Greetings and welcome back to another edition of Hayden's History Hour.

I'm your host, Hayden Daniel, and editor of The Federalist.

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Today we have a very special episode for St. Patrick's Day and we're going to explore the

burning question that's on everybody's mind, did the Irish ruin America? Now, tens of

millions of Americans estimated up to 30 million, can claim some sort of Irish ancestry.

And that's a point of pride for many of them, as we've seen with the amount of celebration that goes on for St. Patrick's Day.

And today, most people would say that the Irish Americans are solidly American in both culture and temperament.

They are just as American as the people who were here during the revolution or earlier in the 19th century.

But that wasn't always the case. Americans who saw Irish immigrants coming over the Atlantic in the mid-19th century, certainly

did not think so.

They saw the Irish Catholics coming off the boats as invaders who brought a foreign

culture, an alien religion, crime, and corruption to their young republic.

That being said, as you might expect, the Irish faced a lot of hostility when they first came to America.

And their arrival and how they began to assimilate into America changed the very nature of American politics in foundational ways that we still feel today.

But before we dive into the history of Irish immigration to America, we need to do just a real quick rundown of Ireland's history and its relationship with England before colonization.

The English conquest of Ireland began at 1169 during the reign of Henry II, the king of England at the time.

Ireland at that point was not a unified country.

It was a very fractured island full of small, petty kingdoms.

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