Are you lace curtain or shanty Irish?

There seem to be a lot of lace curtains in Ireland these days. I’m not kidding. Walk through a neighborhood and you’ll see them. 

Lotsa high fallutin’ people round here as my mom would say. You don’t even have to ask because these are the lace curtain Irish. 

Me, I grew up shanty Irish back in the U.S. My mom would say sometimes we were showin’ we were shanty Irish. 

Everyone who came to America started out shanty Irish. They were poor and lived in shanties. Shanty defined: “a small crudely built shack”. The shanties took the form of tenements in New York.

Hopefully you would move up in life, make more money and become a lace curtain Irish. You would find yerself among the high mukkety muks of the world. Example of lace curtain Irish: the Kennedy. Definitely lace curtain. Even though patriarch Joe had a bit of a shady background.

So if you were Irish you were probably Catholic. Irish Catholics had big families. Sometimes twelve kids. Everybody was baptized. The girls dressed up what is essentially a child wedding dress for communion. The boys in a white suit. Then there was the confirmation. Nobody really understood that.

Confession. You go in a wooden booth where you can’t see the priest. You are a 6 year old kids thinking up sins to tell the priest. Then you would get a penance of three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers. What a strange deal it all was. 

Any self respecting Catholic parent would send their kids to Catholic school if they could. I went one year. 5th grade. St Lawrence school. Sister Rose Angela. The nuns still wore habits. We wore uniforms. 

The boys and girls played on one playground, the girls on another. What I mostly remembers is the fact that we were heathens(ha). We didn’t go to church every Sunday. What if the nuns at school found out? They never did. After the year, I went back to the unholy public school.