Comment by Joan gekchrist on February 6, 2014 at 7:29am

Perhaps our values have changed.. What a shame !!!!

Comment by jean kaniecki on February 6, 2014 at 8:42am

For anyone interested there is a piece in today's (Thurs) Pittsburgh Post Gazette written by Brian O'Neill promoting  an Irish sport ing event (boxing) being sponsored by the AOH www,post-gazette.com/opinion.  Don't know if this is on the computer yet.  I plan on calling Mr. O'Neill to thank him 

Comment by frank mcloughlin on February 15, 2014 at 3:20pm

The latest is a game on Google whereby you have to help the drunken green -coated leprechaun sober up by spilling his beer glass. Frank mcloughlin

Comment by Ann O'Brien on February 17, 2014 at 3:02pm

I find this attitude prevalent in a more sinister manner since I was an undergraduate.  I went to college in Minnesota.  I heard a lot of antiCatholic comments all through high school and college.  Even when I went to my 20 yr high school reunion- a women I thought was my best friend in high school replied when I said her husband's surname was Irish was "oh, but he's NOT CATHOLIC!"  While sitting at lunch with an undergraduate in a dorm one day this girl of German ancestry said to me "My mother said to me that Irish Catholics are the most obnoxious people she knows.  You are NOT Irish Catholic are you?'  Even in my job interview for resident advisor the hall director asked me since I was Irish was I a Catholic.  I was so sick of this that I studied with a professor at St. Thomas and went went to live in Dublin where I wrote my first master's thesis on Celtic art and the Book of Kells. This was in 1977, before anyone wrote about this in the U.S and before Trinity library and the National Museum became versions of another kind of Disney land that it is today.  I know.  I am on my second doctorate, one a Ph.D. in arts and Humanities from NYU and now an Ed.D. I know museums studies.  I just feel the actual artifacts have lost their power in the way they are presented today.  Well, so I saw the real Ireland of Saints and Scholars and met lots of faculty from various Irish universities and the director of the National Museum gladly and graciously met with me back then- and I was scared out of my mind to meet him and then I did go to Armagh and meet Dr. Sims.  The Book of Kells expert who actually got to touch the book!  Well so I return to American academia and I have to read the ignorant comments that my so called fellow doctorate students are writing in their papers about what a great intellectual their Jewish uncle was but he ended up marrying a big buxum dumb blonde from Texas with the last name of O'Brien or when I chaired a conference for Black studies and one paper wrote about a park in Chicago where it was divided into where the Irish played and they couldn't play there and where the Dutch played and they could play there.  When I met the writer I asked where could I play.  I had a great grandfather who was Dutch?  When I went to a liquor store and bought some applejack in NYC -some jewish guy commented that there wasn't enough alcohol to make an Irishman drunk.  I said how about my New Amsterdam Dutch relatives who founded this city, would it make them drunk?  The man looked shocked and couldn't say anything.  I went to a conference in Sweden and there was an exhibition about Swedish Immigration to the Chicago area complaining how the Irish gave them a hard time. And then there was Sotheby's yes Sotheby's where everyone talked about their pedigree and looked down their noses on the Irish.  I recently read a book in the last two years about the habits of the super rich in America that said that if you have an Irish brogue- get rid of it because it is considered low class.  Sigh.  Yes it does matter.  The little things do matter like those stupid t-shirts.  I went to Dublin last November on the most difficult journey of my life to attend the burial of my beloved in a graveyard in the Dublin mountains.  The entire trip I was surrounded by Irish, they were strangers, they didn't know I was going to a funeral, but everyone Irish person I encountered was sweet and gentle and kind and compassionate.  I have always hated that American culture isn't that and doesn't get it.

Comment by Niall McArdle on February 18, 2014 at 5:33pm

thanks for posting this: good lick with the campaign to defeat negative stereotypes. i missed the original discussion but saw the update today. i posted a link to my blogpost on this topic and i will repost it here: http://ragingfluff.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/google-game-gobshite/

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