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Yvonne Abraham

The help of the Irish

In 2016, the OUTVETS group marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Steven Senne/Associated Press/File

Who gets to define what it is to be Irish around here this St. Patrick’s Day?

Must it really be the throwbacks who run the big parade in South Boston, where city-staining controversies seem to outnumber floats? Sure, they finally relented and voted to include a gay veterans’ group in Sunday’s march. But please. It’s high time we looked elsewhere for a true celebration of the culture that helped shape the region.

You’d have a hard time finding people more true to Boston’s Irish history, and its spirit, than the folks at the Irish International Immigrant Center, which, despite the name, serves people from 120 countries these days. They’ve been inundated with worried supplicants of late, thanks to the unreconstructed nativists who now run the country.

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“This St. Patrick’s Day, we’re dealing with absolute chaos,” said executive director Ronnie Millar. “We’re on the front line of a crisis.”

The crisis has triggered a surge in volunteers and donations, but the IIIC is still overwhelmed. And there’s only so much its attorneys and social workers can do for the Somali refugees sobbing over family reunification forms or for the Hondurans terrified they will be picked up by ICE while their kids are in school.

“Right now, we can’t reassure people,” said immigration attorney Rebecca Minahan. “I can’t give them reliable information. It changes every day.”

The way Millar and others see it, fighting this wave of heedless cruelty is the most Irish of undertakings.

“The very essence of being Irish is the values of hospitality, of caring for others, fighting for social justice and human rights, and we’ve stayed very true to that,” he said.

There was a time when the Irish in this country were exactly where the most vulnerable immigrants are now. Scores of thousands arrived here in the second half of the 19th century, fleeing famine and poverty. Back then, immigrating to the United States was a matter of scraping together money to buy passage on a crowded ship. No small feat, but far short of the bureaucratic and financial walls today’s immigrants must scale.

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Those who came before them met the boats at the docks, taking care packages to the new arrivals, using their networks to find them places to sleep and work. Irish immigrants were viewed by many with deep and open prejudice, especially as most were Catholic.

“People didn’t know much about Catholicism,” said Robert Mauro, a professor at the Irish Institute at Boston College. “Was their allegiance with Rome or elsewhere?”

So it is that the predicament in which so many IIIC clients now find themselves has extra resonance for Millar and his colleagues.

Of course, the federal government doesn’t have a monopoly on small-mindedness. Which brings us back to that troublesome parade. The IIIC had never taken part in the Southie event before. Decisions by the Allied War Veterans Council, which organizes the parade, to exclude gay groups didn’t sit well with the IIIC. But after OUTVETS was allowed to march in the last two parades, the IIIC decided 2017 would be the year.

When they told organizer Timothy Duross they wanted to carry a sign that read, “Immigrants Make This Country Great,” he raised concerns that the message would offend some parade-goers, said Millar. Rather than be stubborn, he said, the IIIC replaced the innocuous statement with the aggressively bland, “Together for All,” and prepared to march.

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For his part, Duross told me he was not offended by the sign (“‘Illegal immigrants’ I would have a problem with”), that he did not disallow it, and that the IIIC changed it entirely on their own.

Given the history here, my money’s on Millar’s account.

In any case, after organizers voted to exclude the gay vets once again — before caving to common sense and pressure — Millar told Duross the IIIC would be sitting out the parade, after all.

“That is not the real Irish spirit,” Millar said.

It’s not the real American one, either.


Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.