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Mike Whalen Interview

Narrator: Mike Whalen

Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule

Date: 5 April, 2018

DS: Dáithí Sproule MW: Mike Whalen

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DS: Here we are, and I’m with Mike Whalen, and we’re at the Celtic Junction. And is it the 5th of April? I think it is – you’ve got the newspaper there. I was just saying to Mike that the pattern I’ve had with everybody else is just to start it off even with your parents – what’s the background of your parents?

MW: Well, I consider myself 100% Irish. My parents were both from small towns in Minnesota, and they were Irish towns.

DS: What were the towns?

MW: My mom came from Franklin, Minnesota, in western Minnesota. The town was Scandinavian, but the townlands – what do you call those? – there’s not a town in it, but it’s a political division. Birch Cooley and Bandon were all Irish, and Bandon was named by one of my great-great-grandparents from the town that he came from in Cork. And my dad was from Rosemount, which was a real strong Irish town. He moved into the Cities in the 30s because his dad died, and they couldn’t keep the farm. My mom moved to Eden Valley, which is on the Meeker-Stearns County border. She was fourteen or fifteen. That was an interesting town, because it was seven hundred people and they had two Catholic churches. They had an Irish church, and it had a Dutch church, but it was “Deutsch”, you know. The Irish church just closed about ten years ago, and now my mom says that a lot of those people drive fifteen miles to Manannah, to another Irish parish rather than go the six blocks to the German church.

DS: What was her surname?

MW: Her last name was Hanlon. Her mother’s name was Larry. My dad’s mother’s name was Kelly. Just in December I did a DNA thing. I did one of those swabs. I didn’t understand this, but somebody I know from doing Irish genealogy said that this is the best one for some reason. It wasn’t one I’d heard of. When I got back from Mexico, I saw the stuff, and I was 98% British Isles. They don’t differentiate between Irish, Scottish, Welsh, but I know there’s no British in me --I’m sure it’s all 98% Irish and 2% central Asia.

DS: Yea, you see, that’s the thing – who knows?

MW: The Celts came from central Asia. So it’s kind of an interesting trip. So even though I’m Irish American, there wasn’t a whole lot of Irish activity or Irish identity in my family. Everybody knew they were Irish, and Saint Patrick’s Day was a big deal, stuff like that, but nobody talked about going to Ireland. Irish music for them would have been ballads, you know, Carmel Quinn, stuff like that. You’d say you’re Irish, you’re Irish American, is the way you identified, which was the same as most of the people in my neighborhood.

DS: So you were raised in an Irish American neighborhood?

MW: Yea, but it was kind of interesting. There’s a real interesting book about Saint Paul by woman named Lethert Wingerd – she’s related to Nick Lethert. So she wrote a book on Saint Paul that dealt with labor, nationality and politics, She said when the new parishes, the suburban parishes – Saint Luke’s, Saint Mark’s, Nativity – were being formed, they were middle class, and the old Irish parishes, like Saint Vincent’s, Saint Mary’s, Saint Patrick’s, were older ones. She said that the new ones were middle class, so in the First World War they had preparedness committees, before the war, you know, getting ready for war, where the old Irish parishes were anti-war because the Brits were involved – they didn’t want anything to do with the Brits. It was a real kind of an interesting thing. This book is really, really interesting on Ireland.

DS: The words are used slightly differently in Ireland and England, you know, middle class and so on. Are you saying that the old Irish were what class?

MW: Working class. The old neighborhoods were the old Irish parishes, the national parishes – the same thing with the German and Italian – they were much closer to

downtown. The houses were smaller, and the people who lived in those houses were workers. As the communities developed, the houses got a little bit bigger, but not that much bigger because the families were still huge. I’m still shocked when I think -- my brother and I shared a room, a bunk bed, we didn’t have a closet, because we rented out a room to a boarder. So there was four bedrooms, and my mom and dad had one, we had one, and then my sister had one, and then the boarder. So the houses weren’t that big, but not like the bigger mansions out in the suburbs now, so it was kind of interesting. There was no real class consciousness. You really didn’t understand that. Everybody wanted to be middle class.

DS: One of my themes, we have personal themes as we listen or I listen, and I’m interested in things that are never mentioned. Say, one of the things that wasn’t mentioned by most people was the Vietnam War – astonishingly.

MW: Right.

DS: Or some people don’t mention politics at all. Isn’t that astounding? I comment with one of the people: I say, I know people here for the last thirty, thirty-five years who have never mentioned politics to me, which astounds me. Then the other thing that I don’t think was really mentioned was class. It’s not surprising that you should mention it, by the way. But it’s an important issue obviously.

MW: It’s interesting because my parents, their families were all farmers, but they were small farmers. My mom’s mom and dad had a ninety acre farm, so that would have been small, not small like in Ireland, but when they moved off the farm, when I was up to five or six years old, we’d go to visit them, because they lived in the same town that they had had the farm – they didn’t have an indoor toilet – this was 1953 or 4, 1955. They would have had an outhouse and they had a pump in the kitchen and stuff. It was kind of an interesting trip, but it wasn’t probably till I was a teenager that they had an indoor bathroom in the houses that they rented then because they didn’t own a house. Everybody in my family worked. All my aunts and uncles worked, nobody made a lot of money.

DS: What did your father do for a living?

MW: My father was a salesman, but before that he worked in a gas station. My uncle worked in Quigley’s, he pumped gas all his life, that’s all he did.

DS: With some of the interviewees the music is a factor in their lives, even if it’s just in the background. Let’s say, before the age of twelve, eleven, or whatever, when you were really young, was music or dance or Irishness a factor at all in your life, apart from Saint Patrick’s Day?

MW: Well, no, it wasn’t. There were certain things, like when I went to Ireland first in 1972, I heard people lilting, and I didn’t know what lilting was, but my mom and my grandma always did it. (lilts)

DS: They did? Great.

MW: So the thing is, there were certain things – I think sometimes the terms that people used when I was in Ireland, because the families were all fairly large, say, my mom’s name is Mary, there was probably fifteen Marys in our family. People would talk, they’d say, “Our Mary, Phil’s Mary, Jim’s Mary,” things like that, and I hadn’t heard that except at my family until I went to Ireland, and then I heard it in Derry a lot. So I was kind of an interesting trip. So some things that I didn’t necessarily understand about being…that would maybe have come from Ireland, I didn’t understand it until I went there and saw it. So no, I just knew I was Irish, I was interested in Ireland. When I got out of high school, I was the bus boy at Diamond Jim’s, Carmel Quinn would sing there. It was a big restaurant, not a concert hall, you sat at tables, I would see her, she’d be there for a week, two weeks, and I asked her to sing a rebel song – it had nothing to do about rebel songs, which she didn’t do, but she said, “Oh, oh, that might be…”

DS: What year roughly would that have been?

MW: This would have been 1967.

DS: And how did…you talked to her? Nick also…she came over to Nick’s house one time for some reason, was brought over for breakfast or something, and he talked about her.

MW: She would have been relatively famous. She would have been on Arthur Godfrey’s show in the 50s, and then I think the Irish American Cultural Institute brought her in for concerts – a lot of people who would have gone to events for the Cultural Institute were that age, they would have been in their fifties and sixties, and so that would have been Irish for them. But otherwise I can’t even think if there was…there wasn’t anybody from

Ireland in my neighborhood. There was somebody who lived next door to my grandma who was from Ireland. He was a cobbler -- he fixed shoes, on Marshall and Cleveland.

DS: Even that is a factor that hasn’t really come up. It’s not that I have anything particular to say about it, but just the difference between people who are Irish American and people like myself who are actually from Ireland. And there are phases – maybe the age you were, there wasn’t a wave of actual Irish people. And funnily enough when I came to the States, which was in ’78, and I was in New York and the Bronx and all these places, there was no Irish wave at that point either. It was all definitely Irish American or older people who’d been in the country for years and years, which is different, you know.

MW: Right. It’s kind of a real strange thing. I know there were people in my classes whose parents or grandparents were from Ireland, but I didn’t go to their house, where they lived. My grade school had sixteen hundred kids in it, so it was a huge area, so you basically just knew the people who would be on your block and then towards the school. But the thing is, I really didn’t start paying any attention to politics until I got drafted in 1968.

DS: So you were drafted?

MW: I was drafted.

DS: That must have been a cataclysm, was it? (laughs)

MW: It was shocking, yes. I thought I was in good enough shape to be in the military, but then I was a military policeman, which was another thing -- that kind of shocked me because I don’t like the cops. Instead of going to Vietnam, I was sent to Europe, which was the last squad of the last platoon that went there. So there was eight of us, and we didn’t all go to the same places, but…

DS: Could I ask you, the other person who mentioned the military was Martin McHugh, funnily enough, because he was drafted. You went somewhere to do training, where was that?

MW: I went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, then went to Fort Gordon, Georgia – to Fort Campbell for basic training, and that’s on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, then I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia, which is near Augusta, north Georgia. I was anti-racist when I was in grade school and high school, and I was politically involved with the Democratic

party, you know, Kennedy and stuff like that, and so when I got to these places, maybe a third of my basic training company was from Minnesota, a third was from Wisconsin, and a third was from Mississippi, from northern Mississippi, and then when I got to advanced training in Georgia, it was in the deep south, on the South Carolina-Georgia border, and the racism was really intense. The thing is, I was anti-racist, but I didn’t know black people back in Minnesota.

DS: It’s sort of the same, for Irish music -- the sad thing about Irish music is it’s so white. I’ve been living here for all these years and have I one or two…

MW: Except that one Derry guy, Stennet – he played rock and roll.

DS: But what sort of things were happening? Was it people saying stuff in your presence or doing stuff?

MW: About racism?

DS: When you were in the army.

MW: Oh, it would be like, I went to Aiken, South Carolina, for a weekend pass, so I was staying with four or five people in a motel room, and I went back to the office to get something, and the guy in the office – there was maybe six or seven people in there – and he goes, “Where are you from?” and I said, “Minnesota.” And he said, “That’s one of those nigger-loving states.” I’m going, “What! What the fuck!” It was a real weird trip. So it was interesting. But even in grade school the Catholic church sponsored these racism meetings, and so I’d go from my grade school, and I think maybe when I went to Cretin my freshman year I went to them. It was an interesting thing. I really didn’t understand much, but it was maybe a hundred students and teachers.

DS: When I think back on people I know in my own life, I think there are certain things that are obvious to you from the beginning, so they’re both obvious and a concern, so prejudice was obvious and a concern to me that I thought about a lot, and in the North it was Catholic and Protestant.

MW: Right.

DS: And I thought about all that stuff. Almost everything I thought about – and this was long before the Troubles – is exactly the same thing as with race. You know what I mean?

MW: Right.

DS: It’s exactly the same thing. It’s colonialism, it’s thinking all those people are horrible and we’re all great, all the clichés, and they breed like rabbits, and all the different things. But I think there’s something, I don’t know whether it’s in your brain or in your upbringing, a subtle thing, that you’re not going to have to be enlightened about this thing, you sort of know this is a problem.

MW: It’s real interesting, later in the 70s, the Minneapolis downtown library had movies they would rent out, would let people use, and one of them was…I don’t know if it was an American TV program about Northern Ireland from 1968, or if it was a BBC program. It was forty-five minutes long, and it just blew my mind, because that was the same thing. They would interview ordinary people and they’d go, “They don’t even know what bath tubs are – they put their coal in them,” and I’m just going, “What the hell.”

DS: I feel there’s not quite the right word for it, you know. Here you can talk about racism, and then they say xenophobia, and somehow that doesn’t describe it.

MW: No.

DS: And I would try and make up a word, my own word for it or something, but it’s a definite phenomenon anyhow. Anyway, you were in the army, and was it unpleasant for a person like the person you became, your interests and so on?

MW: Well, the military is mind-numbing. They don’t want you to think. I was still going to church when I went in the army. I’d go to mass every Sunday, I didn’t go a whole lot. I believed everything the Catholic Church would talk about. The Catholic Church was very conservative in the 50s and 60s, and they were very anti-communist, so they supported the war in Vietnam. In Germany I was stationed in Heidelberg, and that’s when I stopped going to church. I hung around with the Red Cross workers, who weren’t volunteers – they were paid staff for the hospitals, and we’d go through the dead mail, when someone would transfer from Germany back to the States. The only mail that gets transferred is first class mail, so any magazines and anything like that, you’d have to change the

address yourself, so they would have these big mailbags full of stuff for the hospital, and they would go through and take out all the religious stuff and all the really overt political stuff, because in 1969, ’68 and ’69, the anti-war movement was getting very large in the States, and a lot of the people in the military supported the anti-war movement. So when we were going through the different things, I could take things home to my room that just couldn’t be taken into the hospital wards. So I would pick up magazines and underground newspapers. I subscribed to Commonweal magazine, which was a liberal Jesuit magazine, was anti-war. Then occasionally I would see things in there about Ireland, and when I was in Germany, I started to read…They had two American newspapers every day – they had Stars and Stripes, which was a military newspaper – it was crap – and they had the Herald-Tribune, which was an international paper. So that would be on base, and I would get one of those every morning, and I started doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. But I also read the paper, and the Herald-Tribune covered Northern Ireland unbelievably. They would have op-eds I’m sure weren’t in the papers in the States, but they would have articles by Bernadette Devlin – she had just been elected. So it was real interesting.

I got out of the military in 1970 about five or six days after Kent State. I did hippy things, hung around, smoked a lot of pot.

DS: You were back in the Twin Cities?

MW: I came back to the Twin Cities, got involved in the anti-war movement. I had friends who were still somewhat religious, and they would go to the Newman Center. I wasn’t going to church or anything like that, but they would be leafleted there about anti- war conferences, so I went to an anti-war conference in Cleveland. And in 1972 I went back to Germany. By this time I’d picked up a fiddle, a violin. I took one class from, I think his last name was Darling, but he played old time music maybe.

DS: Here in town?

MW: In town, yea.

DS: That’s interesting, we’ll have to track that down.

MW: It blew my mind it was so hard, so I never did it again. I was going back to Germany, to Heidelberg, and I’d take the violin with me. I got it at an estate sale or garage sale.

DS: Were you going back to Germany to visit people that you knew? You just liked Heidelberg? It’s a beautiful city.

MW: Yea, it’s beautiful. I wanted to see what the politics would be like, being in Europe. But before I left, I went to Boston because I had spent time in Boston the year before, and some of my friends knew people from Rounder Records, they’d just started, so I met them. They would do benefit albums, and they had done an album on rebel music maybe in 1971 or ‘72. I can’t even think of the name of the band. They said would I send back information because they wanted to donate the money to an organization in Ireland, in Northern Ireland. Because I said, “I’m going to Europe,” and they said, “Are you going to Ireland?” and I went, “Yea, I’m Irish American, I’ll probably go there,” but I wasn’t sure if I was or not. Then I can remember hitchhiking in Germany, probably just in Heldelberg or right outside Heidelberg, and I got picked up by a German dude and his Irish girlfriend. This had to have been February or March, and I said, “I’m going to be going to Ireland,” and she said…I must have said something political too, so she said, “If you go, you should be there for Easter because that’s the most political day.” And I hadn’t…news to me. I hadn’t read any history of Ireland or anything like that. I ended up closing up everything I was doing in Heidelberg, I didn’t take any music classes or anything like that. Then I hitchhiked to England.

I was in Liverpool, they had a ferry from Liverpool to Belfast then, and I’m very naive about Irish politics, and so I went in to shave in the men’s bathroom before the ferry left, and when I came out, there was this guy standing by my backpack, and I had the fiddle there, or the violin in a case. I hadn’t opened it in four months probably, five months. And he said, “Are you a musician?” and I went, “No, I’m not.” I said I was going to learn, but I’m not. He flipped out his badge, he was special branch, he said, “Open up the case.” It took me about five minutes to open it – I’d hitchhiked in a blizzard in Massachusetts down to the airport in New York. I also had leaflets in my backpack. He didn’t find the leaflets, but I was just going, it’s the strangest thing. So the ferry ride, I think it was leaving at night, it was a big boat, and there was a bunch of women on one of

the decks singing, and the songs were really beautiful, and they had Irish accents, and I’m just sitting there and, “Oh man, is this ever beautiful,” and I wanted to ask them to sing a rebel song I’d heard in Boston called “The Guns of the IRA,” something like that. I’m not even sure if that was the name of the song, but I was too embarrassed because I wasn’t sure if I had the right name or anything, so I didn’t ask. But I said to the guy sitting next to me, who was around my age, maybe two years younger, I said I was going to ask them to sing this IRA song, and he went, “Oh my god, those were British army wives or Ulster Defence Association wives,” – something like that. He said, “They would have killed you.” And the guy I was talking to, I ended up walking through Belfast with him and hitchhiked to his home. He was a Protestant republican. He had gone to Magee College in Derry, and he said his brother was involved in paramilitary organizations, loyalist paramilitary organizations, and it was real nice, so he was able to say as we were walking from the docks in Belfast – I’m not even sure what road we were going to hitchhike on, because it was forty-seven, forty eight years ago. We went to his house and we ate, and he borrowed a car from one of his family, and he drove me farther down, so I think it was in Lisburn or Lurgan – Lisburn, I think, was where he lived. He was a nice guy, I can’t remember his name or anything like that. Then I got three more rides to Derry. I didn’t want to stay in Belfast – I thought Derry was more interesting because that’s where Bernadette Devlin was and there was more information on the civil rights marches and stuff.

I got to Derry on Easter, 1972, on Easter Sunday, so I got to Creggan – I think that’s where…Or no, maybe I wasn’t in Creggan, I was down in the Bogside, and it was in between the Official Sinn Féin march and the Provisional march. One had just ended and the other one was starting. Somebody came up to me when I got dropped off with my backpack and stuff, and they said, “What are you looking for?” and I said, “Well, I want to stay for a while,” and they found me a place to stay.

DS: And where did you stay?

MW: I stayed in Creggan, up on the hill, right on the edge of the cemetery.

DS: But you were staying in somebody’s house?

MW: I was staying in somebody’s house, they were the -----s. It was this guy, John -----, his brother was in the Official IRA and had done three years in the Republic of Ireland, 10

and he had just gotten out. And then his wife, her father had been in the IRA in the 30s, 40s and 50s. He was an alcoholic, and he had two kids, and there was like a…His wife had a loyalist boyfriend, and she had left him and moved to some loyalist town in County Derry. Her boyfriend had his house and his wife, and then he had a trailer beside his house where his Fenian girlfriend and her two kids stayed, (laughs) and then she got pregnant had had another baby.

DS: Yea, talk about a soap opera.

MW: So the thing is that they would occasionally argue, but he was happy to have his kids home. But I just thought, god, what a mess. (laughs) This was like two and a half months after Bloody Sunday, so that was what most people were still talking about. So I met people in the civil rights movement, and I met people in the Official Sinn Féin, and I met people in the Provisional Sinn Féin, and I met people in the Catholic Ex- Servicemen’s Association. There were so many different organizations. There was no-go when I was there. I’m not sure, had you left already?

DS: I left in ’68. That’s a story because I left after October 5th ’68, which was the big march.

MW: The civil rights march.

DS: Yea.

MW: So it was interesting. I ended up meeting a whole lot of people, you know, because I was the only American that I knew in the town, and I would go out every night up to the Telstar. And that was nice, and everybody would sing, and most of the songs people sung weren’t Irish, they were country and western. It was nice, real friendly, and people were really nice to me, and I would go to the riots every day with the kids.

DS: That’s right, the daily riot. It’s mad.

MW: Right. I saw one kid, one guy got shot right beside me. His name was John Stores or Starrs. (NOTE: Starrs) The guy he was with was wounded. I was in the Bogside Inn when Manus Deery was shot. He was a kid, twelve years old going to the store.

DS: Yea, that’s just down the street from our house. If you go up the hill, our street is in to the right, Westland Avenue, just before you get to the Lone Moor, which is below the Creggan.

MW: I knew somebody who lived on Lone Moor Road, his name was Sheehan. Did you ever know any Sheehans?

DS: No.

MW: Sheekan they called him. Would that be a name that they called anybody Sheehan?

DS: I don’t know, I’m not familiar with it.

MW: I’m shocked, at other times I’ve heard people, especially in Belfast, I’d come home from being out, and somebody would say, “I saw you talking to the Qughses.” And I’m going, I don’t remember talking to anybody name Qugh, Qughes. There was Hughes. (laughter)

DS: Shugh. So Hughie would be Shughie too. It could be Qughie or Shughie. Yea, Qughie McGeown.

MW: You’d hear all these things, and you’d just go… And it was also kind of funny – people in Belfast… I went to Derry for the first time, that was the first place I went to in Ireland. I walked through Belfast at probably seven in the morning, and then I was in Lisburn for a short time, then I went to Derry. So I was really used to the Derry accent. But now years later I’d be in Belfast, and I’d say I was going to Derry, and somebody would say, “Can you understand a word they say?” Even in Dublin, if I was on the street and I heard someone from Derry, I’d stop and just talk to them for a little while, because that was the brogue I was used to. I wasn’t used to Dublin or Cork or even Belfast.

Yea, it was nice. But I wasn’t doing anything traditional there. I didn’t go dancing. It wasn’t until I came back from Derry in 1972… It might have been 1973 that Irish Northern Aid started in Saint Paul, and Irish Northern Aid was an organization that lasted about thirty-five years that supported Sinn Féin. They said they supported political prisoners in Northern Ireland, and so the organization in Saint Paul was mostly Irish immigrants and mostly people from the Republic of Ireland.

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[BEGIN MIKE WHALEN PART 02—filename: A1011b_EML_mmtc]

There was a lot of people who I knew their kids. They would have been four or five years younger than me, or six years younger than me, but they were immigrants, their parents were immigrants. And a lot of them were from Saint Mark’s. They would have events. I read about it in the paper, the founding meeting was in the Saint Paul paper, saying, people come, something like that. I didn’t go. I had met the people I was closest to in Derry, they were in the Official Sinn Féin, or more left wing.

DS: You were already pretty sophisticated politically, in what you liked and didn’t like? Was that part of the deal? You said the Officials were more socialist or whatever. Or was that just an accident of who you met?

MW: No, because the people I was staying with would have been more Provisional. You know this guy had a gun, and he was an alcoholic, he shouldn’t have had a gun. But yet it was his own gun, and he would go with another guy and they would rob banks or whatever, and say they were the IRA, then keep the money, which was a real dangerous thing. At one point I was in a bar, and he was there, and it was down in the Bogside, it wasn’t the Bogside Inn, it was some place else, and some people said, “Take this gun.” They took it away from him. I took it back up to their house, so I’m walking past the old factories – I can’t think of the name of the road.

DS: Well, there’s the Lecky Road and then there’s Westland Street. Up the hill.

MW: Yea, straight up the hill, and the factories were on your left, where the British Army was. I had to walk by these places, and I thought, “What the fuck, I hope this doesn’t fall out of my pants.” I was real skinny then.

DS: And had you seen guns around growing up in America? To us, seeing a gun – still I never see guns. It freaks me out.

MW: No, I mean, my dad didn’t have a gun at home, and he didn’t go hunting. The shows you watched on TV were cowboy and Indian shows, there were always guns in those.

DS: It wasn’t like real life, it didn’t seem like real life.

MW: No, and the thing is, there were probably people in my neighborhood with guns. But I had just got out of the military…

DS: So you were used to it.

MW: I qualified with the AR-15 and the 45 and the M60, which was like a machine gun.

DS: This wasn’t going to freak you out.

MW: No. But in Derry it was a no-go area, so even though in the middle of the no-go area there were these British bases, so the British patrols at night would sneak around, but most of the roads were blocked, and so people would do time on the road blocks, and it got to be – I was probably there for three or four months, or maybe five months, but if I was in a car that was coming to a road block, they’d let me through – the people recognized me. So I saw several firefights. There was one – I can’t remember – it was across a field – and this would have been – it wasn’t in the Creggan, it would have been if you would have gone straight up from the church, from the cathedral…

DS: Rosemount.

MW: Yea, it would have been up there. It was still up kind of a hill, and there was a big field, maybe there was a school or something…

DS: Well, if you go up from the cathedral, there was Brooke Park – was it in the Park?

MW: No, I would know nothing around that part of Derry at all, because it was a no-go, but the thing is, there was probably ten IRA guys with guns shooting across the field at the British Army, and they were shooting back. There was probably five hundred people watching.

DS: Exactly, yea, we were talking about the daily riot, so I had already gone to Dublin, but I was back for holidays and things. We were in Westland Avenue, so if you walked out our street to the left, across the park you’d see the cathedral. If you go down to the bottom of our street and up a wee bit of the hill, and then that’s the Lone Moor Road. And we would go up and stand on the corner, and one day – this wouldn’t seem as extraordinary to you because you were in the army, but we were just standing there, me and my pals, and there was the riot, and people would rush forward. The army were behind a barricade down that end of the street, and we were standing there. People would

throw stones, and tear gas would come, and the next second this guy opens his coat beside us with what looks like a tommy gun and ratt-a-tatt-tatt, puts it in and off he goes, and the thing that was most vivid in my mind was, when real, dramatic things happen in real life is, the most striking thing about it is not drama and background music, it’s unreal. “Was that really a…?” You just kind of stand there thinking.

MW: I saw so many guns, I could not believe. I saw thousands of guns. And the thing is, if you heard a gun shot, the kids, these would have been fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old kids, would say, “It’s a 45,” – “No, a 38, I know.” In Minnesota people would know a car that was driving by, no, that’s a Chevy or that’s a Dodge. There there was no cars, people didn’t have cars. People didn’t have phones in their houses. But the kids could tell the type of gun from the shot, from the reverb of the shot. But the one thing was real interesting. There was this article that was about ex-American military staying in Ireland. I guess there were several who joined the IRA.

DS: Yea, it wouldn’t be surprising really.

MW: I can remember in Derry there was also a couple… Sometimes people would come up to me and say, “We want you to meet this person – he’s supposedly a reporter. Why don’t you talk to him?” And so it was real weird. Or there was a couple of young British kids, teenagers, eighteen, nineteen years old, who came and one of them, he had done some time in jail because he had seizures, and he was at one of the riots and he had a seizure and fell down and the Brits grabbed him. The cops grabbed him, and he did like six months. I hung around with the Keenans a whole lot. Did you know them at all?

DS: Yea.

MW: There were some people who lived next door to them, family, right up by the Telstar, that’s where they lived, and it was some women, and one of the girls married one of the Keenan boys who was really involved in politics. I’m not sure if they still… I know that Sean Keenan’s dead. When the splits came in the 80s, I’m not sure if they stayed in Sinn Féin. But it was nice. I had a good time.

So when I came back then, O’Connell’s restaurant had a back room, and they started having Irish music there, and the room was really small. Did you ever go to that?

DS: I was there. They started having gigs there too in my time. It was later, in O’Connell’s, yea. I heard a lot about O’Connell’s, the earlier version of O’Connell’s. The little room was gone.

MW: Or they wanted to have it in the big room because they thought it would bring more people in, but it would always be real crowded.

DS: You were talking about Irish Northern Aid.

MW: So Noraid started, and around this time, maybe in 1974, they would have a monthly fundraiser at the Snelling Avenue Commercial Club. I went there. I’m not sure if I went by myself or with one of my roommates. We went to the fundraiser, it was a céilí, and they didn’t call céilís because they were all immigrants. Their kids didn’t come, I can’t remember their kids coming, and there would be maybe a hundred people, a hundred and fifty people, and so the band would start playing, and this was the Northern Star Céilí Band. They weren’t called anything like that then.

DS: So it was Jamie and Laura…

MW: No, not yet. They joined later. But Marty…

DS: Bill and Judy? Were Bill and Judy involved?

MW: Maybe. But I can’t remember. Marty was there for sure. So what people do is they just grab you and say, “Come on up and do this dance.” Then I started talking to people about what are the steps like, and so there was a couple who were divorced, and it was the Vaughans. Josie Vaughan was the ex-wife, and Andy Vaughan was the husband. We started doing Irish dancing classes, free classes, at Saint Mark’s. Around the same time all this was going on, there was a Jewish guy from Milwaukee came to Minnesota who taught Irish dancing. Do you remember him at all?

DS: No.

MW: David was his first name, I don’t know what his last name was. So Jamie and Laura were in his class, and maybe the class was on Monday. On Tuesday or Wednesday they would come to Saint Joseph’s Academy, where we knew two of the nuns who worked there, so they would teach a bunch of us. There was maybe twenty of us would come, and they would teach us what they had learned that week.

DS: Had you any interest in dancing before this?

MW: I did just regular rock dancing. When I was in high school, I was a really good dancer. We would go dancing maybe six different times during the week. Even in the afternoons they would have dances. There were clubs and stuff like that all over. You could be under twenty-one, in high school. And dancing’s easy for me, except step dancing (laughs) – so it goes. Those fundraisers that Noraid had were real interesting. The place wasn’t very big. Did you ever go to any of those? Did you ever see that place?

DS: Where was this?

MW: The Snelling Avenue Commercial Club, it was on University and Snelling.

DS: No, it was before my time. I just remember mention of it, yea.

MW: It’s really hard to figure out: we decided, we started a group called the Liam Mellows Irish Republican Club. There were two women who had traveled round Europe for a summer in 1975, and they ended up in Ireland. They went to a conference, and they liked what the people were saying, and so we formed an organization. Most of the young left, like Mary and Sam, Mary MacEachron and Sam Dillon and…I can’t remember, there was a bunch of us. And my roommates – Jane Minton and Dave Murphy and stuff. We’d have these meetings, and we decided we were going to have a céilí. We did it at the Odd Fellows Hall, and it was huge, massive, there were so many people there. I don’t think there’d been a public céilí… In the 50s and 60s there were Irish American Clubs, and sometimes they would have dancing, but they wouldn’t have said “We’re having a céilí.” They would have an event, and somebody like Marty would bring an instrument and play some music, and people would dance. They had people – Florence Hart, who teaches, primarily a Scottish dance teacher, was teaching the children of people who were in the Irish American Club the Four Hand Reel, or she was teaching them their steps, but the thing is, it was sort of dying out. There had been a million splits and people not liking each other and stuff. So the thing is that there hadn’t been a public céilí for, probably since the early 50s or the late 40s, so it was really big.

DS: Was it young people or all ages?

MW: All ages. That’s when I met Ann Linderholm. She was from Belfast, and she could do Irish dancing. But there would be a lot of old Irish. There was a woman named Sally

Burke who lived out near Belle Plaine -- she would come in for the céilís, she was from Belfast too. But the Irish American Club people didn’t come. I think that maybe by that time, even though Noraid was mostly people from the Republic of Ireland, which was really strange because what I found is, unless people come from a republican background, they’re not really interested in what’s going on in the north. So it’s kind of an interesting trip. Over the years I’ve met tons of people traveling, Irish people, and if they’re fifty years and younger, they would have heard rebel music at home maybe, but not on the radio, because the Irish government banned a whole lot of that on RTE after 1973. So for lots of people like, people I’d meet who would be my age, if they were just becoming political or they’re college students, they would be more likely to go to the United States or England or Germany than go to Belfast or Derry, even though they were only ninety miles away. I remember meeting this one guy – do you remember him? His name was Barry Lynch – he was at grad school at the University of Minnesota, he was from Cavan.

DS: I remember the name, yea.

MW: He was a nice guy, but he was from Cavan. He lived five miles from the border, had never been across the border in his life. You go, “Wow.”

DS: It was generally accepted in the Republic that people weren’t interested in the North. It was just a general thing, and that it was a different place and in a way that was true. It was alien and it was different and it was just weird.

MW: But the thing that shocked me was he was from Cavan, he was from Ulster, and you go, “What!” I would figure when you were a teenager, that’s the first place you would go just to…what the hell. So it was kind of an interesting trip. Usually what I would say is, “Oh, I’m Irish American, I’m interested in what’s going on in Northern Ireland,” and they’d go, “Oh, why are you interested in that?” Then I’d go, “Have you ever been to Belfast?” and they’d go, “Why?” (laughter) There were a couple of people who were close to Na Fianna – it was an Irish theater group – they might have been in one play or something, but it was a woman whose husband was maybe a graduate student at the University, and then some weird thing, not anything to do with Irish history, or anything like that, they were going to go to Ireland, and he was going to go to Queen’s to accept some kind of an award. It might have been physics or something like that, and so

she said to people, “I think I’m going to go to Belfast,” and people said, “What! What do you want to go there for?” Not Americans – people in Na Fianna who we all know. So she told me this, and I’m going, “God, none of them have ever been there.” I just think part of it is like in the United States if you say something about immigration or Syria or Islam or Middle East, people flip and they don’t know – they couldn’t pick it out on the map. They couldn’t say where Iraq is or Afghanistan or what Islam is, but they just…

DS: It’s probably a combination of circumstances, but one thing is just insularity, being insular. I have several memories just from the States of people. Say in Boston, I remember being at a house concert in Boston and I was saying – this was when I was living in western Massachusetts – and I mentioned I was living in Easthampton. “Easthampton, where’s that?” “Western Massachusetts.” “What are you living out there for? Why would anybody…?” (laughter) I was just furious. It’s so mad.

MW: Irish people in Boston saying why are you in Easthampton?

DS: These are Americans in Boston, saying, “What are you doing living there?” The town of Northampton in Massachusetts – me and Lisa were living in Haydenville, which is just a little village, two miles outside the center of Northampton, and I was setting up my bank account, and I said my address, such and such, Haydenville, exactly the same – “What are you doing living out there?” So there is an insularity – New Yorkers, Dubliners… The border was there, and people just regarded it as a different world. It’s weird. And it’s “not our problem,” you see. Behind it is the unconscious thing – we don’t want to get involved in that. It’s your problem up there, you know.

MW: “Everybody’s on welfare, it would destroy the state. If the Irish state had to look after it, our taxes would go sky high. Those people haven’t worked in years.”

Jim Mangan, he’s not from Northampton – he’s from – what’s the name of the city that’s right there?

DS: Springfield is to the south.

MW: Springfield, yea. He’s from Springfield.

DS: I was living in Easthampton, I seldom went to Springfield. Worlds are small. Even growing up in Derry – this is getting off the subject slightly, but not really – growing up in Derry, we thought of Derry as a distinct place. We weren’t from Strabane, we weren’t

from Belfast. It isn’t that we thought Derry was great – we just were very aware we’re from Derry, and other places aren’t Derry.

MW: The weird thing about Derry is, it should be Donegal. It’s on the other side of the river. There’s five miles around that, just that little enclave, like those French or Portuguese places in India, just around one little thing. You go, “What the fuck?” So was Derry ever on the other side of the river?

DS: Well, the border was cruel and stupid, and it was cruel and stupid to Derry more than any other place. Derry was the capital of Donegal, or of most of Donegal. All the commerce, all the people, all the travel, everything. I mean, it’s just insane that Derry was… There shouldn’t have been a border.

MW: Right.

DS: That Derry was in the North was insane. It just doesn’t make any sense.

MW: It was really strange. When I was living in Derry, I never went into the city, into the walled part of the city.

DS: The city center.

MW: Never went into the city center, because that wasn’t part of the no-go area.

DS: We always went into the city center.

MW: I’m just saying this was 1972 – I cashed traveler’s checks, I think, at a bar, where they should have been cashed at a bank, but I hardly spent any money anyway. Everybody would be having you over to their house and stuff. But I also remember going to these places – there was a factory, and they had their own social club.

[Here Mike switches back to talking about céilís in Minnesota]

The first céilí was really successful. Then we started having the céilís for a while at the Mixed Blood Theater, the firehouse on the West Bank.

DS: That hasn’t been mentioned by anybody yet.

MW: Those were massive, they were just huge. The thing is, usually at céilís later in the late 80s and the early 90s when we used to have céilís, we wouldn’t even have to have people at the door – people would just give you their money. But at this there’s be a line

to get in. So when the dancing started at seven, there might be a hundred and fifty people trying to learn the steps, and they didn’t learn them.

DS: You were teaching almost immediately, were you?

MW: Yes, I learned from the immigrants from Noraid, and it was real easy for me to teach other people. I was just amazed. Part of the thing is when you teach people, probably teaching them to sing or play an instrument, you have to encourage them too. You have to say, “You’re doing well, this is right.” Then I’d make them, as soon as they’d learn to do a three, I’d make them teach somebody else, and then come back and see if they did it right.

DS: You see, you have a gift for marshalling large groups of people too. That’s part of it, whereas individually we in the Center for Irish Music might be sharing some music stuff, but part of your gift is to walk into a huge crowd and get all these people functioning – it’s great.

MW: It’s getting harder now. In the 70s and the 80s there was much more interest in Ireland, and part of it could have been because of the war going on, and our first céilís we had on paper posters quotes from Fintan Lalor and Davitt and stuff like that, historical quotes, and then we’d have literature and stuff like that. We also started a newsletter right away. If we were going to talk about political prisoners in Ireland, we would talk about political prisoners here.

DS: Connect it up.

MW: This was not something in which Ireland was unique, because so many Irish Americans if they read anything about Northern Ireland, they would talk about Ireland being the most unique place in the world, and so you go, “No, it’s not. This is happening all over the world. It’s just one aspect of colonialism.” But we’d also talk about how important culture was. At our meetings, sometimes you had people who would come to meetings who…it was impossible for them to dance. (laughs) But we’d make everybody do dancing. The thing is, you didn’t say, “No, you shouldn’t dance,” you’d say, “Yes, you should dance. Even though it’s going to be really hard, you can still do it.” Probably at one point the Mooncoins were the big mixed group. Probably at one point three

quarters of the Monncoins had been in Minnesotans for a United Ireland because our play on culture was really good.

DS: So there was the Liam Mellows and Minnesotans for a United Ireland. What other…?

MW: Well, there was an H-Block Armagh Committee at one point too. By 1979 we started having criticisms. By this time the Official Sinn Féin had changed their name to Sinn Féin -- the Workers’ Party. Then I think they changed their name to the Workers’ Party. There had also been a grad student here from Dublin who was a member of Sinn Féin – the Workers’ Party – that was Agnes’s first husband. We had major criticisms of Sinn Féin – the Workers’ Party or the Workers’ Party on nuclear power. They said nuclear power was wrong -- except in the Soviet Union, it’s right. No, it’s wrong every place, it shouldn’t be. Or like, oh, armed struggle. Armed struggle is good and important in Latin America, but not in Northern Ireland, because by this time Sinn Féin had called a ceasefire. So there was a whole bunch of things. Within our organization it came to a head, and there might have been twenty people who were active, and we said, “Let’s have a vote,” and the vote was to withdraw support…

DS: Of?

MW: Of Sinn Féin – the Workers’ Party, and we’d just go independent, because we found out we were the largest group in their network in the United States, which is amazing. But that happens a lot for other things around Minnesota too. So it came to a vote, and we lost the vote, so there was like ten of us quit, and we started an H-Block Armagh Committee, which there had been a lot of other ones started in the United States too. We were toying with the name – James Connolly when he was in the United States, he had a… the Irish part of the Socialist Party – they had language federations in the Socialist Party – the Irish spoke English, and so they had a thing called the Irish Progressive League that was part of the Socialist Party of the United States. We were trying to figure out should we try to start something like that. The H-Block Armagh Committee lasted until after the hunger strikes, and then we changed our name to Minnesotans for a United Ireland. We still had things on culture. We had the Saor Éire Dancers.

MW: That was a dance group? 22

MW: That was a dance group.

DS: I was going to ask you, I couldn’t remember were you in specific dance groups.

MW: Yea, I was one of the first people in Mooncoins, the first four, and I stayed in that for probably two years. But then we had the Saor Éire dance group. We went up to Hibbing -- the Iron Range Interpretive Center had a family thing, like a Nations Day or something like that, so they paid us two hundred and fifty bucks to come up there, and we did some dancing and stuff. We got the crowd dancing too. I think we had somebody played a flute and somebody played a tin whistle – that was the only music we had. But lots of times it doesn’t matter. It was really kind of interesting. At this time there was probably fifteen or twenty musicians in the Twin Cities would play Irish music in some way.

DS: And this is the late 70s, early 80s?

MW: Late 70s, early 80s. This is before you all immigrated here.

DS: I settled here about ’80.

MW: Marty would have been the only immigrant playing music. Music and dancing was interconnected. The thing is, if there was parties, which is really different now, because there’s no dancing at parties. There’d be parties every weekend for sure, and there’d be, even for the sessions, there’d be dancing at the sessions. The thing is that we were all around the same age. Marty was the oldest person, but there would be other people that would come to dance, like Con McNamara – remember Con?

DS: I do remember Con, yea.

MW: At Noraid gigs they would have people get up and sing. They had a Scottish couple who were of Irish descent, and the woman would sing. She must have been five foot tall and really kind of roly-poly, she was really a nice woman. Their name was Gallagher, I think. She sing a song that was “Oh, the Fairy Dancers” or something like that. I can’t remember, it was her set piece, sing it every time. As far as I know, that’s the only song I heard her sing. But she was really nice, you know. There was the one guy, he’d come too, his name was O’Brien, and I’ve seen some people post stuff about him doing the broom dance.

DS: The broom dance, yea, there’s a photo of him doing the broom dance.

MW: You’d see that a lot, because he’d do that, not at every event, but just about every event, he’d dance. There was a number of people who wouldn’t come. Do you remember Tommy Roe?

DS: No.

MW: And Bernie. They were from, I think, from Galway or Clare. They lived here for a long time and had no kids, and Tommy was the janitor at Saint Luke’s. When they retired, they emigrated back to Ireland. He died, so I’m not sure what she’s doing. They were really anti-political, but he played the accordion, and I don’t think he ever came to a session.

DS: Yea, I think maybe Marty mentioned him.

MW: But the house parties were massive, there were tons, it was just a riot, you’d have so much fun. Or if you went to O’Connell’s, which was a really small area, they put in so many tables in that room. There was hardly room to get around the tables. And we’d still get up and dance, but we were just learning then.

DS: That is a big difference, not just the dancing even – the dancing and the session going together. That’s different now, definitely. Even when I first came here, which was ’78, at the sessions you’d have people, you’d have some dancing, but also you’d have just people hanging out, as well, socializing, having fun chatting, and I loved that. Nowadays that just doesn’t happen. It’s just the musicians playing, there’s no dancing, and nobody hanging out. In fact, the only people I ever see hanging out are old friends. I might ask David Aronow, or maybe Lisa would come, or Nick, and sit and chat, but it was a great period from that point of view.

MW: And the thing is, the dancing now, with all the dance schools, say, for the Irish Fair they have all these dance schools, I think maybe there’s one or two dance schools that have ever come and done any céilí dancing. They would never come to the social dance tent and do anything, up on the stage, and it’s really kind of weird. And I don’t think you really have to be Irish to appreciate Irish music or dancing.

DS: Not at all, I don’t think so at all.

MW: Because we always said, I think you have to understand the history to understand what’s going on in a country. You have to understand the past to understand what’s going on now, and you have to understand what’s going on now to understand what could possibly happen in the future. There’s no interest in history with the dancing. Some people are political – you’ll say, like Danielle is real political – not political around Ireland, but she’s real political, and that’s really good too. But it’s just kind of strange, you know.

DS: You came up through it in a certain way too, you know, and that era, a lot of you shared that at that period. I was talking about the apolitical nature of a lot of people I know now. But also when I first started hanging out here – I don’t want the conversation to be about me, but I think in fairness to you, I felt bad that I wasn’t really a supporter. When I came here, republicanism came with a lot of baggage, and in our family, you know, my grandfather had been a commandant in the IRA and so on. My grandfather Carney was a commandant in the IRA. My grandfather Sproule was a policeman and was in the RIC. So my great-aunt and her sisters were very much involved in that earlier era and whatever happened to us – I was talking about some things are natural, you know, spontaneous, like the prejudice, consciousness of prejudice, how wrong it is. Another things that was spontaneously part of my background was, not non-violence… Non- violence is a funny word, but I didn’t believe in killing people, as simple as that, blowing up people. All the violence to me was just a complete no-no. So the whole thing in the north, looking around it, as I’m not a sophisticated political person, to me the violence was a huge problem – the violence of the government, the violence of the people opposing the government. I was right there, I saw the violence, the violence started in front of my eyes, literally. So that was the lens in which I viewed the culture and the different organizations. So that made me standoffish about it. When we first did the céilís and the band would invite me to do the céilís, and this is support H-Block etc. etc., well, I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I really liked you and respected you, but then I was kind of standoffish about it, and I felt bad about that. But then I’d had these incidents as well. I’d say a person who’s active politically, which you’ve always been, you probably take this in your stride, but somebody who’s not been that active politically, I was in several situations through the period of the 70s and into the 80s where people appealed to me to play at events, and then I enlisted other people to play at those events, and I would

say, what is this really for, am I going to be supporting something I really believe in or not? And persuaded them to do it. And I go, and then I’m standing and I’ve brought my friends in. One particular instance I remember, a Protestant from the north of Ireland, a great piper, whose name was Karl Partridge – he was married to a friend of mine. I said, “Look, this is for the women in Armagh, this is a political, civil rights issue, this is wrong, there’s an event.” I was appealed to by a friend of mine, from America, funnily enough. And went, and the next thing of course, we’re along with Provos, and the Special Branch are taking photographs of everybody, including the musicians, and I’m thinking, this is so contaminated, I’m endangering this piper.

MW: Right, no, for sure. Because he’s Protestant.

DS: Apart from myself. That was part of what would always be in my mind, and a lot of people I knew, in relation to republicanism, etc. But as far as political views, and colonialism and the evils of the whole thing, we’d be on the same page. But that one element – are we going to have an armed struggle, as in killing people, that to me was the big divide. And it may have been to other people in relation to the organizations you’ve been involved with.

MW: I remember meeting Donny Golden’s mom and dad when they came here. She’s Protestant, but she grew up in the countryside. Her father gave her and her brothers and sisters Irish names, but also they were learning traditional Irish instruments, which would be unbelievably dangerous if they were living in Belfast. Her name was Bunting.

DS: This is Donny Golden’s parents?

MW: Yea, his father is Catholic, and the mother is Protestant. But her uncle was Major Bunting. So her cousin was Ronnie Bunting, the head of the INLA, who was killed in 1980. So it’s a real kind of an interesting thing. But now see, for someone like her and her family, who live in the countryside, but in a really strongly loyalist area. They live near – oh, god – it was going towards the coast, going east from Belfast. But if someone hears that music – you’re playing at home – your house could be burned down. Sometimes you just go, “Wo, man.”

DS: Yea, some of it is dangerous and weird. You came through your period in Derry fairly unscathed, let’s say, but there’s all sorts of minefields around, literal and figurative.

[END MIKE WHALEN PART 02—filename: A1011b_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN MIKE WHALEN PART 03—filename: A1011c_EML_mmtc]

MW: There were other people that would come up to Minnesota too. Everybody was really close and tight. There was a Comhaltas committee here, which lasted a couple of years, three years maybe, and then people dissolved it and started the Irish Music and Dance Association, just because there was so much control from Dublin. I’ve read some of the stuff about the concerts, and the parties were phenomenal. I mean, those parties went all night long. People stayed at people’s houses, you know, the Comhaltas musicians.

The youth céilí band would come up from Chicago. Were you here for those?

DS: Oh, that wasn’t mentioned. What was that?

MW: Several times. They would do a concert-céilí. They’d do a concert for an hour and a half, and there’d be a céilí for an hour and a half after. Those things were a riot. This was Liz Carroll, was part of the youth céilí band. They would come up in two vans.

DS: That must have been the 70s too, was it? Jimmy Keane?

MW: He was the accordion player? Yea, he was in the youth céilí band too. He was about her age too? It was phenomenal, and the parties were unbelievable. They’d be at our house, at my house and Sam’s. I can remember one time the Nazis were marching in Marquette Park on the southside of Chicago, and I can’t remember what was going on. I kept on thinking, “I wonder if any of these people coming up from Chicago are pro- Nazi.” So I talked to a couple of people. One guy was named Masters or something like that. He was an older guy, one of the chaperons – they didn’t do much chaperoning, I can just say. It was just really strange, but the parties, there’d probably be a hundred and fifty people in our house. There’d be a session up in the attic, and there’d be a session in the kitchen, and people dancing in the dining rooms. It was a riot.

DS: Did you always have the duplex, you’d the two sides of the house.

MW: Side by side.

DS: Would the party scatter from one side to the other?

MW: Yes. The Chicago people came up at least twice, and there was an older woman came up with them too. She would probably have been in her sixties or seventies or maybe even eighties. She played piano.

DS: Eleanor Neary?

MW: She was just phenomenal.

DS: She’s a very famous musician – very unusual to be playing tunes on the piano.

MW: She must be dead for thirty years or so. We started going up to Duluth to do céilís too, and the first one was put on by Young Communists – it was at the Sons of Norway Hall. It was a benefit against the B-1 bomber, which I think is still being made. That was really good too, and I was really shocked too how… because it was Finlanders basically doing this thing on Irish dance in the Sons of Norway Hall. And that Sons of Norway Hall is still up there.

DS: Those were big céilís too, were they?

MW: They were always big.

DS: Laura talks about them.

MW: They were really, really nice. Sometimes people were phenomenal dancers. I’m not sure if they all danced a lot, social dancing, but I can remember once the dance we started off with was the High Cauled Cap. Usually you wait till the end of the dance, the end of the night for that, so people get used to the sound of the music, but we started with that one, they were so great, so fast, such fast learners. At different times, I think Dean Magraw went up to Duluth once and played with us and the céilí band.

DS: Could be. I was up a few times, and I just remember one, might have been in that ballroom – Greysolon Ballroom? – and it might have been the last time I was up with the Northern Stars – you know, Jamie and Laura and Patty and so on. It was a huge céilí, and I remember you going into the middle of this crowd. There were hundreds, four or five hundred people there, and I couldn’t understand how you got them all – that’s what I’m saying – how you got them all going, in order. It was great.

MW: That doesn’t happen now. Now you have to practically drag people up to dance. I remember up there there was this woman – that Hotel Duluth was a senior citizen

building, and there was this woman who would come down to the céilís, her name was Kathleen O’Brien, and she had lived in Ireland for a while in the 30s or so, and she said, “Can I borrow the Irish flag, and I’ll give it back next time you come?” So I said, “You want the Tricolor?” She said, “No, I want the Plough and Stars,” because she was going to make a copy of it and hang it up. Such an interesting old lady. That was fun up in those ones. I keep on thinking, people in the Irish community could be putting on céilís in other towns, because remember we used to go out to Wauseca, Minnesota – were you part of that too?

DS: No, I wasn’t there, I don’t think, but I heard about it. I heard about a lot of these things because of Patty, the funnier céilís too and ones that things happened at. (laughs) It was definitely a very lively phase, and somehow it changed, you know. I don’t know when it changed or how it changed. Did you do any of these qualification things, official certificates?

MW: No. The thing is, we actually changed some of the things from the Irish dance book because none of us had had a parent or grandparent from Ireland, or had been at an Irish dance school, so when you’re reading these dance books, sometimes it’s really odd some of the things they say. Some of the things it’s like, there’d be too many…there’d be a lead around in every one and you’d go, “A lead around, it’s too boring.” I went to a feis in Derry once. It was in Bellaghy, and the feis céilí was in the indoor soccer or football field. So it was huge. They were doing, I can’t remember if it was the High Cauled Cap, but they did it different. It was a big circle, so you never got to rest, and you’d be dancing, but they’d play two different types of music, and maybe if you started a jig, that’s when you started the waves. But it was very strange. And sometimes with the Haymaker’s Jig, you’d do more spinning at the top, for the top couple. It was real interesting.

DS: But it would be natural to have different versions. The whole rigid standardization is not natural at all obviously.

MW: Right.

DS: So if you change things here, that would be a natural process.

MW: Sometimes too, you go, if there’s not many people and they haven’t a clue about music, they’re not paying any attention to the music, then I just say, ok, forward and back, forward and back. Music will be the background, all they’re doing is listening to me telling them what to do. Yea, it’s too weird. But lots of time going out to the country for these céilís was really good because for most of these people, their great-grandparents had immigrated, and they haven’t a clue about anything. Maybe there’d be a Hibernian chapter, so they wear a sash, stuff like that.

DS: But they didn’t really know anything about that.

MW: No. The thing is, I’ve been to céilís in Donegal, but just a bar will have a band playing, and I’ll try to get people up to do a dance, and most of the people haven’t a clue. I say, “Let’s do a Haymaker’s… And you know you did it in grade school.” It’s just fun, you know.

DS: Well, getting things going spontaneously too is something I love. So I would do it in my own way. You’re getting people up to dance – well, my thing would be getting people to sing. Not to sing all together, but say you’re sitting around and they’re not supposed to be even musical people, I’d say, “Well, somebody must have a song or a recitation or something.” And that’s the way our sessions were. We weren’t instrumental people growing up – it was songs, and my father might say an old recitation, whatever. And it didn’t matter what sort of song it was. And that’s the spirit, the spirit you describe, like, you’re in a bar in Donegal, let’s get a dance going.

MW: Let’s get up and dance.

DS: That’s lovely, that’s natural.

MW: You see, that’s the thing too – there would be occasionally people would sing at the sessions in the late 70s and early 80s, but usually it would be Tom Dahill, or you. But most people didn’t – they just wanted to play music

DS: One of the comments I made to Brian Miller at some point recently was, about the sessions is, what’s really going on in people’s heads in the session, you know what I mean? So different things are going on in people’s heads.

MW: Right.

DS: People have their gripes and so on. But definitely the idea that everyone’s just going to be playing together the whole time rattling off tunes is not the ideal session. And as far as the songs are concerned, now Tom is such a brilliant entertainer – he would have no qualms about starting up a song if he wanted to, which is the right thing to do. But generally the story is there are no songs unless somebody asks for a song.

MW: Oh, really?

DS: But if somebody asks, it happens. So funnily enough a really nice thing has happened the last few years, this guy Barry Foy – have you met Barry?

MW: I don’t think so.

DS: He moved here a few years ago, and he’s a brilliant fiddler, and a great character, but he always asks for songs in the session, and then they happen. And it’s such a relief. The song is lovely, and then it creates a contrast with the tunes. And, as you know, in Ireland when people sing a song, everybody shuts up.

MW: Yea. They’re very quiet. It’s really kind of an interesting trip with dancing – lots of times it’s more fun to dance with someone who knows how to dance. But the thing is at a céilí you’re actually teaching people too. So you’ll say, “Don’t you two dance together – dance with them.” And you can see they’re pissed, but you go, “Come on, we’re trying to make this fun for everybody. At the end of the night there’ll be plenty of time to do all the dancing you want because there’ll be less people here.”

There was a guy who came here to play, it was a trio, because a lot of the bands would stay at my house, even after Sam left, they would still stay at my house. And this guy stayed for a month, and he was Jewish, and he came to the Twin Cities with this Irish group that was touring. Then he stayed, and what he was doing was contacting people at different synagogues to get old klezmer music. So he started a klezmer band.

DS: Really?

MW: Yea.

DS: And did he stay here? MW: He stayed here for a month. He didn’t stay here, he went back to New York, or Boston.

DS: And he was playing Irish music?

MW: He played Irish music.

DS: It wasn’t Mark Simos, was it?

MW: The thing is he would go to people’s houses and he would talk to people at the synagogue, then go to old people’s houses, and get old music they had, or if there was musicians who had played, and these people would be in their seventies and eighties, because there were no klezmer bands in Minnesota.

DS: I don’t know. I’d have to ask somebody like David Aronow – that doesn’t ring any bells.

MW: I just remember he got mugged coming from the house too. Somebody robbed him coming down the hill on Chatsworth. I also remember – this would have been in ’76, or maybe ’77 – is it Séamus Begley? stayed at my house for a month. He was playing at MacCafferty’s.

DS: Really?

MW: They stayed on the floor in the living room, and my landlord came over, god, he thought he was getting me evicted. He was in the same place that Paddy lived too.

DS: Séamus is a character. He’s a fantastic musician, but he’s one of the most beautiful singers, Séamus Begley, unbelievable.

MW: He would have been twenty-four, twenty-five then. What’s he doing?

DS: He’s still on the go, very much.

MW: How old is he now, would you say?

DS: I suppose he’s about my age. I’m sixty-seven. He would be roughly in the same region.

MW: Joe Burke stayed at my house several times too. He was a great guy.

DS: Yes, he’s a great storyteller – yarns, jokes.

MW: He stayed for two weeks, he played for a month at MacCafferty’s this one time, and then this woman named, oh, Casey, played the harp with him.

DS: Máire? Máire Ní Chathasaigh. Miriam Casey, she’d be known in English. She’s still on the go too. I know her quite well. I’ve toured in group tours with her. And her husband, Chris Newman, is a brilliant guitarist, they play together.

MW: Where’s he from?

DS: He’s English. Brilliant, virtuoso guitarist. And her sister, Nollaig, or Noelle Casey, she’s a great fiddler and violinist, and she tours with the Chieftains and Cherish the Ladies.

MW: Well, she was a riot. I just remember they were playing at MacCafferty’s too, and it was like a Thanksgiving blizzard. So when we left MacCafferty’s, we walked back to my house in ruts, tried to ride on top of a car that was going by – her with her harp, big huge harp case, and Joe – I think he carried a fiddle and an accordion. Was he playing the fiddle too?

DS: I wouldn’t be surprised if he played the fiddle, but he plays flute and accordion, in public anyhow.

MW: This was a long time ago, fort-five years ago, nearly fifty years ago. And then, what’s-his-name used to stay at the house too – Michael Flatley.

DS: Really? And why was Michael in town?

MW: He came for Green Fields of America. A tour. He was the dancer. I can remember seeing him – Barb Dahill and I went down to – not to the concert – he danced with the Chieftains one year when he came.

DS: I wanted to ask you did you meet Donny Golden much? You see, Donny’s one of my heroes, as a dancer, obviously.

MW: I met him in Milwaukee, and I think maybe here, once he came on one of the tours, maybe with the Chieftains.

DS: He would have danced with them a lot. And his sister, Eileen. She lives in Donegal now.

MW: She does?

DS: In Ardara. She married a local guy and has a pub in Ardara – if you’re ever in Ardara. 33

MW: You know, I’ll probably never be back to Ireland again, just because it’s so expensive.

DS: Yea, yea, it is expensive.

MW: No, Donny Golden, he was interesting. I danced with him a couple of times. Like, in Milwaukee we would dance on the sides when the band was playing – when they were playing a jig or a reel. Sometimes we’d get fifty or sixty people doing a Bonfire Dance on the side of one of the big stages.

DS: Of course, I saw you there.

MW: I haven’t been there either for years.

DS: It’s changed too.

MW: And Mark Howard from Trinity, he got up and danced with us too. There was one guy, his name is Tom Burke, and he was from Chicago and had taken Irish dance, but he’s in Freedom Road Socialist Organization – I’ve known him from that. He would be in Milwaukee, and he was a good dancer too, so it was always fun to have him around.

DS: Did you visit Ireland much over the years?

MW: I would go for sure every other year, sometimes every year.

DS: Was the dancing part of that when you were over? Much or just the odd time?

MW: Yea. One year I went to a céilí in the Camden Irish Hall in London. That was nice. It was very organized, and they would do the Humors of Bandon as a céilí dance. It’s in the céilí book, but the whole place was doing that, so it’s huge. Have you been to the Camden Irish Center?

DS: I don’t think so.

MW: It’s huge, gigantic. Then I went up to Glasgow and stayed there for a week. I met people who were involved with bands of the line – it was pipe bands, whistle bands. These were people who involved in support, solidarity with Ireland. Every town had three or four different bands, and so I hung out with some of those people. Then I would go to political bookstores and stuff. We went to a céilí in Govan. I was wearing a political prisoners t-shirt, and these guys I was hanging with said, ”These guys don’t want anything political.” So I said, “Well, I’m going to go with it anyway.” Maybe fifteen or 34

twenty people came up to me wanting to buy the t-shirt. That was a fun céilí too – it was one of the nicest céilís I was ever at. It was in a room that wasn’t like this. It had nooks and crannies, and there would be people dancing in all parts of it. Like I said, I’ve been to the céilí at the Derry Fleadh in Bellaghy, and that was a nice céilí.

There were some people who put on a céilí once a week at a private Irish school in south Dublin. I went there once. You knows Breathnachs, you know Cormac Breathnach?

DS: Yea.

MW: I used to hang out with his brother Oisín. Do you know him?

DS: I did know him, yea.

MW: He’s in Spain now. Two years ago I reconnected with him through Facebook. Did you know Oscar?

DS: No, I don’t think so.

MW: What was his sister’s name? She was the chairman of Sinn Féin for a while – Lucilita. The mom’s Basque, I think. It was an interesting trip.

I would go to festivals. I was at one on the Cork-Kerry border in the early 80s. Agnes lived in Dublin for a while, and so I would stay, and then weekends I would go to other parts of Ireland. If there was something going on, I would hitchhike down there by myself and hang out. It was called Midsummer’s…but it was in Irish, so… I didn’t go to that many. I didn’t go to any in Dublin. I’d go to the gay bars in Dublin – that’s where I met that guy John McGuire. It was fun. I had a good time in Ireland. Last year in Mexico I met this guy from Mexico City on the beach, and he said his three uncles played in an Irish band in Dublin. He’d been in Mexico for thirty years. Two of his uncles stopped playing twenty years ago, but one of them still plays in a band.

DS: In Mexico.

MW: In Mexico. He plays in Mexico City and Marelos. He said his three uncles went to Ireland maybe five or six years ago for a month and traveled round all the sessions playing music.

DS: There is some Irish music just about anywhere you’d go in the world.

MW: There’s dance schools and stuff all over Mexico. I met a guy, there was this Irish couple that had emigrated to Vancouver, and it was a gay couple. One guy speaks Irish, he taught Irish, and they were a riot to be around, they were as funny as hell. And this year I was coming back into the enclosure where the hotel is, and I said something in English to this guy, and he answered me, and he had an Irish accent. “So, where are you from?” and he said Argentina. His grandmother was from Ireland, and he had just been to Kilkee for nine months, so he was fun. He and his girlfriend – she was twenty and he was twenty-one – and they were going to Cuba. There’s lots of Irish traveling.

[The following was recorded after a short break. Mike is back talking about the scene in the Twin Cities]

MW: The dancing and music were connected, so the thing is, you rarely saw people playing Irish music if there wasn’t somebody dancing. And it wasn’t step dancing. It would be Four Hand Reel, Six Hand Reel. It wasn’t that people didn’t know how to do some of the step dancing – you might do a baby jig or something like that, but it wasn’t the real intricate dancing, the choreographed that the dance schools do now, and a lot of them are just doing it because they get on the stage. (laughs) That would be something that I think would be… Céilí dancing is really dying, and set dancing hasn’t really caught on, you know. It’s real difficult. Occasionally there’s these céilís, third Saturday of the month, and whenever no musicians show up, because that’s happened a couple of times – the only musician would be Tom – and then there’d be seventy dancers come. But sometimes when’s there’s seven or eight musicians, no dancers. (laughs) Thirty people dancing at one of those céilís is a lot. You go, “Man.” So that’s the thing. I think it would be good for everybody – for the musicians and for the dancers, and even for more people to start coming to the sessions. It was a scene. Remember when they used to be at that Billy’s? And there was food there.

DS: Well, there’s an organic thing about things. That’s one of the things about the céilí that happens here. Tom Lockney and Tom Juenemann trying to get more people to come, but it’s hard to make things happen in an artificial way. You know that if people came, they’d love it. And it’s the same with the music too. I tour all the time – well, not all the

time – but I tour every year and, say, with Altan the audience is getting older along with us.

MW: Right.

DS: And you know that if people who were younger heard it, they’d love it. But how do you get them in? So at the moment it seems to me that céilí scene, yes, it has fizzled out, but then if you look at the old time and the square dance – if you go to the square dance, it’s sort of where the Irish dancing was thirty-five years ago. It’s young people, actually people of all ages playing. But there are a lot of young people who are really playing great old time traditional music, and they are also involved in the dance group, and they’re dancing, and there’s all these young people going. It’s just a thing – nobody made it happen. That’s the phase, whereas the Irish thing is at a different phase. But there are plenty of people playing, which is great, but I did love having a community round the musicians, not just the musicians playing for themselves. Most of those people hanging out, almost all of them, were the dancers.

MW: What’s the state of the sessions now? Which session do you go to?

DS: My most regular one is the Friday one in the Dubliner, because I like the time slot, six to half eight or quarter to nine. It’s great for me. I have a couple of pints, play tunes, it’s great. The Merlin’s happens after that, Merlin’s Rest, and it can be very good. Then there’s Keegan’s on Sunday night, it can be huge. And then there’s a lunchtime session in Kieran’s Pub, which I really love because it’s actually very small and very quiet and some of the teenagers, who are brilliant, from here, and a few of us, and there’s space to chat and play and sing, whatever, and it’s very, very quiet. But that one’s a nice one. It doesn’t necessarily happen every week.

MW: It’s a hassle when, even at Keegan’s, when you’ve got to pay for parking virtually at all these places. At Kieran’s downtown, it’s like you go, “What the fuck.”

DS: Well, the Keegan’s one you don’t have to pay for parking, because you can park at the photography place across the street, and there’s almost always a space. So you’ll know that again. Just across the street, and there’s a big lot beside Surdyk’s. And that’s a Sunday night, so actually you don’t have to pay on the street either.

[END MIKE WHALEN PART 03—filename: A1011c_EML_mmtc]