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At eight twelve on the morning of St Patrick’s Day, Maeve O’Rourke came into the Belfast kitchen looking for toast and found New York already accusing her family of cowardice. The message had arrived sometime after midnight and sat waiting on the household terminal beside the telephone, its green indicator blinking beneath a photograph that had taken several minutes to come through the line. Maeve leaned over the chair without sitting and watched the image finish resolving itself from broad blocks into recognisable people. Her aunt Eileen stood in a Queens sitting room beneath what appeared to be six feet of paper shamrocks, wearing a jumper so violently green that the camera struggled with it. Uncle Joe had a tricolour bow tie. Their eighteen-year-old daughter Bríd wore green plastic sunglasses despite being indoors, while fifteen-year-old Patrick had apparently allowed someone to dye a stripe through his hair. Twelve-year-old Maura stood in front holding a handwritten sign that read BELFAST: EXPLAIN YOURSELVES. Beneath the picture, Eileen had typed, **We have seen photographs from your house. Not a single decoration. The New York branch has concluded you have abandoned the nation.** Maeve read the sentence twice, then called toward the stairs, “Mam, Aunt Eileen says we’ve abandoned Ireland.” Nuala O’Rourke answered from somewhere upstairs, “Tell her Ireland is coping.”
Maeve sat at the terminal and began typing before her mother reached the kitchen. She wrote that Belfast had not abandoned anything, Belfast simply did not require visual confirmation of the date, and anyone who needed green plastic glasses to remember being Irish was clearly living too far from home. She had nearly sent it when Nuala appeared tying the belt of her dressing gown and told her, “Don’t start a transatlantic incident before I’ve had tea.” Maeve said, “They started it.” Nuala leaned close enough to inspect the photograph and immediately laughed at her brother-in-law’s bow tie. “That thing could guide aircraft,” she said, then read Eileen’s message and added, “No, send yours. She deserves it.” Maeve transmitted the reply while Nuala filled the kettle, and within twenty minutes the family line showed its first Dublin contribution of the day: their cousin Orla Devlin had posted an old photograph of Nuala aged seventeen, standing at a seaside railing in a white blouse with a collar wide enough to qualify as weather protection. Orla had added only **Belfast has always respected restraint. Evidence attached.** Nuala stopped halfway through pouring tea and said, “Where did she get that?” Maeve told her, “Nan, obviously.” Nuala said, “Your grandmother will answer for this.”
Orla lived in Dublin, was twenty-four and had developed the reputation of possessing photographs nobody remembered allowing to exist. Her mother had spent years storing family pictures in biscuit tins, drawers, envelopes and old albums whose adhesive had long since given up; Orla, after acquiring access to a decent scanner through work, had begun slowly transferring them into digital form. This had initially been praised by the family as preservation. The praise ended once Orla realised preservation could also mean making sure every cousin on two continents saw an uncle asleep with his mouth open at a 1979 wedding. On St Patrick’s morning she apparently had free time, dangerous equipment and no moral supervision. By nine she had posted Nuala’s seaside collar, Eileen aged eleven with two front teeth missing and her fringe cut at a slope, and their brother Seamus—now a respectable bank manager in Cork—wearing a homemade cowboy hat at a cousin’s birthday in 1968. Each image arrived with little comment. **American influence began early.** **Financial sector leadership, 1968.** **Please note Belfast’s commitment to dignity.**
The Belfast house gradually woke around this attack. Declan came downstairs already dressed for Mass and found Maeve, thirteen-year-old Ciarán and nine-year-old Aoife crowded around the terminal while Nuala stood behind them with tea. He asked what had happened, and Aoife announced, “Orla found Mam’s enormous collar.” Declan inspected the image and said, “I remember that blouse.” Nuala told him, “You did not know me then.” Declan answered, “I remember it from photographs because the blouse arrived five minutes before you did.” Nuala threatened to remove him from the family line. Ciarán, enjoying the morning more with each minute, asked whether they had any old photographs of Declan. Nuala told him there was one involving flared trousers and a bicycle, which immediately changed Declan’s position on digital family archives. “We should have rules,” he said. Maeve asked what kind. “Consent. Decency. Historical mercy.” Nuala said, “Interesting how quickly you discovered principles.”
The family terminal was not unusual enough in 1991 for anyone under thirty to regard the exchange itself as remarkable. Maeve had grown up sending text to cousins before she was old enough to understand why older relatives still called it astonishing. Photographs took longer, especially when too many people tried transmitting large files through busy weekend lines, but that inconvenience had become ordinary too. Bríd in Queens could send a picture of an outfit before leaving the house and complain about Maeve’s answer before Maeve had finished breakfast. Orla could scan an old photograph in Dublin, post it to the family board and watch relatives in New York and Belfast begin denying responsibility for their younger faces almost immediately. To Maeve, the Atlantic was not an abstraction crossed only by letters, expensive telephone calls or adults travelling with suitcases. It was five hours of time difference, occasionally bad connection quality and cousins who appeared on the screen whenever they felt like interfering.
By ten the New York branch had answered. Bríd’s message appeared first: **Plastic glasses are an expression of cultural confidence. Sorry Belfast fears joy.** Maeve typed back that cultural confidence generally survived without novelty eyewear, while Patrick sent a photograph of himself in the kitchen beside a tray of green bagels. Ciarán recoiled visibly and wrote, **That is food colouring abuse.** Patrick responded, **You people boil cabbage. Stay humble.** Nuala, reading over Ciarán’s shoulder, said, “We don’t even have cabbage today.” Ciarán answered, “I’m not letting accuracy weaken the argument.” Declan told him this was a dangerous principle, though he was smiling as he said it.
The dispute expanded once the adults began contributing. Eileen, awake early in Queens because she had food to prepare before relatives arrived, insisted that Americans of Irish descent were entitled to enthusiasm because distance made ritual more important, not less. Nuala replied that there was enthusiasm and then there was dressing an entire house as though green paper had exploded inside it. Eileen sent another photograph, this one of the front window decorated with shamrocks and a hand-painted sign reading LÁ FHÉILE PÁDRAIG. Nuala conceded the lettering was nice before adding that the plastic leprechaun underneath ought to be prosecuted. Eileen wrote, **That leprechaun cost six dollars and has been in this family four years. Show respect.** Declan typed over Nuala’s shoulder that four years did not make an object ancestral. Joe replied from New York that Americans were more efficient at creating heritage.
Dublin remained less interested in defending either side than in worsening relations. Orla posted a photograph of Eileen and Nuala together in 1974, both wearing matching green skirts made by their mother for a parish event. Eileen had evidently been laughing as the picture was taken, while Nuala had the expression of a teenager already planning retaliation against the photographer. Orla captioned it **Before ideology divided them.** Nuala objected at once that the skirts had not been their idea. Eileen replied that she remembered liking hers. Nuala typed, **You also liked a man with a moustache who played accordion. Your judgement at nineteen is inadmissible.** Eileen sent back, **You married Declan. Shall we compare?** Declan, reading from behind Nuala, said, “I’m being dragged into a dispute I was winning by absence.” Maeve told him, “That’s what family is for.”
After Mass the Belfast branch went to Nuala’s mother’s house for lunch, where the terminal sat in the front room beneath a shelf of framed photographs that supplied Orla with much of her arsenal. Kathleen O’Rourke was seventy-two, small, silver-haired and entirely untroubled by the family’s claims that she had enabled a privacy catastrophe. She had already received a telephone call from Nuala demanding to know why Orla possessed the seaside picture and had answered that photographs were taken to be seen. When Maeve repeated the complaint in person, Kathleen said, “Your mother spent years saying nobody ever took enough photographs of her. Now apparently we took the wrong ones.” Nuala said, “There is a difference between a family photograph and a public transmission to New York.” Kathleen corrected her: “It’s not public. It’s Eileen.” Nuala said, “Eileen is worse than public. Public eventually loses interest.”
Kathleen’s house filled slowly with nearby family. Seamus and his wife arrived from Cork later than promised. Two cousins came from across Belfast carrying children and a tin of biscuits. An aunt from Lisburn brought apple tart. Nobody coordinated the meal particularly well, so the table contained ham, potatoes, bread, three different desserts, sausage rolls somebody claimed had been requested and a bowl of salad that remained almost untouched. The television stayed low in the corner while conversation moved across rooms. Children ran through the hallway with the confidence of people who knew nobody would truly stop them until something broke. Maeve and Ciarán transferred the family line onto Kathleen’s terminal, and within minutes Orla had posted a fresh photograph taken in Dublin that morning: herself, her younger brother Donal and their parents squeezed around the breakfast table, Donal caught halfway through eating toast and their father reaching for the camera as though attempting to prevent the image.
Orla captioned it **Dublin branch formal portrait, 11:43.**
Donal immediately replied from another terminal in the same house, **I am sitting six feet away from you and I hate you.**
Bríd in New York wrote, **Post more.**
Donal answered, **You are dead to me.**
Eileen wrote, **He looks lovely.**
Donal replied, **Aunt Eileen, with respect, this is how wars begin.**
Kathleen read that aloud and laughed so hard she had to remove her glasses.
Nothing about the joke carried political weight for the younger cousins. To Maeve, war belonged to history classes, foreign news and stories old people occasionally told badly because they assumed younger listeners knew the background. Ireland itself had been one country for twenty-five years, longer than any of the grandchildren on Kathleen’s floor had been alive. Belfast and Dublin were different cities in the way cities were different: accents, habits, football loyalties, preferred newspapers, complaints about one another’s traffic, the conviction that the other place thought too highly of itself. Maeve’s understanding of travelling south involved train times, cousins, weather and whether somebody would meet her. She knew there had once been a border because school had taught it, family history had supplied details and older adults occasionally used phrases like before reunification or back when you had to go through the crossing. Yet it belonged to the inherited category of things that had been real without being imaginable as ordinary life now.
Kathleen herself could remember it easily enough, but she did not spend St Patrick’s Day explaining history to children who had not asked. When Maeve discovered an old photograph in one album showing Kathleen and her late husband beside a car somewhere in County Louth and asked why there was a handwritten date and journey time beneath it, Kathleen only said they had once kept careful notes about certain trips because travelling could be slower then. Maeve asked, “Because of the roads?” Kathleen paused before answering, “Roads, queues, all sorts,” then turned the page to a photograph of Eileen as a baby with a bonnet large enough to make everyone forget the question.
By early afternoon New York had become louder even through text. Relatives had begun arriving at Eileen’s Queens house, and every message contained evidence of somebody in the background. Bríd sent a photograph of two aunts arguing over soda bread while Patrick leaned between them holding a knife he had been specifically told not to use yet. Another image showed Joe wearing a green paper crown apparently made by Maura. A third displayed a dining table covered with food and one elderly uncle seated at its end wearing an expression of profound suspicion toward a bowl of green mashed potatoes. Nuala stared at that picture and typed, **You dyed potatoes?** Eileen answered, **Maura wanted to.** Nuala wrote, **You are the adult.** Eileen replied, **That is a technical classification.**
Joe then entered the argument and accused Belfast of under-celebrating because living in Ireland had made them complacent. Declan typed, **We live here. The day happens whether we decorate or not.** Joe responded that this was precisely the lazy attitude New York had overcome. Seamus, who had been trying not to participate, leaned over Kathleen’s terminal and wrote, **New York has overcome subtlety.** Within seconds Bríd replied, **Uncle Seamus, Dublin has already posted your cowboy hat. Sit this one out.**
Everyone in Kathleen’s sitting room applauded.
Seamus asked his mother whether she had deliberately given Orla the picture. Kathleen said, “I gave her a box. History made its own decisions.” Seamus replied that this sentence was exactly why families needed archivists with ethics. Maeve said Orla was an archivist with ethics; her ethics merely did not favour him. Seamus pointed at her and said, “You’re sixteen. Someday there’ll be a photograph.” Maeve told him, “There already are. I’ve made peace with it.” Nuala said, “That confidence won’t survive Orla finding your haircut from 1984.” Maeve reminded her she had not existed in 1984. Nuala said, “See? Already hiding behind technicalities.”
The first genuinely bad photograph of Maeve appeared forty minutes later.
Orla claimed innocence because she had not taken it. The image came from Kathleen’s collection and showed Maeve aged approximately six, asleep sitting upright in a chair during a family gathering with one sock missing, hair stuck to her forehead and a biscuit still clutched in one hand. Ciarán laughed before the picture had fully resolved. Maeve leaned toward the screen in disbelief and said, “Why would anybody photograph that?” Kathleen, from the sofa, answered, “Because you wouldn’t let go of the biscuit.” Maeve said this did not justify permanent records. Nuala was already laughing too hard to defend her. Orla’s caption appeared underneath: **Belfast branch maintaining national dignity, 1981.** Bríd added, **I would like this enlarged.** Maeve typed, **I will cross the Atlantic and destroy your house.** Patrick replied, **Wear green when you come.**
The Dublin cousin escalated again by posting photographs with almost no gap between them: Declan at a barbecue in an apron reading KISS THE COOK; Eileen in 1969 wearing enormous white sunglasses; Joe during his first visit to Ireland in the seventies, asleep in the back seat of a car with his mouth open; Nuala holding a crying baby Seamus while looking equally close to tears herself; Kathleen dancing at a wedding with both shoes in one hand; and, finally, Orla herself aged twelve with a home haircut so uneven that everyone briefly united against her. Maeve expected her to delete it. Instead Orla captioned the image **I submit myself to the court.** Donal wrote from Dublin, **Sentence: permanent public display.** Orla replied, **Accepted.** Nuala said, “That’s why she’s dangerous. No shame.”
The New York gathering used the photograph as justification for a group portrait. They sent notice first because arranging nearly twenty relatives around one camera took enough time that Belfast could follow the process through messages. Bríd reported that Uncle Michael refused to stand in the back because he believed age conferred seating rights. Maura complained that somebody had hidden her plastic glasses. Eileen announced that nobody was allowed to eat until the picture was taken, prompting Joe to accuse her of weaponising hunger for composition. Belfast supplied unsolicited direction. Maeve wrote, **Put Patrick in back because of the hair.** Ciarán added, **Move the leprechaun out.** Nuala insisted, **Leave the leprechaun. Future generations deserve evidence.** When the photograph finally arrived, the family had failed to achieve formality anyway. One child faced sideways. Somebody near the back had closed their eyes. Joe’s bow tie sat crooked. The plastic leprechaun had somehow moved to the centre foreground and appeared to be the only subject prepared for the photograph.
Kathleen examined it with tenderness that did not require the picture to be good. She identified people aloud for the smaller children near her chair, even though most already knew the names. “There’s your Aunt Eileen. That’s Bríd beside her, and Patrick behind Joe. Maura’s down front. That’s Michael with the dreadful jumper.” A child asked why all the New York relatives wore green when nobody in Kathleen’s house did. Kathleen said, “Because they enjoy annoying us.” Nuala corrected her, “Because they’ve confused Ireland with a colour chart.” Kathleen said, “That too.”
Dublin sent its own group picture soon afterward, but Orla had apparently set the camera timer badly. The photograph caught the family in the process of arranging themselves. Her mother was halfway into a chair, Donal was pointing toward the camera, her father had one hand lifted while asking a question, and Orla herself had only just entered the frame from the left. Bríd immediately declared it better than New York’s. Eileen accused Dublin of cheating by making failure fashionable. Orla replied that New York’s problem was trying too hard. Nuala said, “At last, Dublin contributes something useful.” Orla responded by uploading the seaside collar again.
By four in Belfast, lunch had stretched into tea. In New York it was still late morning. This time difference gave the family day a peculiar overlap: Ireland moving toward evening while America continued preparing for its main meal. Maeve liked watching it. Belfast relatives began putting on coats while Queens cousins were still deciding who needed to go to the shop for more milk. Dublin had reached the lazy middle of the afternoon when people shifted from chairs to sofas and claimed they were too full to eat until somebody opened biscuits. The family line made all three households appear adjacent despite the clocks refusing to agree.
Bríd sent Maeve a private message asking what Belfast teenagers actually did on St Patrick’s Day if they did not dress in green and march around declaring their ancestry. Maeve replied that some went into town, some went to music sessions, some went to family houses, some did nothing, and several people she knew were mainly interested because Monday would involve everyone discussing who had embarrassed themselves over the weekend. Bríd wrote that this sounded disappointingly normal. Maeve answered, **That’s because it is normal.** Bríd replied, **You live in Ireland. You’re supposed to make it interesting for me.** Maeve typed, **You live in New York. I thought that was your job.** Bríd answered that New York was currently doing its part and attached a photograph of Patrick attempting to eat a green bagel without getting dye on his teeth.
Maeve forwarded the image to Ciarán.
Within moments it was everywhere.
Patrick posted, **Betrayal.**
Maeve answered, **History made its own decisions.**
Kathleen, when shown this, was delighted to discover her phrase had entered family law.
Later in the afternoon, an older uncle in Belfast began telling Joe over the family line that American celebrations had always seemed strange to him because they combined things from different parts of Ireland and different centuries as though they had all happened together. Joe answered that immigrant traditions were allowed to become their own thing. The conversation might have turned serious if Orla had not inserted a 1976 photograph of that same uncle wearing a green tie covered with tiny harps. She captioned it **Cultural purity, archival evidence.** The serious discussion collapsed. The uncle declared the tie had been a gift. Joe said this was how all embarrassing traditions began. Orla promised to locate the matching waistcoat if provoked further.
Maeve noticed that the older adults occasionally touched history from an angle the younger cousins did not. Eileen remembered her first St Patrick’s Day in New York after emigrating and the strange comfort of hearing accents from home amplified in public. Nuala remembered visiting Dublin as a child when her parents still spoke of travelling south as something requiring more preparation than Maeve’s generation understood. Kathleen remembered St Patrick’s Days before television filled homes, when a family gathering meant only whoever could physically reach the house. None of them turned these memories into lessons. They appeared because family conversation worked that way: an argument about a plastic leprechaun could suddenly contain a thirty-year-old memory and then move directly into whether Seamus had taken the last apple tart.
The younger generation received these fragments without carrying the same weight. For Ciarán, Dublin was where Orla lived and where a school trip had once left him convinced every museum contained too many stairs. For Maeve, New York was Bríd’s city, five hours behind and full of relatives who decorated excessively. Belfast was home, not a political position. The map they inherited had already settled before they were born. Adults could remember when roads, institutions and identities had been arranged differently, but Maeve’s life did not contain a before against which the present had to be measured.
Around six, Kathleen insisted on making one proper Belfast photograph before people left. This created more resistance than New York’s portrait because nobody in the room had dressed with photography in mind. Seamus said his shirt had gravy on it. Nuala complained that she had been awake since before eight and looked accordingly. Declan said the Americans would only use the picture as propaganda if Belfast appeared insufficiently festive. Maeve argued that refusing a photograph would be worse. Kathleen ended the debate by producing the camera and saying, “Stand where I tell you. You’ll all be dead someday and somebody will want to know what you looked like.” Nuala told her mother this was unnecessarily cheerful. Kathleen replied, “It’s practical.”
They arranged themselves in the sitting room. Kathleen sat in front because everyone agreed on that without discussion. Children clustered around her. Adults stood behind. Maeve ended up between Nuala and Ciarán, with Aoife directly in front holding Kathleen’s hand. Nobody wore green except Seamus, whose dark jumper happened to contain one narrow stripe. Declan suggested they borrow a parsley sprig for cultural credibility. Nuala told him to behave. The first photograph failed because a child sneezed. The second caught Ciarán with his eyes half closed. On the third, everyone was at least facing forward.
Kathleen immediately preferred the second.
Maeve asked why. Kathleen said, “Because it’s us.”
Nuala said, “The third is also us.”
“No, the third is everybody trying.”
Maeve understood the distinction because Orla had spent the entire day proving it.
They transmitted both.
New York voted overwhelmingly for the second.
Dublin did too.
Orla saved it to the family archive before anybody could object.
By evening, Belfast had emptied back into separate houses. Maeve sat at her own kitchen table with homework open beside the terminal but made no progress because the family line continued. In New York, Eileen’s gathering had reached its loudest stage. Messages arrived more slowly now because people were eating. One photograph showed the table after serving began, crowded with dishes and arms reaching through the frame. Another showed Maura wearing Uncle Joe’s bow tie. The green potatoes had apparently been consumed despite everyone’s criticism. Patrick reported that his hair stripe had stained a towel and blamed Bríd. Bríd denied involvement.
Dublin grew quieter first. Orla posted one final batch from earlier in the day: Donal asleep on the sofa, her mother reading while everyone else talked, her father washing dishes with an apron tied badly around his waist, and herself reflected accidentally in a dark window while taking another photograph. Maeve liked the last one most. Orla had no ridiculous expression. She was simply there, camera raised, family behind her in the reflection.
Maeve wrote, **Finally one where you don’t humiliate anybody.**
Orla answered, **Give me time.**
At half nine Belfast time, Bríd sent Maeve another private message. **Mam says we should come over next year.**
Maeve typed back, **You should.**
Bríd asked, **For St Patrick’s?**
Maeve answered, **Any time.**
Bríd wrote, **That is not festive enough.**
Maeve said, **Come in March, then. We’ll find you a plastic leprechaun.**
Bríd replied, **I already have access to one.**
Maeve smiled and closed the message.
Nuala entered carrying two mugs of tea, set one beside her daughter and asked whether New York had surrendered yet. Maeve said, “No. Bríd says they might come next year.” Nuala immediately asked whether Eileen had actually said this or Bríd had promoted a vague suggestion into a travel plan. Maeve admitted she did not know. Nuala said, “Then tell them they’re welcome before your aunt spends six months pretending airfare is the only obstacle.” Maeve typed the invitation onto the main family line. Eileen replied within two minutes that they would discuss it, which everybody understood as serious enough to become family business.
Kathleen, apparently still awake at her own house, wrote that she had beds.
Orla wrote that Dublin also had beds but no guarantee of privacy.
Seamus warned New York not to trust Orla with cameras.
Patrick replied that the American branch had survived one day of humiliation and could survive more.
Then Kathleen posted the Belfast group photograph again, the second one, Ciarán’s eyes half closed and everyone imperfectly arranged.
She added no caption.
For once, Orla did not improve it.
Maeve sat with her tea cooling beside the keyboard and studied the faces. Belfast occupied one room. Dublin and New York existed elsewhere on the line, present through pictures accumulated over a single day: green bagels, gravy stains, crooked bow ties, terrible old haircuts, relatives caught laughing, eating, sleeping and reaching for cameras. No one had organised the exchange as a commemoration of anything larger. Nobody had decided that the family represented Ireland at home and abroad. They were simply related, technologically close enough to irritate one another in real time and geographically far enough apart to turn ordinary differences into recurring jokes.
Nuala leaned over Maeve’s shoulder and said, “Send them one more thing.”
“What?”
“Tell New York we still think the potatoes were disgraceful.”
Maeve laughed and typed it.
The answer from Queens arrived before she had finished her tea: **THE POTATOES WERE EATEN. HISTORY HAS VINDICATED US.**
Dublin responded almost immediately: **History has declined comment. Photos available on request.**
Maeve wrote, **Nobody request anything.**
Orla sent back a single sentence.
**Too late.**