Did South Boston Ban the Shamrock for St Patrick's Day?

The story began in the summer of 1999. Against a background of racial tension, Boston Housing Association hosted a voluntary meeting promoting diversity in the housing projects.

The shamrock was mentioned, and it lit a fuse that just keeps on burning.

Boston is proud of its Irish heritage. While it's long been a melting pot of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, the largest proportion of Bostonians claim Irish descent.

20.4% of the population at the last count, which makes it the highest concentration of Irish-Americans in the whole of the USA.

The entire of Boston - and South Boston in particular - is habitually festooned with shamrocks. Not the plant itself, but paintings, murals and iconic prints gracing shutters, windows, doors and the sides of buildings. The mere suggestion that they might not be appropriate to display in a multicultural society incensed Bostonians before the news even escaped the city.

But it all turned out to be a storm in a tea-cup. (If such a phrase is appropriate, given that this IS Boston.)

Traced back to source, it turned out that the original public meeting had taken on the aspect of a debate. Boston Housing Association representative Linda Argo had led a discussion about triggers for tension. Was it permissible to display, say, a Confederate flag or a Nazi swastika on a South Boston window?

While a chorus of 'no, no, no' was instantly forthcoming, she turned the issue on its head.  What about a shamrock?  After all that only really symbolized the Irish, in a city where nearly 80% of the population were not of Irish descent.

She was getting people to think. She wasn't suggesting for a moment that the ubiquitous shamrock should actually be banned. But that's what it sounded like to some in the audience and the uproar was instant.

Columnist John Ciccone wasn't at the housing project meeting in South Boston, but he spoke with people who were.

His opinion piece in the South Boston Tribune blew the story city wide. It was laced with vitriol concerning the whole concept of a meeting to discuss diversity. He called that 'brainwashing'.

But his most scathing points surrounded the suggestion that the shamrock might be perceived as hateful, and that it could possibly be lumped in with symbols like the Southern Cross or the swastika.

Yet Ciccone's editorial went further than Linda Argo had ever gone. He stated outright that Boston Housing Association (BHA) had ordered Southies, in the three main housing projects, to strip their properties of shamrock displays.

Letters to the editor poured in from furious Bostonians. They were printed, which pushed the story into the public eye for weeks. By the time that had finished, a casual reader might have supposed that shamrocks had actually been banned throughout the entire city.

America's largest Irish-American newspaper, The Irish Echo, quickly picked the story up. Its reporters at least contacted Linda Argo to establish what had been said. But unfortunately the diversity awareness trainer was not equal to dealing with the press.

She didn't deny the story outright. She used business-speak and the language of academics tip-toeing around political offense. She told The Irish Echo that she'd merely asked residents not to display 'bias indicators'.

Pretty much everyone, journalist included, read that as confirmation that Linda Argo - thus the entire BHA - had banned shamrocks in Boston. The story ran as such.

By now, reporters from the Sunday Tribute in Dublin had heard about the furor, probably via The Irish Echo. The urban myth took on an international scope, as Ireland now read all about it, in one of its most widely circulated national newspapers.

'Outrage as Shamrock is Seen as ‘Hate Symbol'' screamed the headline with the story presented as fact.

One of its journalists had also contacted the besieged Linda Argo. She was quoted as saying, "We want people to talk about what they may be doing that is causing an effect that they did not intend and not to display symbols people might consider to be bias indicators on the outsides of their buildings."

That term 'bias indicators' again reeked of political correctness gone mad.

In Boston, the backlash was as much about academics and administrators losing all common sense in the pursuit of not causing offense. In Ireland, the reception broadened considerably. It became damning of Americans as a whole.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, the story was about to explode again.

Within the same week, both The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald reported that the housing association was trying to ban shamrocks. Any Bostonians who'd missed it the first time now had the opportunity to add their rants to the others.

Then The Salon got involved.  A popular source of news and gossip, the magazine is enjoyed by millions of readers across the USA and online.

In 2000, it chose to run the shamrock banning Boston story on St Patrick's Day!

In fairness, The Salon did mention that it was just a rumor in the by-line. But the first half of its long editorial merely highlighted the apparent truths behind the rumors. People had to read right to the end to discover that the shamrock ban was never on the cards.

Even then, the article was laced with inflammatory quotations from officials and local residents alike, which all added up to suggest that Boston's shamrock displays really were endangered.

Of course, those celebrating St Patrick's Day in Boston could quite patently see that no shamrocks were being excluded from their city. 

But those living elsewhere had no such evidence before them. Condemnation rolled in, framed in letters, blogs, and editorials, not to mention personal conversations and good old word of mouth.

Nevertheless, it seemed that the story had finally run its course. Until it resurfaced again in time for St Patrick's Day 2001.

'Loony Americans are set to ban the Shamrock in Boston following complaints from minority groups!' blazed the editorial from one of Britain's best-selling tabloid newspapers.

The Sunday Mirror ran its story in February 2001, just as Britons were gearing up for their major St Patrick's Day parades in cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester. They received the startling news that shamrocks 'will now become a thing of the past' in  Boston, 'following complaints from blacks and Hispanics.'

Racist embellishments (who were those colored people complaining?) is par for the course for the Sunday Mirror, as was anti-Americanism at the time. It made it all the more darkly amusing when the newspaper railed against linking the shamrock with the swastika.

In short, xenophobia and racism are fine, as long as it's the Sunday Mirror doing it. Yet the Nazis were still bad.

Nevertheless, reporters from The Irish Times apparently took it at its word. One of Ireland's more prestigious broadsheets, it published the Boston no shamrock story on March 8th 2001. Just a week before St Patrick's Day.

While not as blatantly racist as The Sunday Mirror, the newspaper did lay the blame solely upon 'some minority residents' in Boston, while politely sneering over the 'wilder shores of political correctness'.

It also stated that Boston Housing Association had urged Bostonians 'to avoid public displays of such "bias indicators" as swastikas, Confederate flags and shamrocks'.

Linda Argo must have seriously wished by then that the words 'bias indicator' had never left her mouth.

As late as February 2011, The Irish Echo reported the shamrock ban rebuttal, like it had only just occurred. Under the headline, 'Shamrocks Get OK for Boston Housing Projects', the story described events a decade old as if they'd happened 'last week'.

It looks like the myth is going to run and run, carried on tides of righteous outrage by people who never check their facts. But the truth has always been clear - Boston never banned the shamrock from its streets.

And Bostonians would tell officials where to go, if that ever became the case. In Boston, the shamrock remains utterly and permanently everywhere.