bar group and an Irish whiskey expert, about the claim. He said he hadn’t heard of it until he moved to America and became immersed in our bar culture. For his part, he characterizes the notion as a “gross oversimplification.” Although Bushmills does have some Protestant roots, the current Master Distiller is Catholic, and the company is now owned by a Mexican-based liquor conglomerate. As for John Jameson? He was a Scottish Protestant founding a company in a Dublin—a city that, around 1780, had a much more significant Protestant population.
As a myth, McGarry considers this one to be in the same category as other Irish American ideas that are heavy on the American. Think eating corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day, saying “Top of the mornin’ to ya,” and ordering a black and tan or Irish Car Bomb—the former being a drink made up of a pale ale layered with a dark beer (normally Guinness), and the latter consisting of a shot of Irish cream and whiskey being dropped into a glass of Guinness and drunk in one go. Both drinks’ names evoke bloody and painful histories, but putting that aside, McGarry contends: “No Guinness drinker in Ireland would have the audacity to mix it with anything other than more Guinness.”
This phenomenon of cultural dilution or mistranslation can be observed in other supposedly Irish folklore. Mary C. Kelly, a professor of history at Franklin Pierce University, tells me that Americans will frequently quote “Mayo, God help us!” to her once they find out she hails from Mayo (referencing the way that county was hit hard during the famine). However, she reports, “people in Mayo don’t go around saying that.”
Kelly sees a deeply rooted historical reason for why Americans descended from Irish immigrants tend to cling to these, let’s say, colorful myths and narratives. She cites the backlash to the predominantly Irish Catholic immigrants fleeing starvation in the famine from 1845–52. These new arrivals were seen as having a split loyalty between the Constitution and the pope. “There was this fear that Catholic Irish could threaten the foundations of the United States,” she told me—something that may sound devastatingly familiar to anyone following the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions on immigration.
She also explains how this period of time formed a wedge between the Catholic and Protestant Irish populations in the States. The new Catholic immigrants were viewed negatively by the existing American population, and Protestant Irish felt that their arrival was “enveloping them in this new negative association of what it meant to be Irish.” According to Kelly, the famine subsequently led to Irish Catholics associating more with Irish nationalist organizations, in which they could process their trauma aloud. She argues that there was a broader culture of silence around the experience of the famine otherwise (although she also acknowledges that some historians challenge this). The history of the famine, and subsequent discrimination against newly arrived Irish Catholics, was, Kelly says, a “dark shadow over people’s lives.”
Considering that context, it’s clear that clinging to something as seemingly silly as a whiskey brand became a way of asserting one’s identity and heritage. The inherited trauma of the famine, and the allegiance of Irish Catholics to Irish nationalist organizations, created an us-vs.-them mentality. Irish Americans subsequently have sought to honor their ancestors’ struggle by aligning themselves, even in drinking, with the very things for which they were discriminated against: their Catholicism and refusal to cow to British rule in their homeland.
I see now that this “shadow” found its way into the fabric of my grandfather’s life as well. My uncle tells me that “parts of his family were very ticked off for him going from orange to green” in converting to Catholicism, and that they did not associate with his side of the family much. (The orange of the Irish flag represents Protestants, the green represents Catholics, and the white represents the hope for peace between them.) According to my uncle, the experience of ostracism added mightily to that chip on his shoulder.
There is a twinge of sadness for me in realizing that I had colored in the lines of my grandpa more with myth and stereotype than reality. His sense of identity and relationship to his ethnicity and religion was much more complicated than a silly story repeated drunkenly in pubs. He never got to go to Ireland, but he loved ordering gifts from catalogs of Irish goods. These keepsakes are now scattered across the family; a gold shamrock tie pin lives in my own collection.
To my mind, the inclination to hold on to these grievances and pain as Americans comes from a desire to attach ourselves to something more significant. Being a white American isn’t something to be particularly proud of, but being descended from defiant freedom fighters who survived a famine and British colonial rule might be. My uncle thinks along the same lines: “These stories give families, in my opinion, a pride to be like, We fought our way to this point,” he says. But while these cycles of lore can be relatively innocuous, like in having a whiskey preference, or even goofy, like in drinking green beer on St. Patrick’s Day, they can also perpetuate harmful stereotypes. “What once constituted authentic Irish culture, customs, and traditions starts to morph into something else,” says McGarry. He and his team at the Dead Rabbit attempt to combat this through the bar’s “Paddy’s Not Patty’s” March events, which celebrate Irish culture rather than, as he puts it, “getting absolutely shit-faced.”
So my grandfather never had strong opinions about the religious affiliation of his whiskey—but he did face pushback from his family for converting to marry a Catholic woman, and he carried a deep sense of pride about his ethnic heritage. He told stories and held on to lore that gave him a sense of being part of something larger than himself. It seems to me that he wanted his family to feel that same way. To transmute the otherness he felt into something great—just as his ancient ancestors had.
As it happens, I went to Ireland when I was 20, the same year that you could find Addie and me at the Half Door. We had wrapped up a study-abroad program in England, and I went off on my own to explore the island my grandfather never got to visit. It was the very first time I had traveled alone. During my day on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, I rode a rental bike up to Dún Aonghasa, one of the ancient forts my grandfather had held in such esteem.
I sat near the edge of the cliffs and took in the scene. I don’t know if that fort was the first or simply the oldest surviving, but it was certainly something great. I had packed a small meal of bread, cheese, and a beer. I cracked the beer open with the edge of a jagged rock and drank it in a toast to my grandpa, my family, and the forebears who had built this place. I can’t remember the brand, but it doesn’t really matter. After all, things hold the value we assign to them. This beer served to honor those who came before me and enabled me to be a person who could have this experience. Most importantly, it was a drink for my Grandpa Joe—and the legacy he left me.
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