There is a storm raging in a teacup here–here, that is, in my town of

Huntington, Long Island. The town is celebrating its 350th anniversary this

year, and the town coat of arms has been much on display. Some

Irish-American activist noted that the coat of arms included elements from

that of Oliver Cromwell, who came from Huntingdon [sic], England, but who

treated the Irish harshly in 1649. People keep asking me for an opinion on

this. I can’t be bothered to form one: but for absolutely the best–that

is, most thoughtful & sensible–blogging on matters Irish, I refer readers

to John Fay. John’s today blog has a link to an

editorial in Long Island Newsday on the coat of arms flap. Sorry, but I

can’t summon any interest in this story. Cromwell was OK in my

book–basically a good man, who seems to have had an uneasy conscience about

the atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford. (He was, by the way, a great

philosemite–Sigmund Freud was so impressed by Cromwell’s kindness to the

Jews, he named his son “Oliver.”) They were, however, pretty much par for

the 17th-century course. The Thirty Years War had only just finished,

remember, and the English Civil War too. The Cromwellian horrors were the

final episodes in an 8-year Irish conflict that had actually begun with

Catholic massacres of Protestants… and so on. I shall get ten thousand

angy e-mails on this, droning on and on about the Saxon

yoke and the wickedness of the evil Brits. I don’t care. It was all a long

time ago. Memo to Irish-Americans: it is getting hard to find anyone in

Ireland who cares, either. You can’t get a conversation going about this

stuff over there. You guys are living in the past.