(Irish tin whistle music) - Diddly-oh, diddly-oh
What be this, now?
Ack, sure it's 5000 in cash.
That'll be the fifth time this week.
Must be that luck of the Irish.
No, no, no, no, no
(cloth ripping)
No, no, no, no!
If you've ever heard the term luck of the Irish,
and imagined Irish people to have some
unnatural tendency to find fortune in life,
you may imagine that's where it comes from.
But today I'd like to give you a little more
context in history around that term.
And you may be surprised when you find out
why it originally came into usage.
So, picture this.
It's the mid-1800s in Ireland, and under British rule
Ireland was already a very difficult place to live.
And that's when the infamous Potato Famine hits.
While not native to Ireland, most of the country
depended on this single crop and as such an estimated
one and a half million people died from starvation.
So let's imagine a specific person
who already wasn't doing great
and has been losing friends and family all over the place.
With very few other options,
he and his family decided to emigrate.
In his case to America.
An estimated 80,000 people died
simply on the boat ride across the Atlantic.
So that's a few more family members out of the picture.
And he hardly gets the warmest of welcomes
on the east coast of America.
I'm not sure if we should welcome him to Philadelphia
with an anti Irish mob, or test the starvation skills
a second time by putting job ads
in the New York Times that say "No Irish need apply".
But there's gold in California.
So he sets off there instead,
completing the journey in a single afternoon
by first class flight....
Sorry, my mistake.
He either had to get back on the ship
and sail around the tip of South America,
or stop in Panama and hike through
the jungle using canoes and mules,
or try to go through the entire continental US which
included deadly desert passages and a whole lot of nothing.
Let's just say he lost a few more family members
to typhoid fever, cholera, shipwreck,
and a touch more starvation for good measure.
We're getting to the lucky part now, I promise.
So our hero has suffered great hardship
and loss I can't even begin to fathom.
But the fact that he has persevered means he clearly
has a will to succeed and a drive to never give up.
That's just unparalleled.
This is exactly the kind of person you need to be
if you're going to be digging or panning for gold.
And this extra work ethic meant that Irish people
were a little bit more likely than those
already settled in California to find gold.
They simply tried harder.
Now, it was hard age to live in
and other immigrants to America,
other recent arrivals to California may have suffered
their own hardships enough to have a similar work ethic.
So the Irish arrivals weren't actually
special in any gold finding ability.
It's more a case of the timing of the famine,
aligned with that gold rush to drive enough Irish people
out at once that they were easier to spot as a single group
for those already settled in California.
This context is important,
but from the perspective of someone whose family
emigrated a generation or more before
and wasn't as successful at finding gold.
It's as if the Irish were just lucky,
rather than any kind of admiration.
This led to resentment.
And the term luck of the Irish
was actually used pejoratively.
According to one historian,
it carried with it a certain tone of derision,
as if to say, "Only by sheer luck, as opposed to brains,
could these fools succeed."
And that's where the term comes from.
So it's not really the fun kind of luck after all.
But let me wrap up by turning it on its head a bit.
If you've ever put a lot of work into something,
or spent years crafting a skill,
or train for something physical and succeeded,
only to have other people dismiss it
as down to nothing but luck,
then that is a lot more along the lines
of how this expression was originally used.
So maybe this unappreciated lack of context
could be a new way of looking at it.
If you've ever experienced this dismissal of hard work
or years of preparations,
then as far as I'm concerned,
you've got the luck of the Irish,
no matter where you're from,
and precisely because it has nothing to do with luck.
Let me know your thoughts on this way
of looking at it in the comments below.
A Happy Paddy's Day, by the way.
And be sure to check out my other Irish themed videos here.
Thanks so much for watching.
Make sure to subscribe for loads more
fun videos and I'll see in the next one.