In the United States,” America” it you are a citizen, you are an American, ideally, regardless where you were born or what ethnic background your parents come from. It really is not cool to say *Italian hyphen American.” You are an American, no hyphen necessary. In theory anyway, because where you come from and the ethnicity of your home hearth will have an affect on how you look at the world and how it looks at and treats you. So in many respects you are a Hungarian American, or an Irish American, yet when you go back to the old country, you see you are not that either and they call you the American and consider you the outsider.
This can be an enhancing or limiting factor in particular to kids who were born in the States, think of themselves as Americans, and not like their parents, yet society might not always let them through because of their heritage. This is not a theme expounded on in this film, though
The main idea here is that as a kid you are shuffled back to the old country where the environment is not conducive to growth…which might well not have been in the States either from the sound of their father. Despite the beauty around you, the opportunities to study Yeats and Joyce...you come to hate this stick in the mud old country and would do anything to be able to escape away from it, back to the States, as you see and feel yourself and American, and not be stuck here for the rest of your life accepting a listless fate like the dolts you see around you. So do to lack of positive authority figures in your life, and you are a young lad, you hook up with criminal wise guys, so you can save some dough to to get back to the States.
The big joke is that it ends up being done with girlie magazines, rather than bookies and beating up people. Girlie mags that are illegal in Ireland in this film. So you feel not like native in the land of your forefathers, but you realize once you think you are stuck there, that whatever American is, you want out of here and back where all that space is and maybe a chance at something. And if you persevere, in that American spirit as one solid adult figure draws the youth’s attention to unique American perspective, you will make it, and he does. But not to any pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it would seem. That would take a little more depth than this film allows to ponder. So our hero turns green not because he has some epiphany of his Irish legacy, but turns the green of money.