Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404100071
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
But when he yearned to sketch in the details of his family's journey from the Old World to the New, there was no one left to tell the story.
The six of his eight great-grandparents who came from Ireland fled political and religious persecution or famine, Casey presumed, but none documented the experience in letters or diaries.
Other family members knew little of the family story.
Casey traveled to Dublin for clues but hit more dead ends.
Still, Casey's search bore fruit. The idea of tracing Irish roots resonated with his daughter and son-in-law, Charlottesville filmmakers Ellen and Paul Wagner.
"Out of Ireland" tells the story of people like the Caseys in their own words.
Irish film stars Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Gabriel Byrne and Brenda Fricker read letters - poignant, sorrowful and cheerful - the emigrants wrote home to Ireland.
Kelly McGillis narrates.
The 110-minute film also uses historical photographs and family portraits, newsreels and footage shot in Ireland. Like Ken Burns in his Civil War series on PBS, the Wagners interview historians and writers to bring the story together.
But Wagner said the soul of his documentary is the music and songs of immigration performed by Irish musicians.
Casey and 600 others packed into a University of Virginia theater March 25 stood and gave the Wagners a long ovation after watching the world premiere.
"It was beautifully done and illuminating," Casey said.
Wagner won an Academy Award for his last documentary, "The Stone Carvers," a 30-minute portrait of Italian-American artisans who worked on the National Cathedral.
Like "The Stone Carvers" and two previous Wagner documentaries, "Out of Ireland" will be broadcast nationally on PBS. A date hasn't been set.
The film opens with a panoramic view of a man standing on a Wyoming cliff and a forlorn melody of flutes, tin whistles and a fiddle.
As the camera slowly moves closer, Quinn's voice begins a letter Maurice H. Woulfe wrote from Wyoming in 1870 to his brother in Ireland.
"My dear brother Michael, . . . I'm in first-rate health. I was never better in my life. This Rocky Mountain air agrees with me first-rate. I have everything that would tend to make life comfortable . . ."
Then the story goes to the beginning, with footage of Ireland.
Seven million Irish came to America after Britain confiscated land, removed the right of Irish people to vote and imposed martial law in 1798. During revolts, people were hanged for wearing green, the color of the rebel Pikemen.
The potato famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century set off one of the first massive waves of European immigration to North America. In Ireland, a million people died of starvation and disease, and 500,000 were evicted by British landlords.
"For God's sake, take us out of this poverty," Mary Rush writes The early Irish immigrants discovered the streets of America were not paved with gold, and they were expected to pave the streets themselves for little pay. her relatives in Canada on Sept. 6, 1846. "Don't let us die in the hunger."
Two million emigrated to America, and the Irish tested and profoundly changed what Walt Whitman called "a nation of nations."
Wagner said the film examines the same themes of immigration and ethnic identity with which Americans grapple today.
"We're coming to a new age in America," historian Dennis Clark says in the film, "when people are coming to this nation from Asia and Latin America in very great numbers for the first time, really. America is not sure what it thinks and feels about these new immigrants."
It's worth looking back at the Irish, Wagner said, because no group of immigrants was as obsessed with its past or as aggressive in its embrace of the future.
"They show you can enter the mainstream of American life and still retain your ethnic identity," Wagner said.
About 10 percent of Irish immigrants returned home, compared with about 40 percent of immigrants from other European countries, according to the filmmakers.
The early Irish immigrants discovered the streets of America were not paved with gold, and they were expected to pave the streets themselves for little pay.
"When the builders of canals wanted a labor force to build the Chesapeake Canal in Virginia," Clark says in the film, "they went to the local plantation owners and said, `Rent us your slaves.' But the planters replied, `No way, these slaves are too valuable. Hire Irishmen, instead.' "
Despite poverty and discrimination - Irish Catholics were depicted as monkeys in newspapers - the Irish came to dominate urban politics in a short time.
By the 1920s, only 15 percent of the Irish were unskilled laborers, the same percentage as Americans overall.
Irish-Americans sent an estimated $260 million to Ireland in the 19th century, money that helped fund more emigration and Irish rebellions.
In 1916, an Easter rebellion broke out in Dublin and marked the beginning of the end of British rule. In 1921, Great Britain made the central and southern parts of Ireland a free state and made six counties with a Protestant majority Northern Ireland.
But the economy in Ireland never rebounded, and the Irish people were, and remain, sharply divided over the separation of the country.
". . . at night when I lay in bed," Woulfe wrote in his letter from Wyoming, "my mind wanders off across the continent and over the Atlantic to the hills of Cratloe. . . . I still imagine I will see Cratloe once more. But if I do, I guess all those things will be changed."
A man who returned to Ireland after living in America for 33 years discovers there are no jobs and the house in which he lived has turned to rubble.
"I can't get my eyes to see things as they were before I left," he writes.
That paradox is the documentary's backbone, Wagner said.
"The theme is, as adults, we are always yearning to return to our childhood. But you can't go home again, particularly to your youth."
by CNB