Ultan Cowley: March 2009

Wednesday 25 March 2009

Camaraderie of Pain: Excerpt from Joe McGarry interview

This is an excerpt from a recorded interview I conducted ten years ago in Camden Town with Joe McGarry, an Irish recovering alcoholic, survivor of homelessness, and veteran of the British construction industry who has since become instrumental in helping many men with similar experiences to reassess their lives and recover (even discover) their sense of self.

Joe is perceptive, poetic, straight-talking and self-aware, to an enviable degree. I publish this short piece to demonstrate the depth and complexity of difficult lives which are often dismissed by others as wilfully wasted and unworthy of serious consideration...To such I say, Listen to this - and Think Again!

Click here for the mp3. If your web browser doesn't play it for you, you can right click on the link to bring up a menu that includes the option to save the mp3 to your computer.

The story so far...

'Paddy and the Big Ditch: Irish Labour on the Manchester Ship Canal, 1887-1893, was commissioned by the Irish World Heritage Centre, Manchester, in 1993 to mark the first centenary of the opening of the Ship Canal.

It was followed by The Men who built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy, in 2001. This book was researched in Britain over three years, from 1994 to 1997, and writen over the following two years in Ireland. I amassed over sixty hours' of recorded interviews with labourers, tradesmen, middle management and family members. The black and white illustrations, many never previously published, were collected from public archives, company records, and private individuals.

It puts the history of Irish male migrant labour in Britain's contruction industry in the 19th and 20th centuries in the contexts of Irish emigratiion and British civil engineering, in the written histories of which the navvy had been no more than a footnote.

I still collect first-hand accounts of that way of life on an on-going basis and, as the older veterans get fewer, men from the 'Eighties exodus come into greater prominence and a new chapter takes shape.

At the same time musician Joe Giltrap and I continue to tour our Show, The Craic was good in Cricklewood: Songs & Stories of the men who built Britain.

This features songs and poems of the navvy life, together with first-hand accounts of life on site and in the dancehalls, pubs, and bed-sits of Camden Town, Cricklewood, and elsewhere.

Pages

Wednesday 25 March 2009

Camaraderie of Pain: Excerpt from Joe McGarry interview