I have always been awed by the vibrancy with which my mom tells stories, but when I tell her so, she just shrugs. She always says that her uncle Joe was the best storyteller.

Joseph O’Shea grew up in the Wood Island neighborhood of East Boston in the 1930s and 40s. He lived with his brother, sister—my grandmother—and their parents in a triple-decker in Wood Island. And where they lived truly was a family affair: His aunt lived upstairs, and his grandmother across the street.

Though the O’Shea children had not been born in Ireland themselves, their parents had. This pocket of the family that emigrated to the U.S. coalesced on this one road in East Boston, teeming with other immigrants, primarily from Italy. As a result, the O’Sheas engaged with the Irish aspects of their identity every day, from spending time with family members to interacting with other Irish families at church or parochial school.

Much of Irish culture centers on a rich tradition of storytelling and oral history. It’s perhaps best described with the “gift of the gab.” According to Irish lore, if one kisses the Blarney Stone in County Cork—which just so happens to be where the O’Sheas immigrated to Boston from—they will develop eloquent speech, becoming an apt storyteller. But these days, it’s most used to describe someone of the Irish diaspora whose words entrance and engage.

Storytelling is arguably the biggest component of Irish folklore. The spoken word, not a paper trail, tells the history of Ireland. You find Ireland in Finn McCool and the Giant’s Causeway. You find Ireland through the tragic love of Diarmuid and Grainne. You find Ireland among the selkies, banshees and leprechauns. Though these stories and figures may have never existed, their existence in the Irish conscience grounds the people in a shared, mythical past.

The tendency to talk and spin a tale has grown beyond the Irish island too: Storytelling is just as steeped in the Irish diaspora, including the United States.

When I visited my grandmother’s house, she’d listen to Irish records on her record player. My parents would put Boston’s Irish Hit Parade on the radio in the car on Saturday. The Irish Rovers, The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers would sing songs about a girl with a black velvet band, lonely unicorns and lots and lots of whiskey. The cadence of the banjo, the tin whistle and the Bodhrán had me tapping my toes in the backseat.

While I learned many great Irish stories through music, what does the practice of storytelling in the Irish tradition mean to Irish-Americans today? Being Irish comes with connotations of being an underdog. Especially in Boston, this attitude permeates quite deeply, even if the past prejudice the Irish faced in the United States no longer proliferates. Stories are used to continue to craft shared culture, but I still longed to know more about the Irish roots.

I visited Ireland for the first (and only) time in November 2024 as part of a class on terrorism and counterterrorism I took while studying abroad in Copenhagen. I registered for the class less for the content than for the opportunity to engage with my ancestry in Ireland. Through the stories I had heard, I had come to believe that Ireland was an emerald utopia, and I wanted to see it for myself.

But as we toured Dublin and Belfast, I learned about cultural division and strife during the Troubles. The Troubles were sectarian, they were political, but they were ultimately a disagreement over how different stories comprise a collective national identity. Depending on the stories you picked, people living in the same city identified as Irish, Northern Irish and/or British.

This dynamic is best represented by the city of Derry/Londonderry: The city couldn’t land on one name over disagreements about the ties of the people living there to the English crown. Those who identified as British had no issues with and were even proud of calling the city Londonderry, but those who identified as Irish balked at the idea of naming their city after an oppressing regime’s capital.

As I learned more about the Troubles, I came to understand my own family’s history in the conflict. My grandfather’s uncle—Tom Kelly, a fervent supporter of Irish independence—attended the 1915 funeral for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (a predecessor of the Irish Republican Army [IRA]). This funeral concluded with Patrick Pearse’s statement on Irish freedom becoming the mantra of the IRB and later IRA: “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

So as I stood at Rossa’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, I thought of Tom Kelly and how he felt in 1915 in this same place, how he thought the future I live in might have looked. How would he feel about how I understand Ireland’s history and culture?

Stories are the ultimate bearer of unity or fracture. It might be a folktale on the battles of Tuatha Dé Danann, or it might be a significant moment in family history passed through the generations. It might even be a story of the life we experience now. But stories facilitate a connection with others that is larger than ourselves. Competing stories can spawn opposing factions, but understanding why others believe in the stories they do helps us find the commonalities bridging the divide.

The facts matter less than what the stories mean to us.

So while I may not be as wellspoken as my mom or her uncle Joe, storytelling through the written word has always drawn me in. I hope I continue to carry on the tradition of the “gift of the gab” by creating and sharing stories that shape our shared future.