I replied last night to Dave's Wife via PM in reard to my relatives in Ireland, but didn't address the issue regarding anti-Irish/anti-Halloween propaganda.

I was surprised to read those comments, because I have never really encounted that particular prejudice. I encounter a fair number of far-right-wing and/or socially-conservative folks in my daily life, but I've never encountered that kind of anti-Irish know-nothingism ~ I thought that had already been relegated to the trash heap of history.

Perhaps it's because New Orleans is such a Catholic city, having been occupied and run by the French and Spanish for centuries before the Louisiana Purchase. This is probably the only US city where the old-money establishment (the folks you read about on the society page) are not predominantly "W.A.S.P.," but rather largely Catholic, along with plenty of "mainstream" Protestants and some Jews. So, in a climate where anti-Catholic attitudes simply cannot exist, you probably don't get the corollary anti-Irish stance, either.

The one family I know that forbade their kids to participate in Halloween, because of the purported "devil worship" and/or "paganism," were in fact Irish Catholics! (Well, half-Irish/half-German.) They belonged to the "charismatic" fringe of the R.C. church, with a lot in common with Pentecostalists and other Fundamentalist Protestants.