When will Ireland repay its debt to our emigrants?

Sometimes a confluence of events occur. Individually singular but strangely interconnected. One appears or arrives from a preordained plan. The rest falls into place. Serendipity, happenstance and complete the journey. And the journey? Come follow me and I will take you with me and explain.

Recently I spent a week on Inis Meáin, the middle island of the Árainns. I go there yearly to snas up my Gaeilge. Though serviced by regular daily ferries and airplane, the island stubbornly refuses to bend to commercialism. One pub, school and shop. A tiny population living atop the continuation of the Burren limestone that breaks the Atlantic surface. In essence, a moonscape.

I won’t go into what it I love about it because it’s a thing beyond love. It’s like a moment given to you in which you dwell in an Ireland that no longer exists. Irish the only spoken language, stone walls, stone fields and stone forts challenging the populace to dwell there. They do but in declining numbers. Government and council restrictions now are a bigger hurdle than the omnipresent limestone. A curios amalgam of the old, few in the middle and the very young. Set up to finally cease breathing or producing. And yet it stubbornly clings to life.

Sean nòs songs that scrape your soul, musical instruments that when your eyes are shut, it could be 1825 or 1925. An island decimated with migration to America mainly. Walking towards the pier I overheard three men chatting about the Korean and Vietnamese wars. I was curious. Erris has men that moved to America and fought those two wars. On my way back I was too curious not to ask. In Irish we chatted about America, the islands, Holyoke, Springfield Massachusetts and wars. Turned out one of the men spent over forty years there. Turned out he was friends with people from up the road from me in Glosh and Fálmór.

We spoke about the empty houses on the island. Boarded up. There is an Irish word for complexity and it’s called ‘casta’. It’s complicated they explained. Many of the houses belong/belonged to people from the island long dead or resident in places like Springfield, Holyoke or Butte Montana. They are long gone with no one in the middle to light a fire or repair the roof. But no mechanism to fill the empty house. Like we said, casta agus níl sé simplí.

Sitting in Synge’s cottage that’s not Synge’s cottage but really Tí ‘ac Dhonnacha where today a grandson sits beside the open turf fire as the rain hammered the roof outside, it could have been 1900, the time Synge himself availed of the locals generosity, a family of twelve under a roof with a kitchen and two bedrooms. Synge had one room. Ciaran, the descendant, fills in the gaps, the history, but it’s as if time itself has been suspended. All that’s missing is the ticking clock.

Máirtín Mac Donncha’s son of the house that Synge lodged in, has his picture festooned on the whitewashed wall of a small craft shop on the island owned by his granddaughter Juda. We chat about life, the island and emigration, Juda spent years in California before fate brought her back to the island. The single local shop sells books too. Looking back at me is the same picture as that which adorns Juda’s shop; it’s Máirtín adorning the cover of JM Synge’s book called The Aran Islands. History dead, history very much alive, history continuing down the familial line.

Reading the book through Synge’s 1900 eyes we find him back in Tí Dhonnacha again. Sadness fills the darkening room as the turf fire glows. The old lady of the house listens as a letter from another son in America is read to her. Work had dried up in New York and he was chasing the railroads six hundred miles inland. The reality of perception and reality hit the old lady. Having watched her son sail away towards Galway, a place she could see, then move across another sea but a horizon that was what you wanted it to be, close and mystical at the same time, now six hundred miles of inland rail track brought reality home. She would never see that son again. Which reminds of a sentiment recently expressed by a local Erris county councillor when he described his mother as rearing her nine children for export.

America loomed heavy in Synge’s interactions with the islanders. The first question asked of Synge was the state of the American Spanish War. American deadman’s brake even back then lay across world affairs. The rationale of the islanders was simple. If the American economy tanked, if their menfolk and young women were swept into that war, the precious dollars and sovereigns sent home would cease. So too would the island.

The nearby cemetery has a bench on which affixed are police badges and memorabilia. The grave beside it contains the body of the young islander policeman who died before his time in Springfield. Beside him lays his brother who also died young, drowned at sea. The mother lays with them. All of this occurred inside the last thirty years. My granduncles on Inish Meáin Gaoth Dobhair paralleled their island comrades almost a century apart. One, a 25-year-old fisherman drowned, the other, 23, an RIC policeman, contracted flu whilst searching the shoreline for his brother’s body. The similarities were canny. A screeching seagull broke my reverie.

In Galway on my way back from the island I bought another book. First published in 1990, called The Aran Islands Another World, a book devoted mainly to Inis Meáin by ace photographer Bill Doyle. The forward is by the late Muírís Mac Conghail. The Doyle Mac Chonghail was another part of the unfolding jigsaw regarding old Ireland and the Neo Ireland heading, in 1990, towards Bertie’s Celtic Tiger. Doyle’s series of photos mixed with Mac Conghail’s words, written and photographed circa 1990, beautifully and poignantly overlay Synge’s pilgrimage ninety years earlier. Mac Conghail notes “Inis Meáin, the middle island, is in many ways the one whose social and economic structures show the greatest continuity with the past… difficulties about landing made it the island that visitors tended to miss.” 

Whilst Synge of Playboy of the Western World was a wordsmith par excellence in 1900, Doyle’s black and white photographs taken ninety years later underline the great writer’s world and exposed them to us visually. The eternal stone walls, shiny limestone that after a shower of rain resemble lakes. Men, women and children at one and against nature in the continuing quest to dwell on the rocky outpost. Stiofán Ó Fatharta and his neat potato ridges, Máirtín Ó Cualáin carrying a basket across a limestone pavement like their ancestors from Famine times. Doyle lays bare, in black and white, the collection of boards that make up a coffin, following the box on its bicycle journey to the wake house to be keened by shawled women in red dresses just like in Synge’s time. A time trapped in an atmosphere where the players change but the characters and stage remain rooted in the past.

Back in Blacksod, it’s an area like much of Erris that harks and has roots and connections with Inis Meáin – emigration, American links, nearby islands, the Irish language and the connection with granite rather than limestone. Hardy souls are fashioned from that granite and despite road improvements and a more regular bus service, isolation. That great barrier of bog and heather ranged by mountain and lakes as one leaves Crossmolina heading to the bottom of the Erris Peninsula still deters the traveller. Not quite Inis Meáin but hints and hues of it mixed with a rapid advancing modernity. I buy the Irish Times in Brogan’s supermarket along with the Western. The local intersecting the national and international.

Forgotten ‘elders’ 

On Wednesday, July 9 I read Mark Paul’s ‘London Letter’ in the Irish Times, titled ‘Extending the hand of friendship to under appreciated Irish ‘elders’ in Britain’. The thing that caught my eye was the term ‘elder’. It’s not a term associated with Ireland or being Irish. Regardless, I learned that we have a Minister of State for Diaspora. The author of the Irish Times piece interviewed the minister in the top floor of the Irish Embassy, not a café or greasy spoon where many of the forgotten and ‘under appreciated elders’ may still gather for company. The article faffed on telling us essentially what minimal intervention and support our government gives the Irish in the UK. One initiative under the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith had an intergenerational meeting where children sang songs and asked about the past. Wow.

Inis Meáin, Erris, Councillor Gerry Coyle, Synge, Bill Doyle, emigration, exile and the current kerfuffle where a ham-fisted effort to split local communities over housing in Mayo landed on my perch. The Irish Times’ quaint (I’m being charitable here) description of our exiled Irish struggling in the UK are written out of our history. I could fill these pages with facts and figures but I’m sure enough people that the Western People reaches know the emigrant’s story; salty tears, lumps in throat, poverty mixed with pain all overlaid in pride, hope and prayer.

A few facts. Mayo the county saw its population fall by two thirds. A population of 388k in 1841 fell incrementally to 274k in 1851 to a nadir of 109k in 1971. Needless to say the Great Famine has scarred the county to this day. UCC’s Émigré Programme noted that in the 1950s half a million left the Republic. Our population then was three million. Between 1848 and 1900 a sum equal to £4.9billion today was sent back from America. In the 1950s, Dept of Finance figures show that Emigrant Remittances made up over 3% of national income in the Republic. In 1961, remittances from the UK alone amounted to £13.5million sterling. Our Education budget for that year amounted to a little more. THEY paid for OUR education.

Coincidence or not, three separate articles have entered my timeline as I try and finish this piece. The first is a piece on Kevin Rowland, Dexy’s Midnight Runners founder. His book called Bless Me Father is a microcosm of the next generation exposure to life in the UK. The racism, Paddywhackery, Irish jokes, menial work, hiding your Irishness like a dirty secret. Rowland, whose roots are in Crossmolina, saw how his father and comrades suffered. His music changed his anger as he wore his Irish heart on his sleeve in a city like Birmingham that had recent memories of IRA bombings. Not easy.

Hot Press provided a piece on the Gallagher brothers whose parents are from Mayo and Meath. Brought up in Manchester, ironically also hit by IRA bombs, the Gallaghers clung to their Irish roots and fought from the front. That swathe of England’s North West that produced Oasis, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Joy Division and dare I say, The Beatles, all were strongly connected to Ireland and influenced by it. And yet. For every Mark Lawrenson, Steve Heighway, Ray Houghton, John Aldridge and Kevin Kilcline, we had as many if not more of Irish descent who chose to stoop the shoulder and pass on us.

Kate Kerrigan, yes, the Irish Times again, opined, correctly, despite having a Mayo mother and a Longford father, her difficulties being accepted as ‘Irish’. Kerrigan is of the view that we at home here are unaccepting of those of her generation, a child of Irish people. Kerrigan noted our feting of Biden yet looking down on a plumber from Wembley. I agree. Our returning brothers, sisters and family meet nothing but obstacles in trying to change driving licences, tap into our banking system, obtain a Public Service Card or get onto a doctor’s or HSE list. Why?

Anyone over 74, that is the generation that did not avail of Donagh O’Malley’s Free Education Scheme not set up until 1968 and who through the failure of the Irish Government were forced, often at the age of 12 or 13, to leave this nation to pick potatoes, scamper around building sites, send money home, live a hard life away from their native village, should not be described as ‘elders’ today and have a token cup of tea in the Irish embassy in London. As a gesture of goodwill and reparation and thanks, this government should belatedly financially reward them with what they have earned – a basic Irish state pension and access to all public services including relocation of housing. If we can do it for others, why not our own?

My journey started in Eachleam National School in 1957. Most of my fellow scholars, like their siblings and relations before them, just like my mother’s family in Gaoth Dobhair, were forced to leave their native sod. Back then I took that emigration of my friends as an act of God, a way of life, when in effect it was a fact of life, poor governance, an abandoning of the periphery on this island. Personally, I know of children who went to the UK at the age of 11 in one case, 12 in many cases and at 14, heck you were nearly overage for the labour force by then. As life went by, a gnawing anger and guilt has followed me. Two hardworking parents who luckily had state paid jobs, I was spared that life. And of course, I am aware many were successful too, like Doohoma native John Keane who saved Glasgow Celtic from bankruptcy in the 1990s. Many others entered British life, kept quiet and oiled and contributed financially, economically and culturally to an empire, hiding their own roots, music and tongue.

Being Irish wasn’t easy particularly in the UK, being Irish in the UK and indeed in parts of Ulster isn’t easy today. Was it our survivor’s guilt inherited from the Great Famine that has kept us from recognising the massive service and sacrifice our exiles made? Was there an inherent superiority built into our own inner wiring? Did we fear that we too might board the cattle or mail boat slipping out from Dun Laoghaire on some foggy autumn morning, and a train from Holyhead to the heartlands of Birmingham, the sites of London or the relative sanctuary of a Leeds or Huddersfield already dominated by earlier Mayos and Galways?

The time for talk is over. The time for a ‘Jesus, it’s great to see you Mick/Mary… long time since we met… when are you going back?’ is over.

Recently, in my area in Erris, the last remaining man of the house, usually a bachelor, has passed away. Most were school friends of mine. Those family homes once had between six and twelve children. Today they lie empty, their flock scattered across the globe. Whilst lauding our humanitarian efforts for those who now arrive on our shores seeking sanctuary, let’s not forget the generations who left those same shores seeking a better life away from here. In ignoring our own, we sow the seeds of dissent towards those genuinely flowing here and deserving the nation’s help. That help should not be at the expense of our own but in tandem with it.