You Don’t Get to Be Racist and Irish - Imelda May

https://www.unicef.ie/app/uploads/2020/07/Imelda-May-Poem.pdf

You don’t get to be racist and Irish. You don’t get to be proud of your heritage, plights and fights for freedom while kneeling on the neck of another.

You’re not entitled to sing songs of heroes and martyrs, mothers and fathers who cried as they starved in a famine.

Or of brave-hearted,
soft-spoken. poets and artists. lined up in a yard,
blindfolded and bound waiting for Godot,
and point-blank to sound.

We emigrated.
We immigrated.
We took refuge.
So we cannot refuse. when it’s our time to return the favour.
Land stolen.
Spirits broken.
Bodies crushed and swollen unholy tokens of Christ nailed to a tree that you hang around your neck like a noose of the free.

Our colour pasty,
our accents thick,
hands like shovels from mortar and bricklaying foundation of cities you now stand upon.
Our suffering seeps from every stone your opportunities arise from.
Standing on the shoulders of our forefathers and foremothers who bore your mother’s mother.
Our music is for the righteous.
Our joys have been earned well deserved, and serve to remind us to remember.

More Blacks.
More Dogs.
More Irish.
Still labelled leprechauns, Micks, Paddys, louts.
We’re shouting to tell you:
our land, our laws are progressively out there.
We’re in a chrysalis, emerging into a new and more beautiful era.

40 Shades Better.
Unanimous in our rainbow vote, we’ve found our stereotypical pot of gold and my God, it’s good.
So join us.

Because you don’t get to be racist and Irish.