For Irish roots, a bag of dirt
SPEONK, New York: Part of being Irish in America is a nostalgia for the old sod. The rich, dark dirt holds centuries of farming and famine and fighting. For millions of immigrants and generations of descendants, it is the essence of their heritage: the subject of great poets, the wealth of Irish kings.
And now, all that can be had for a few dollars per pound, shipped to your doorstep with some shamrock seeds on the side.
Straight from the Auld Sod Export in County Tipperary - well, not straight, but via a warehouse in this eastern Long Island town filled with plastic bags labeled "Official Irish Dirt."
The company was started to capitalize on the sentimental symbolism of Irish soil to Americans.
"There's a saying that when the Irish came to America, they brought their churches, schools, and music, but the only thing they couldn't bring was the soil," Pat Burke, one of the two Irishmen who founded the company, said by telephone from Ireland. "Now we can send it over to them."
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In honor of St. Patrick's Day on March 17, the 12-ounce, or 350-milliliter, bag that normally goes for $15 was available at four bags for $20 through the rest of the month, shamrock seeds included.
One recent afternoon, a team of Hispanic employees was furiously preparing the bags, which carried the image of a little Irish farmer in a green vest and cap and were labeled "Guaranteed Irish."
Tim O'Connor, the Irish consul general in New York, called the enterprise "a tiny but tangible way to regain the powerful mystical connection to the soil, which means so much to the Irish."
Burke said the soil was often tossed atop coffins or sprinkled on grass over grave sites. Funeral directors and florists have ordered pounds of the stuff, as have wholesalers in China, who have indicated that their customers were attracted by the legend of Irish luck.
An 87-year-old lawyer in Manhattan originally from Galway recently bought $100,000 worth of the dirt to fill in his yet-undug American grave. A native of County Cork spent $148,000 on seven tons to spread under the house he was having built. "He said he wanted a house built on Irish soil so he can feel like he is home in old Ireland when he walked around his house in Massachusetts," Burke said. Neither man wanted his name mentioned for fear of seeming eccentric or foolish.
Since Auld Sod's Web site, officialirishdirt.com, went online in November, Burke said, he has shipped roughly $2 million worth to the United States, where about 40 million people claim Irish ancestry and Enterprise Ireland estimates annual sales of Irish gifts at more than $200 million.
The company started mining the dirt in September from a two-acre, or 0.8-hectare, field it purchased in Cahir, a small Tipperary village, but has had to buy or rent other plots across the country to keep up with demand. Burke said his original notion, to gather dirt in each of Ireland's 32 counties and market it by county, proved too expensive.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture issues only two permits for importing dirt, one for Irish soil and one for Israeli soil, said Melissa O'Dell, a spokeswoman with the department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. HolyLandEarth.com offers Israeli dirt at $20 for a 16-ounce bag.
Burke is hardly alone in trying to capitalize on Irish nostalgia. Colleen Roberts said she has sold more than 100 bags of dirt since January from her online gift shop, IrishFinds.com. At BuyIreland.com, one can get a square foot of a field in "rural Ireland" for $49.99 - or, at least, a deed, a map, and photographs.
On Irishsmoke.ie, $18 brings three pounds, or 1.4 kilograms, of Irish bog, also known as turf or peat, cut from Donegal fields, to burn in a fireplace or on a grill. The site's proprietor, Jim Gallagher, thought of the idea one night when he ran out of charcoal during a barbecue and was too drunk to drive to the store.
"I cut up some peat and put it in the barbecue, and everyone said, 'This is amazing,' " recalled Gallagher, who also sells incense and torches that smell like peat. "It's the aroma of home."