The Jameson Catholic Bushmills Protestant Irish whiskey divide: Do the religious allegiances have any basis in fact?

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. “There was this fear that Catholic Irish could threaten the foundations of the United States,” she told me—something that may sound devastatingly familiar to anyone following the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions on immigration. The new Catholic immigrants were viewed negatively by the existing American population, and Protestant Irish felt that their arrival was “enveloping them in this new negative association of what it meant to be Irish.” According to Kelly, the famine subsequently led to Irish Catholics associating more with Irish nationalist organizations, in which they could process their trauma aloud. The history of the famine, and subsequent discrimination against newly arrived Irish Catholics, was, Kelly says, a “dark shadow over people’s lives.” Considering that context, it’s clear that clinging to something as seemingly silly as a whiskey brand became a way of asserting one’s identity and heritage. He and his team at the Dead Rabbit attempt to combat this through the bar’s “Paddy’s Not Patty’s” March events, which celebrate Irish culture rather than, as he puts it, “getting absolutely shit-faced.” So my grandfather never had strong opinions about the religious affiliation of his whiskey—but he did face pushback from his family for converting to marry a Catholic woman, and he carried a deep sense of pride about his ethnic heritage.