Overcoming Irish shame

I have a friend whose Ukrainian ancestors were so poor, they spent their first winter in Canada living under their wagon. They turned it upside down on the prairie and piled sod against the sides to keep the cold air out. For their descendants, it's a matter of family pride that they have such rough and ready characters among their ancestors.

In Irish families, we aren't so proud. We too are descended from rough and ready, and very colourful, people. And yet we are ashamed of it and go to great lengths to lie about it. The Irish in North America, and this generalization is warranted, not only lie about our past, we make up myths to replace it and behave as if this mythology was true.

The following is a list of things that are true of virtually all Irish Catholic families whose ancestors came to North America in the 19th century.

1. Our ancestors were dirt poor. In Ireland, they lived in a hut with a thatched roof and a dirt floor. They came over steerage. When they got here, they lived in slums. They didn't get out of those slums until the twentieth century. Your grandparents started off life with nothing, crammed into a tenement with relatives and boarders and lived in constant fear of things getting much worse.
2. They were probably illiterate. In the unlikely event that they could read and write, they did so at about the same level as someone with a grade 3-5 education does now.
3. They weren't particularly religious. Although they, like everyone else, got swept up in the major Catholic revival of the 19th century, only about one in three Irish Catholics practiced their religion when they got here. The Irish were notorious for saloon going on Sunday morning in 19th century Saint John.
4. Our female ancestors were house servants and they felt damn lucky to be. This continues into the 20th century up to about 1930.
5. There is a very good chance our male ancestors were criminals at some point in their lives. There weren't nearly as many jobs for men as there were for women. As  consequence, the men spent a lot of time just hanging around and they got up to no good in various forms. They were prone to violence and theft. Go through court records and newspapers from the 19th century and you will find that your male ancestors were "known to the police".
6. They died like flies from diseases such as cholera, consumption and diphtheria.
7. They drank staggering amounts of alcohol. Historians estimate men drank the equivalent of two 26 ounce bottles of 90 proof liquor each and every week; that's about 6 times as much as a typical adult male drinks today. And that's the average drinker! (And while that seems insane, it almost certainly helped some of them avoid cholera.)
8. As a consequence of the above, alcoholism was rampant. So was drunkenness on the job and domestic violence. 
9. They suffered sudden and brutal financial reversals in North America. It is a 100 percent certainty that some of your ancestors ended up in the poorhouse.

In theory, that ought to be all we need to know in order to stop being ashamed of it. It doesn't work that way with the Irish. This is a people with a deep-seated shame. Where this comes from, I don't know—though I mean to explore the issue.