- My name is Joseph Patrick Mooney, and if you say that in Gaelic, it's Joseph Mooney is my name.

I live in Crookston, Minnesota.

So my dad left home at 14 and went to England.

My mom left home at 16 and went to England.

And it was basically the Irish people that built all the roads in England and all the construction and that's why my dad went over there and a lot of his friends went over and worked in construction.

My mom worked over there because there was no employment in Ireland or very little employment.

I was born in England, but at the age of eight we moved back to Ireland and then I spent the next 18 years in Ireland.

So I consider myself Irish.

My parents are Irish, so I consider myself Irish.

So I was about eight, eight and a half when we moved, it would've been 1971.

1972 was the year that the highest number of casualties and death happened in Northern Ireland because of the Troubles.

We didn't go to Northern Ireland.

There'd be times in Dublin where there'd be bomb threats and bomb scares and stuff like that.

So it was a little volatile.

Ireland was a very Catholic country back then, so there's a lot of differences between us and England.

And it was very controlled by the Catholic church.

I think Ireland, when I lived there was about 99% Catholic.

So I worked at a pharmaceutical company in the middle of Ireland that was called Elan Pharmaceuticals, that was started by an American from Georgia.

And we wanted to market one of our products in the US but we weren't big enough.

So we partnered with an American pharmaceutical company and they sent over some Americans.

So I married an American and then in 1989, moved to Kansas City.

That's where the pharmaceutical company was there.

Lived in Kansas City for about seven years, and then a friend of mine moved to California to a work for a biotechnology company over there called Amgen.

I'd never been to California, so I went for an interview thinking it'd be cool to see California.

And then I ended up in California for the next 22 years.

Then I left San Diego and went to Fargo for a year, worked for a company there.

And then I decided to quit science about six, seven years ago.

And my wife had a very successful photography business.

So then I joined her business and worked with her.

So some of my first initial impressions of the US when I got here was one, the magnitude of the country.

In Ireland, you can drive from one side to the other in about two hours.

If you drive two hours here, you won't even make it to Alexandria, which is the middle of the state.

Houses were much bigger, cars were bigger, a lot more consumer products than in Ireland.

And the stores stayed open a lot more.

In Ireland everything closed at five or six, didn't matter what it was.

So I have two biological children in the US.

One is in New York, one is in Fargo.

They were both born here.

One was born in Missouri, one was born across state line in Kansas.

And my son is 33, my daughter's 28.

And so I wanna stay here for my kids.

And because there's a lot of opportunity in America, you know, I have to say, there's a lot of opportunity here and I enjoyed it and taken advantage of it.

So I've lived in a lot of places and people always ask me, what's your favorite?

And I say, I have no favorite.

I enjoyed all of them because of the differences.

Living in different countries and different states has given me a very unique perspective of the world.

And even America.

It's a very, to me, America's a very fragmented country at times.

You know, we're very unified in certain situations, and then there's others.

We're very, very fragmented.

I believe in embracing those differences and coming to the co, to the world, to America.

And there is a lot of people who do want to come here.

Yes, there's parts of the world that hate America and what it represents, but it gives people a lot of opportunity.

I would not have this life, I don't think, if I'd stayed in Ireland.

And it's not that I wanted this life, that was not my goal in coming here.

It just, it happens here.

You know?

- Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.