In My Father Left Me Ireland, Michael Brendan Dougherty explores his cultural inheritance, reconciling his childhood and familial past with his mother's America and his father's Ireland. This multilayered history required Dougherty's emotional investment, and readers reap the dividends.
Dougherty's memoir, a series of letters to his father, describes how family heartbreak and cultural yearning can lead to self-discovery. An only child, Dougherty was raised in New York City's suburbs by his Irish-American mother. His absent father stayed in his native Ireland, where he married and raised his own family. A fatherless boy, Dougherty grew up in 1990s America, but curiosity about Ireland shadowed his formative years.
A senior editor at National Review, Dougherty has distinguished himself as a keen observer of our political age, and his book shows some of that facility. In post-Cold War America, baby boomers embraced what Dougherty calls the “myth of liberation.” “When I was a child the nation's president disclosed to us his preference in underwear for a laugh,” he writes. “The adult world that I encountered was plainly terrified of having authority over children and tried to exercise as little of it as possible.” A generational shift, fueled by peace and prosperity, seemed to anesthetize the past. “This was the end of history, and wasn't it good?”
In Dougherty's youth, the end of history meant an “architecture of fatherlessness.” His mother, who worked at IBM, purchased a townhouse in New York's Putnam County. The house seemed to reflect broader residential preferences—a suburban development growing in a field. Looking closer, Dougherty discovered that such houses “were built to lean on each other because the homes inside were broken.” The children of divorce turned to mass media for instruction. Disbanded families, spiritless communities, and cultural decay would eventually override a deeper shared contentment.
Ireland was experiencing its own form of fatherlessness—a fading sense of nation. In 1994, after a quarter-century of fighting the British in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army declared a ceasefire. When the shooting stopped, Ireland embraced a revisionist identity, demolishing its past and commodifying its culture. Dougherty's father adopted the prevailing Irish attitude, praising the end of the “dark” country. Economics would point the way forward: the Celtic Tiger would deliver jobs and supplant the Church, but “the idea that there is nothing for Ireland to do with fifteen centuries of Christianity seems uncreative,” Dougherty notes.
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