...an eloquent meditation ... So far, so conservative. But My Father Left Me Ireland makes some very unexpected moves ... The paradoxical combination of revolutionary politics and conservative nostalgia makes My Father Left Me Ireland a profoundly American book. Mr. Dougherty’s writing grasps toward a stable, contented monoculture, speaking more clearly to the concerns of conservative intellectuals during the Trump administration than it does to an Ireland today moving as fast as possible to shake off reactionary views. Mr. Dougherty’s father may have left him Ireland, but, as this book suggests, it is no longer clear what Ireland represents. My Father Left Me Ireland addresses a problem as much as it posits a solution. For, this book reminds us, belonging is always bricolage. It may be easier to find a father than to find a fatherland.
...a brief, beautiful, deeply felt [book], saturated with meaning ... Michael rejects most of the assumptions of our modern consumerist condition and hence rejects its defining registers of hipness and irony. Instead he lays bare his emotions, the yearning he felt growing up with a single mom ... Michael’s welter of feelings about his ancestry and his father are the basis of this book ... Michael doesn’t so much argue as feel that some combination of materialism, technocracy, and individualism is carrying us away from our purpose. He finds his in his faith, his family, his Irishness, his determination to be conscious of past, present, and future.
... self-analysis is done with frankness and pathos. But at points autobiography swells into cranky generalisations ... Sometimes it would be better – and humbler – to use I rather than we ... poignant eloquence and emotional honesty.
The structure of this slim volume is gentle and wistful: a series of letters written to the author’s father ... In some respects, it’s not unlike Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father ... But beneath the surface, Dougherty’s book is a much darker work. His personal journey is in service to a vision of deeply reactionary nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic ... As with certain libertarians, upon first glance some of his critiques seem reasonable, even agreeable ... But there is a strange, telling gap in both his history and his arguments. In My Father Left Me Ireland, there is no real engagement with the period between independence and the Celtic Tiger. The 1916 Rising is described in loving detail before whole decades of the new state are swallowed up in a few glancing references to industrial schools and poverty. No account is made for the hundreds of thousands brutalized in institutions of church and state. There is no mention of the fact that the Little Catholic State That Could had, in the mid-twentieth century, more people incarcerated per capita than the USSR under Stalin ... Instead of engaging with these counter-narratives, Dougherty wields his fatherhood as a license for violence, mixing together tender scenes of holding his newborn daughter with the most bloodthirsty words of Irish nationalist Patrick Pearse he can find ... Irish-American identity, like other white ethnic identities in the United States, is a convenient vehicle; a green bottle to hold the old poison ... The 2004 referendum, the nastier elements of The Gathering, and Dougherty’s book are all assertions of the same ideological point: what matters is bloodline ... What is clear is that someone who has never lived here, who claims heritage in the name of his father and the dead generations for a transatlantic nativist project, is not an arbiter of Irish identity. Ireland belongs to its people, whether they were born here or came by choice or circumstance. Your father didn’t leave you shit, Michael. It wasn’t his to give.
