Tom Hayden explores the psychic, emotional and political consequences of the erasure of a rebellious Irish heritage by generations seeking the respectability of American assimilation. This, he argues, has yielded to an Irish American literature of sentimentality typified by the work of Frank McCourt and to high rates of schizophrenia, depression, and alcoholism within the community. By re-inhabiting their history, today's Irish-Americans could recognize their links to others now experiencing the prejudice once directed at their forefathers and thereby offer an independent Irishness to global movements for peace and justice.