I LOVE America. Or to be more exact, I love North America. Or to be even more exact, I love the USA. 

Even though I’ve lived in Canada for almost a decade and have visited the US on different occasions for at best a number of months, I like Canada, but I love the US. Its people, unfortunately, come in large proportions – 73 per cent of the US population are classified as overweight.  Big in body but also big in generosity – such has been my experience of US hospitality. There have been times when I thought my hosts were planning to adopt me. The country itself is vast and varied. No wonder 52 per cent of the population does not have a passport – why go overseas when you have such variety and expanse at home?

The country has its flaws, to put it mildly. One American I stayed with had not one gun but three, and wouldn’t let his wife drive her car through a Black district in case the car broke down. The NHS is seen by Americans as socialism or even communism in action – of course you should pay for yourself if you get sick. 

Even those of us who haven’t visited the States are steeped in its culture. When I was a child we played cowboys and Indians, and we all knew who the good guys were. We listened to and sang American pop tunes. We adopted  rock ‘n’ roll and the twist as our favourite dances, we feasted on Hollywood movies, Militarily, many Americans believe that their country saved Europe’s ass in not just one World War but two, and they’re partly right. 

The South of Ireland today can thank the Yanks for their bulging coffers. According to  IDA Ireland’s 2025 Annual Report, FDI firms in the South employ over 302,000 Irish people. And of course there are few Irish families that don’t have a blood relative living in the States.

And yet, though I love the US, I detest it too. In that great play by Brian Friel, Philadelphia Here I Come, the notion of the young protagonist heading to the States to live is presented as superficial and heart-breaking. 

The people of the South have recently elected a President who is unambiguous as to the key role played by the US in funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Since the end of the Second World War, the US has been engaged in war after war – sometimes more than one simultaneously:  the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War. The deaths involved in these wars is calculated to be somewhere between 1.4 and 4 million.

You can see the dilemma all this leaves Ireland in. If the US firms in the South were to bend to Trump’s urgings and up stakes and go back to the States, the South’s economy would collapse. If we hadn’t been swamped by US popular culture, we’d never have known artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald and Linda Rondstadt.

All of which goes to show you how complicated and contradictory feelings emerge at the very use of the term ‘US’. The same country which absorbed the millions fleeing the Great Hunger also committed genocide with the indigenous people of North America, dropped napalm bombs all over Vietnam and brought orange-suited captives to Guantanamo Bay for years of torture and imprisonment. And of course we have the US electorate to thank for having created and elected that ghastly excuse for a human being, Donald Trump.

The US today is an empire, with outposts in every corner of the world. It has a vast stock of nuclear weapons. And yet it is the US that has given us the The Sopranos on TV and The Godfather in cinemas. Such is the power and reach of the American empire, we are all today, to a greater or lesser extent, slightly less obese Americans.

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