The Irish They’d Rather We Forgot
Of course I realized while I was writing this how much I was going against the grain. For some time now, the image of Ireland and all things Irish has been extremely rosy. But this is a relatively recent phenomena, and while I’m delighted that the Irish have become cultural icons, I’m also sad that it seems necessary to erase from memory the older, never fashionable immigrants. The ones who arrived in Britain after the second world war to be greeted by signs in boarding house windows that read No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.
In the sixties our house in Newport was packed with friends and relatives who had made the journey from County Wexford to find work in the factories, building sites and hospitals in Wales. In the evenings, they spend hours talking of the rare auld times back home, and I was constantly assured that Ireland was my real home too. At the weekends, the chairs were pushed back and the sessions went on into the early hours, while I slept soundly through the music and singing in my pram in a corner of the room. I lived in an Irish cocoon in those early years, and it was a nasty shock when I first went to school to find that I only had to open my mouth for the other children to start laughing at me. Just like Liam, the narrator in my novel, I was mercilessly teased about my strong Irish accent - saying ‘tree’ instead of three, ‘tay’ instead of ‘tea’ and so on. In that first year in school, I was in endless fights.
It didn’t stop there. One teacher in primary school informed us at great length that the Irish were a terrible burden on the country. They lay around at home all day, drawing benefits when there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. They got drunk at every opportunity, and spawned unreasonable amounts of children, who followed their parents’ example and went on to further burden the creaking and groaning welfare state. The drunken, fornicating, workshy Irish were rapidly using up the national insurance contributions of honest, hard working people like herself so, that by the time she retired, there would be nothing left to fund her pension. Was this not a disgrace? The Irish children hung their heads.
Things got much worse once The Troubles began, and British soldiers started being killed and wounded in Northern Ireland. Every time an IRA bomb went off on the mainland anyone with an Irish accent was treated with suspicion. The British press published vile racist articles and gross caricatures of the Irish resembling apes almost identical to the ugly cartoons of ‘Paddy’ found in the pages of Punch in the previous century, at the time the Irish were campaigning for Home Rule. Third rate comedians were guaranteed a laugh by telling Irish ‘jokes’ [for example, an Irishman walks into a pub with a pig on a lead. The barman says ‘Where did you get him?’ The pig says ‘There’s hundreds more down the docks, just off the boat from Cork']. If you found this kind of ‘humour’ offensive, you were accused of not being able to take a joke. If you pretended to be amused in order to avoid a confrontation, you’d find that a single polite smile would be enough to trigger an avalanche of similar witticisms. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, it was open season on the Irish in Britain.
But if we ever felt at the bottom of the ladder in Wales, our annual holiday in Ireland soon restored our self esteem. We may have been working class in Wales, but our affluence was envied in Ireland. I remember being embarrassed at the excitement with which my relatives greeted the hand me down clothes we had hauled across on the boat. We were visiting a third world country in those pre Celtic Tiger days, and confidence was very low. If the slightest thing went wrong, a light bulb suddenly going for instance, my relatives would immediately throw up their hands and cry apologetically ‘Ah, only in Ireland!’ This would be quickly followed by ‘I’ll bet this never happens in Wales!’ At that time there was a tendency for Irish people to blame themselves for the state of the country. A favourite homily was ‘If the Dutch had Ireland they’d feed the world, if the Irish had Holland they’d sink it.’
My parents clearly had ambivalent feelings about Ireland too, both loving the place and hating the hardships they’d suffered there. ‘They haven’t a bleddy clue at home’ my father would confide in me from time to time, ‘that’s why I try to help them out whenever I can.’ Unfortunately the only time he got the chance was the couple of weeks every summer we went on holiday there. So it was that my relatives had barely finished inspecting their hand me downs before my father would jump to his feet, clap his hands and cry ‘Right lads – what jobs need doing?’ He would spend the next two weeks digging, hammering, mixing cement, plastering and painting, convinced that Ireland was falling apart in his absence. No amount of pleading from his in laws to for God’s sake stop working himself into the ground, come inside and have a drink and enjoy his holiday could deter him from his frenzied activity.
My mother never failed to ram home the message on the boat back that I should never forget how lucky I was to be born in Wales, that no matter how much she loved Ireland, she’d never go back to live there. She’d tell me how much better off I was than my poor cousins, God love them anyway. She couldn’t forget the poverty and deprivation she suffered when growing up between the wars. Perhaps even worse was the experience of being stuck at the bottom of an almost feudal society - she was a farm labourer’s daughter, who went on to work on the land herself, and as a domestic servant. According to her, no one outside her family had ever treated her like a human being till she came to Wales, where, in contrast, she was immediately accepted as an equal. For her, south Wales was a bastion of democracy, decency and solidarity, where no one gave themselves airs and graces, or thought themselves any better than their neighbours (I have to say, that as I grew older, I discovered this was not an entirely accurate picture). Ireland, in contrast, was narrow minded and unforgiving. Unfortunately, instead of convincing me how fortunate I was, she inadvertently helped created a sense of shame about my Irish roots which it took me years to shake off.
But since the late eighties, enormous changes have taken place in Ireland, and subsequently altered Ireland's image abroad. We've had the peace process in Northern Ireland, the much trumpeted Celtic Tiger, a plethora of Irish presenters appearing on British TV, Riverdance, U2, The Corrs, Roddy Doyle, Father Ted, and Irish theme pubs springing up from Budapest to Reykjavik. Now everyone loves the Irish. This is a good thing, long overdue, for the Irish do indeed have many admirable qualities. But just as we cannot, as individuals, erase those painful memories from our lives that we wished had never happened, so a nation cannot brush several generations under the carpet and pretend they never existed. For that is how it sometimes seems, that there is, in fact, no place in the new, smooth Ireland for the older, 'rough' Irish, the Paddies and Marys, so tainted with failure. A couple of years ago I read an article by Joe Horgan about his travels around the new, prosperous, Ireland, reflecting on the many changes since his annual family holidays there back in the 60s and 70s. One night in a bar he fell into conversation with a crowd of young Irish people in their early twenties. Horgan told them what a wonderful contrast their optimism and confidence provided to the negative experience of being Irish Horgan remembered from growing up in Birmingham two decades previously. His remarks produced an immediate, lengthy and deeply embarrassing silence. Horgan had committed the dreadful faux pas of mentioning Ireland’s shameful past. Eventually one of the youngsters changed the subject, the conversation moved on to a safer topic, and the troublesome remarks were ignored.
I am convinced that if Horgan had talked about his experience of growing up in America he would have had a very different reception. There is a lasting assumption that the Irish who immigrated to the USA are a success story to be celebrated, while those who settled in Britain [such a short distance away, it hardly seems like immigration at all] are perceived as failures. They represent the dark days of backbreaking work for low pay, discrimination and harassment that it would rather forget. There is a relative silence about the Irish in Britain in Ireland itself, while the more recent Irish immigrants in Britain tend to regard the previous immigrants as failures. These confident, well educated young people are much more likely to be found in a club, cafe bar or Italian restaurant than an Irish pub [a real Irish pub that is, not some plastic Oirish theme pub called Old Mother O'Rafferty's or somesuch].
The Irish have reinvented themselves as the life and soul of the party;warm, witty and down to earth, at ease in the modern world, yet able to effortlessly tap into a rich and rewarding ancient culture - they are welcomed with open arms all over the world. If this is what it means to be Irish now, so the reasoning seems to go, then people who do not fit the new criteria are disqualified.
It
seems to me there are many parallels between New Labour and New Ireland here.
Both, having jettisoned their ‘discredited’ past and transformed their image
with brilliant PR makeovers, seem to be absolutely terrified of that past
rearing its head again. So the financial and intellectual contributions of the
trade unions and the working class to the old Labour Party are ignored by New
Labour, and they have been airbrushed out of its new image as it courts big
business. They’re convinced that the mere sight of Blair being civil to a
union leader would convince middle England we're returning to the days of beer
and sandwiches at number ten, mass pickets, power cuts and three day weeks.
Before you can say welfare state, the Tories will sweep back into power, and
Labour, humiliated, will tear itself apart with vicious infighting and become
unelectable once again.
Similarly,
the vast contributions to the Irish economy made by the Irish in Britain sending
money back home over the decades are ignored, their loyalty to Ireland through
thick and thin forgotten. They have been airbrushed out of the country’s new
image, as it courts EC grants and investments from multinationals. They’re
convinced that the mere sight of these pre Celtic Tiger ‘failures’ will
convince the investors that those who said the Irish economic miracle was a
conjuring trick were right, and they’ll cut off the money. Before you can say
Plastic Irish Theme Pub, Ireland will return to being a impoverished little
island where people are queuing up to immigrate.
You
could, stretching the point, even draw a parallel between New Labour voting to
abandon Clause Four, the commitment to nationalise, and New Ireland voting to
excise articles 2 and 3, the claim to sovereignty of all 32 counties, from the
Republic’s constitution. Look,
they both seem to be saying, we’ve dropped all that outdated idealistic
nonsense, we pose no threat to anyone, we are people you can do business with.
In
their rush to embrace the modern world both New Labour and New Ireland are in
danger of forgetting their roots and losing their identity. Just as New Labour
has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the other political
parties, so New Ireland is becoming just like everywhere else in Europe. Its
clear that both have undergone such massive changes so rapidly they have to keep
pinching themselves to prove they’re not dreaming. Scratch the surface and
you'll find a mass of unresolved anxieties underneath. But
just as we cannot, as individuals, erase those embarrassing memories from our
lives that we wished had never happened, so a nation cannot brush several
generations under the carpet and pretend they never existed. And anyhow, is there really any need to be so worried?
I recently spoke to a man who lectured social workers. He told me how his students had been amazed to discover how much discrimination and racism the Irish had suffered. Surely this was common knowledge I said. No, not for these young people, he replied, they were completely ignorant of the dark old days, for them, the Irish had always been popular and successful. When they reflected on how, despite years of racism and poverty, the Irish had eventually triumphed against the odds, these students far from losing their respect for Irish people, actually found their example inspirational. The black students, especially, felt a new empathy with them, and were all now going, for the first time, to the Leeds St Patrick's Day celebrations. Why hide such a gripping story of survival against the odds? Why not celebrate it?
You
only have to remember the world wide ecstatic response to the Pogues, to realise
just how much affection there still is for the old Ireland. I was amazed
at the audience reaction when I first saw them in the mid 80s. Here was a group
playing, essentially, the kind of music I had grown up with, and dressed like
archetypal rough Paddies, yet the young, trendy crowd went absolutely wild. The
Pogues had tapped into something no PR company could have manufactured. They
celebrated the raw side of life, in contrast to the bland pop scene of the time.
But something much more complicated than simple nostalgia was going on here. Many of the melodies may have been familiar, but the lyrics certainly weren't. There was a refreshing absence of songs about poor auld Ireland, or the silver haired Mammy pining on the porch. Instead of such sentimental ballads The Pogues offered slices of the gritty urban life lived by so many of the Irish in Britain - songs about loneliness, drinking and gambling, and the daily struggle for survival. That struggle was sometimes brutal and shocking - I would argue that a song like 'The Old Main Drag', about an Irish rent boy in London, could have only been written by an Irishman in Britain, the subject being too taboo in Ireland at the time for anyone to tackle.
The Pogues, in
combining the Irish folk tradition with English punk rock, fusing the rural and
urban, hinted at how we could begin to tell the story of the Irish in Britain.
By bringing together what we inherited from the old country with what we grew up
with in the new, to be comfortable having a foot in both camps, instead of
always looking back across the sea for inspiration. MacGowan, after all, had
lived most of his life in London, sang with an Irish accent, spoke with a
cockney growl. Not everyone in Ireland understood where they were coming from,
and they were reviled by many stalwarts of the folk scene for producing a
terrible abomination of Irish music. But that was to miss the point. They
weren’t trying to reproduce what had gone before, but to create something new. The emergence of The Pogues enabled many thousands of second generation
Irish people to celebrate publicly their pride in their roots, to feel they
finally had a voice.
For the past 200 years Ireland has had the highest emigration rate in Europe. More than half the people who have been born there have left the country. A huge part of it's identity, it's very soul, lies outside the narrow confines of it's shores. In order to be a truly mature and well balanced society, it needs to embrace those parts that it seems to want to cut off. Isn't it time that Ireland welcomed back into the fold the forgotten Irish?