Irish Americans and me.

I emigrated to Boston from ireland in September 1977, and almost immediately developed a profound dislike for Irish Americans. People would ask me where I was from; I'd tell them Ireland, and they'd then say Oh, I'm Irish too, which usually meant their great-grandfather had gotten off the boat in New York 100 years ago.

The disppointment was definitely mutual. I found them loud and usually bigoted; I deplored their taste in beer; their political views; and their ignorance about the rest of the world in general, and modern Ireland in particular. They didn't like my accent: they perceived upper-middle-class Dublin as 'English'; they didn't like my liberalism, or my irreligiosity, or my liking for soccer. I don't remember which annoyed me more; being told by Americans that they were Irish, or by being asked by Americans if I was English. It all culminated on St Patrick's Day in 1978, when I and a couple of compatriots headed to Fields Corner in South Boston, in search of Irish-America, and were asked to leave a bar, because we weren't Irish. It was explained to us there would be a bunch of lads from Southie coming down to the bar later, and they wouldn't want people who weren't Irish in the bar.

But we are Irish. Look, here's my passport.

No, you're not Irish. You're not from South Boston.

You can see how that could be annoying.

In time America discovered real beer, soccer started appearing on the television (Univision, at first, which helped me learn Spanish), and I moved to Long Island and then Nebraska, where I was better able to avoid Irish Americans. And for a while I was myself quite politically conservative. In the meantime, Ireland was becoming wealthier, and far more liberal. At the time I left contraception was illegal, Catholic schools were dens of pedophilia, unwed mothers were locked up and subjected to near slavery, divorce was illegal, and pornography -- even the mildest of soft porn -- was banned. The Church had a stranglehold on every level of society, except perhaps the tiny oasis of Trinity College, the Protestant university, where we exploited loopholes in the law to distribute contraceptives and show Last Tango in Paris.

As most of you know, since then Ireland has legalized divorce, instituted gay marriage by a landslide popular vote, and just today removed the constitutional prohibition on abortion. Most importantly, Ireland has taken a good hard look at its Catholic past -- the pedophilia and cover-ups, the Magdalene laundries, the interference in politics -- and rejected it utterly. The country I escaped is now far more liberal than the country where I sought liberation.

So, apparently in an effort to continue to annoy me into my dotage, right-wing American Catholics, many of them Irish-Americans, have been trying to slow down or reverse Ireland's emergence from under the Catholic Church's shadow. One such is Michael Brendan Dougherty, of National Review, who seems to be on a quixotic mission to turn the Irish clock back, from the comfort of New York. To his credit he's trying to learn Irish, though his choice of a tutor from Donegal is questionable. My mother grew up speaking Scots Gaelic and then Ulster Irish, and I found the Irish she taught me all but useless; my terachers all spoke Connacht or Munster Irish and found Ulster Irish nearly unintelligible. But here's just so much he doesn't get. For example, he recently made fun of the idea that the Catholic Church was to blame for the fact women couldn't buy beer by the pint in Irelend as late as the 1970s (he didn't mention this, but often they couldn't even sit on the bar side of the pub). But in fact, it makes perfect sense. The Catholic Church was the leading opponent of feminism and promoter of the subservient role of women, and the bar nonsense was just a small part of that. If you create a culture of oppression, you're responsible for the indirect as well as the direct consequences.

Most Irish people, particularly young Irish people, don't want to turn back the clock. And Doughtery is practising the same sort of clod-footed insensitivity and ignorance and intolerance that my pals in South Boston inflicted on me.

My message to Irish Americans is this: Ireland is no longer the country your ancestors left. We changed it. We like the changes. We don't want to go back. And mostly we resent your trying to push us back. Concentrate on changing America; there's plenty of work to be done here.