Shop Irish! If you're in the area, we are also stocked in


Buy Ultan's books & CD on AMAZON!


OR, shop right here with our secure Paypal cart ->
  Final Edition NOW AVAILABLE by direct order!   NOW RE-PRINTED! BUY BY DIRECT ORDER!  

Thursday 8 January 2009

PLACELESS PEOPLE: ASPECTS OF EXILE

Placeless People: Aspects
of Exile


We are finding deep wells of sadness in ordinary human lives’, Sr. Teresa Gallagher, Director, Irish Counselling and Psychotherapy, London.
There is some degree of sadness in every human life but the lives to which Teresa Gallagher was referring are those of elderly Irish emigrants in Britain. Half a million Irish migrated to Britain in the Nineteen Fifties while the Republic’s population reached an all-time low of 2.8 million. Roughly 80% of those emigrants had left school before the age of fifteen. In the words of one female emigrant: ‘They taught us to hate England - and then they sent us over here!’
Emigration has allowed those who remained at home to enjoy a standard of living which is not justified by the volume of their production. If it ended suddenly…life would become much more competitive, and much less remunerative’.

A number returned to Ireland but the majority did not. Living often amongst to their own, many tended to mix sparingly with the British, harbouring the belief that ‘some day’ they would return ‘home’ - even while their children progressed through the British education system and into the workplace.

The experience of novelist and navvy Domhnall MacAuligh, who emigrated to England in 1951, is typical. His successful Irish-language memoir, Dialann Deorai (Diary of an Exile) was published in 1964 and translated into English under the title, An Irish Navvy. Throughout his life he regularly wrote for Irish newspapers and magazines while continuing to work full-time in construction.

MacAuligh, though happily married, never reconciled himself to life in England.
Asked by an Irish journalist in 1966 what troubled him most, he responded:

Bringing up a family in Northampton; the children speaking with Northampton accents…apart from that, I’ve never felt settled in this place. I still feel like an outsider – that I don’t belong. There was a free-ness about expatriation once; you told yourself it would be over sooner or later…But that’s no longer true; all that’s ahead of you is the time you have left on Earth – spend it here in loneliness and desolation. I came here in 1951 and I’ve never felt at home here in all that time’.

Clearly it was no accident that MacAuligh, a fluent Gaelic speaker, should have chosen the word Deorai for his title. Deorai, Gaelic for exile, translates literally as Placelessness or Banishment. Placelessness – not belonging, traumatises many rural Irish for whom community is everything, while the corrosive sense of banishment – of leaving because Ireland had no place for them, carries implications for those at home as well as for those abroad which have yet to be faced up to fully.

I have encountered this perception amongst many emigrants in Britain but I
regarded the emigrant experience in the United States as significantly different. In that country, since the early 20th century, Irish emigrants seemed well regarded whilst those at home appeared to take a degree of pride in them not often shown towards their countrymen in Britain.

Consequently I made a sharp distinction between ‘emigration’, as typified by the American experience, and ‘exile’ as defining the experience of many of the Irish in Britain. It has however surprised me to learn that there are many Irish in America
who also share this sense of placelessness and banishment. Amongst these are many former Religious. Often those of Irish descent also experience problems around issues of place and belonging – not least when in Ireland.

Born into an independent nation, which could no longer legitimately blame Britain for its social and economic ills, many older emigrants have avoided questioning the actions and attitudes of those who may have influenced their decision to emigrate – whether within the Church, the State, or the Family. Criticism of these sacred institutions was considered disloyal, especially abroad, and provoked uncomfortable feelings of guilt.

I believe these issues have yet to be fully acknowledged, explored, and understood. This book is intended to provide a forum for Irish emigrants and their descendants to express their personal feelings about the causes and consequences of emigration.

Official Ireland, while acknowledging the protracted trauma of emigration, now
regards it as a part of the past to be consigned to history. However, unlike the dead generations whose thoughts and feelings are recorded only in archived fragments of personal correspondence, there is still time for many 20th century emigrants to speak for themselves - and perhaps demand answers from others.

I welcome contributions and comments from members of other emigrant ethnic minorities also. It is my hope that this work will broaden understanding and perhaps even bring healing in its wake...

4 comments:

Dragut Reis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dragut Reis said...

In my experience, this sense of placelessness you describe extends to many of the children of those who emigrated to Britain too. For the children of Irish immigrants who grew up in English cities, particularly during the Troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, the sense of being too Irish in Britain, and not Irish enough in Ireland was an extension of the placelessness experienced by their parents.

Unknown said...

Thats absolutely true. The irony, in my experience, is in the fact that the natural 'placelessness' of the parents, expressed in nostalgia for 'home', too often translated into a fanatical conditioning of their children to love all things Irish, and loathe all things English - this despite the fact of their actual birth in Britain...I don't think it did them any favours.

Anonymous said...

I am a daughter of Irish exiles who lived for 29 years in Britain before returning to Ireland bringing their entire family back, three of whom were born in Britain. The sense of being too Irish for Britain was not that obvious to me going to Catholic schools with children of other exiles etc. We did Irish dancing and all the rest and it all seemed to fit in. However as a working professional back home - I am definitely seen to be too British for Ireland, with my accent being the most commented thing about me. Even though I have never worked anywhere else( I have worked here for 30 years) and pay my taxes etc I apparently do not have any rights to voice opinions. Having a discussion with other people I work with about the amount of taxes we were paying (and I agreeing with them) I was told by one person just five years ago that if I did not like the system here I should go back to where I came from!(I thought I had). Only last month in a discussion about the forgotten Irish and my experiences, I was saying that my parents did not want to go to England - but it was either that or starve. I was informed in all sincerity that there were many in Ireland who still would consider them traitors.
This is another side of this story.