Thomas Horan describes his experience growing up in an Irish American family in Boston. The paternal side of his family comes from County Galway, his paternal grandmother having come to the United States when she was sixteen, before Irish independence. His maternal grandmother married a man of Scotch-Irish descent. He was raised in the Catholic Church, as a result of what he refers to as an insistence on ?middle-class respectability,? and his family was close with some of the priests from the area, however, he is no longer an active participant in the Church. Though living in an area with a lot of Irish meant that the family didn?t experience any particularly significant discrimination, there was a sense of wanting to assimilate and move up into the middle class. He moved to the South in 1999, first to attend graduate school at Chapel Hill, and then to Charleston. He states that, in terms of anti-Irish or anti-Catholic sentiment in the South, there seems to be more continuity in population here than in northern cities, which perhaps makes things harder for new ethnic populations to integrate.
