Irish in London: ‘Nobody was making me stay. I could have left at any time and gone home to Sligo ... That was 24 years ago’

I’ve done my fair share of crying in airports. For me there was some corner of Dublin Terminal One that was forever “the last piece of home” as I sat sobbing into my packet of Taytos before boarding a flight back to London.

I had no idea why I was crying.

Nobody was making me stay in London. I could have left at any time and gone home to Sligo, or back to Galway or Dublin, where I’d also lived at various times during the first 30 years of my life.

I’d only moved to London in the first place for six months – it was supposed to be a stop-off during a few months of travelling to make some money before continuing my journey around the world. Then I’d go back to Dublin/Galway/Sligo, settle down, resume my career as a journalist, and stay there forever.

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That was 24 years ago.

I’m still in London. I figured I was going to stay when I started nailing shelves to the wall for my books.

For the first few years living away, my shoulders physically loosened every time the plane hit the tarmac in Dublin and I breathed a tiny sigh of relief. I was home. People understood me. They didn’t look at me blankly when I told them the biscuits were in the press or I was going to Tesco for the messages. I could talk about having a mineral without anyone expecting me to produce a hunk of quartz, and nobody expected me to actually do anything when I said, “I will, yeah”. “Fierce” didn’t frighten people; “giving out” wasn’t a come-on.

With virtual offices, I can work from anywhere in the world, and there’s easily as much buzz in a trad session in west Clare as there is in any fancy London gallery

But still. No matter how many times I sobbed at the airport, I never thought about moving back. Not yet, I thought. I loved the excitement of London, the rush, all the people, the places to go – the galleries, the parks, the shops on Kensington High Street, the fact that Buckingham Palace was just a random building on my walk to work.

Some of my friends also moved over at that time. Fiona Kilkelly left Galway for London when she met an Englishman and got married.

“I thought I’d be there for a couple of years, have kids and then we’d move back.”

But when the kids started school, it became much harder to leave, and there were lots of new and exciting work opportunities. More than two decades later, the kids are in university and she’s professor of Creative Industries at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Colette O’Leary only planned to stay for the summer of 2001, “for a bit of an adventure”. An accordion player, born in Kerry, raised in Dublin, she quickly became involved with London’s lively Irish music scene. “There’s a great community, and it’s very exciting because new people are always arriving. Plus, London offers me a lot more opportunities as a professional musician. I visit Ireland regularly, but moving back isn’t on my horizon.”

But now we’re in a dwindling minority of Irish in Britain. There were nearly a million of us in the 1960s and 1970s, when Irish emigration reached its peak. These days there are just half a million, a figure that has been dropping steadily over the decades – from 800,000 in 1991 to 700,000 in 2001, 600,000 in 2011 and just over 500,000 today.

Is it time I was thinking about going home? With virtual offices I can work from anywhere in the world, and there’s easily as much buzz in a trad session in west Clare as there is in any fancy London gallery.

There were lots of reasons the Irish left in the old days: no work, no money, no future. There were darker reasons too that forced many out of a country tightly controlled by the Catholic Church and the conservative right.

The lack of jobs isn’t an issue any more, but the lack of housing is. The emigration map looks different. And the Irish coming to Britain are different too, as Brian Dalton, who emigrated from Waterford to London in 1987, points out. Dalton is chief executive of the Irish in Britain organisation, a network founded in 1973 for Irish community groups in Britain.

“The generation that are coming over since the financial crash in 2008 are different from the generation that came before in that they’re internationalist, educated and mobile. They demand equity, they demand to get paid for their skills, they’re confident and can articulate what they want. They have no hang-up about their identity,” he says.

“They have a different relationship with Ireland and a different relationship with Britain. They’re not leaving Ireland the way we ran out of the place in the 1980s, when it was run by men in soutanes.”

The new generation of Irish can fly home for a weekend and be back at their desks on Monday morning. “London is a home away from home for me,” says Colum Mackey, who left Burren, Co Down, in 2017, when he was 25. “It’s as much my home as Burren is.”

But that doesn’t mean Ireland isn’t a part of his life in London.

“In a way, my Irishness is stronger here. I went to the St Patrick’s Day parade a few weeks ago – I would never do anything like that at home. It can be nice to spend time with people who have a common cultural understanding; there are references and jokes that are more easily made when you’re chatting to Irish people than to people from a different background.”

But other things are very different for this generation. They’re not tramping the building sites of London looking for “the start” or holed up in pubs in Kilburn, drinking the couple of pints that were the prerequisite to getting your pay cheque cashed in a back room.

There was one visit when I realised my mum was in a serious position. I had one sleepless night, and then I made my decision. It was just love, love brought me home

—  Helen O'Rahilly, TV executive

Dalton was part of that generation, spending the late 1980s working as a labourer and in bars, before taking a course in Irish Studies and English at North London Polytechnic. And though a lot of his contemporaries returned to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years, Dalton stayed put.

“I never thought about going back. Ireland failed my generation. It couldn’t support me, and I felt constrained by the place. When I came to London, I felt such a sense of liberation and stimulation. Like a lot of migrants, you can hold two things in your mind at once. You can have a very ambivalent relationship with Ireland, and many of us did because it failed us, but you can also be proud to be Irish and you can hold those two things without conflict.”

Matt Bookle emigrated from Kilkenny to London in the early 1990s. He stayed for 20 years, initially volunteering and working in housing and homelessness before qualifying as a social worker. However, unlike Dalton, he went back.

“I really clicked with London’s social scene, a lot of friendships evolved back then. But I probably always thought I’d return to Ireland.”

When he and his partner realised they were no longer using what London had to offer – the gigs, museums and galleries – they decided to go home, despite the sacrifices of leaving friends and work.

“What we liked about Ireland was what you couldn’t get in London, that sense of open space. We felt that the next phase of our life would be better lived in the Irish countryside, where we could start our own family and reconnect with extended family and friends. A lot of the desire to return is memory and attachment to people and places.”

Attachment also brought TV executive Helen O’Rahilly back to Dublin after 30 years in London, a city she thought she’d live in forever. Leaving a job in RTÉ in 1988 to work for the BBC, she initially embraced London wholeheartedly.

“I loved London with all my heart, I loved the size of it, loved the smell of the Tube. I went everywhere, taking in all these fabulous multicultural places. I bought a house in Stoke Newington – the dissenters’ paradise, as they call it – lots of Irish, Turks, Greeks. I had Dominican Republic neighbours on one side and Crete opticians on the other.”

[ ‘After a few thumps, they let go of me’: Veteran editor on covering the North from Troubles to today ]

But, as anyone knows who has travelled away from home, whether that’s to the next parish or to the other side of the world, the pull of family is strong.

“Everything changed when my mum began to develop Alzheimer’s. The trips over became more frequent and there was one visit when I realised my mum was in a serious position. I had one sleepless night, and then I made my decision. It was just love; love brought me home.”

It’s a story that strikes a deep chord with me. Is it time to think about going back?

The pull of home is captured evocatively in a new film, That They May Face the Rising Sun, directed by Pat Collins and based on the 2002 novel by John McGahern. Released this weekend, the film tells the story of Joe and Kate Ruttledge, who move back from London to the west of Ireland, where Joe grew up. The film traces a year in the life of the local community and trains a lens on emigration – those who leave and those who come back.

For me, McGahern nailed what it means to be an Irish person living away from home in the first few pages of the novel. The lines have stayed with me in the 20-odd years since.

“What do you find wrong with England?” Joe is asked when he is house-hunting in Ireland.

“Nothing, but it’s not my country and I never feel it’s quite real or that my life there is real ... It’s like being present and at the same time a real part of you is happily absent.”

Being present and happily absent in an unreal reality sums it up for me, as I move between two countries, never fully belonging to either.

Presumably McGahern felt it too as he moved around the world, freed from his teaching job by the award of a travelling fellowship after he published his first novel, The Barracks, in 1963. He met Finnish theatre director Annikki Laaksi in Paris, and after their marriage they lived in Finland, London and Spain, before moving back to Dublin, where McGahern planned to resume teaching. However, he was sacked from the school when his second novel, The Dark, was banned in 1965 by the Irish censor, who labelled it obscene due to its undertones of sexual abuse.

A trade union official told him: “If it was just the auld book, maybe – maybe – we might have been able to do something for you, but with marrying this foreign woman you have turned yourself into a hopeless case, entirely.”

[ It took leaving and returning for me to become a Derry girl ]

That suspicion of strangers has been one of Ireland’s less-attractive traits, and it jars uncomfortably with our reputation as the land of the hundred thousand welcomes. For all the neighbourliness shown to the returning emigrants in the film, the locals regard Joe and Kate with some scepticism because of their easy way with each other – “Are they man and woman at all?” – and the care they give their animals – “a cat that’d nearly get up on its hind legs and order his breakfast”. Not to mention their desire for quiet. “Listen to the quiet and see if it wouldn’t f***ing drive you daft,” says their neighbour Patrick Ryan.

The story is set in Co Leitrim, McGahern’s home county, where he eventually returned with his second wife, Madeline, and where, like Joe and Kate, he bought a small farm. The film is shot around the shores of Lough Na Fooey in Connemara, with its vast, green landscapes, big skies and twisty country roads, so beautiful that I was almost moved to tears when I saw the film at the London Film Festival, surrounded by Piccadilly’s grey buildings.

Despite its beauty and slow, lulling rhythm, this is no fairy-tale idyll. It’s a place where offence is easily given and taken, where gossip is rife and where the hundred thousand welcomes can very quickly dry up.

Warm handshakes, strong drinks and plates laden with sandwiches are laid on for Johnny Murphy’s return from Britain every summer, but when he’s let go from his factory job in Dagenham and wants to come home, his brother and sister-in-law don’t want him in the house. It’s a story that would break your heart, but one that’s all too familiar.

The English, says Johnny, “have a set way of doing things. It’s more or less alphabetical.”

I too find the English very ordered and methodical. They have less of the spit-and-sawdust “sure it’ll be grand” approach. They analyse things carefully and have less recourse to St Anthony.

My journey has taken me full circle, but that’s probably part of growing up, I’ve resolved a lot of things about my identity

—  Brian Dalton, Irish in Britain

For the most part, they really like the Irish. My feelings towards them, shaped by decades of the Wolfe Tones’ The Men Behind the Wire and “God’s curse on you England, you cruel-hearted monster”, have sometimes been, well, a bit more ambivalent.

But still I live in England. And I tell them all the time how great Ireland is. And they generously don’t ask me why, if it’s that great, I left it.

I went to Boston in January for my Auntie Mary’s funeral. She was 84, the oldest of the family, sent to the US from Sligo when she was just 16. She missed Ireland and longed for it, creating a shrine of Irish lace curtains, ceramic thatched cottages and Irish flags in her home in Dorchester, Boston. But she lived her life joyfully and died surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Would her life have been any better if she’d come home? Or if, in fact, she’d never left?

Some of the many and varied stories of Irish emigrants are captured in a new exhibition launched by the Irish in Britain group to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Look Back to Look Forward: 50 Years of the Irish in Britain is currently running at EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum, in Dublin, after touring London, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham. It features 50 stories from a diverse range of Irish voices – first, second and third generation.

“Doing the heritage project was really important for me because it made me reflect about my own journey,” says Dalton.

Leaving Ireland, feeling it failed him, he does see the irony in running Irish in Britain. “My journey has taken me full circle, but that’s probably part of growing up. I’ve resolved a lot of things about my identity.”

Fiona Kilkelly’s journey is also taking her closer to Ireland. Working in Britain’s digital creative industries, she has recently been involved in several Irish projects.

“There’s lots of movement in the UK and in Ireland to work more collaboratively, and that paves the way for me to be able to work, and in the future perhaps live, in both places.”

Colette O’Leary says she sees Irish family and friends more frequently now that she lives abroad, making time to catch up with everyone on her many trips home.

As for me and my questions about coming back, maybe, just maybe, the fact that last year I met a Limerick man, living in Clare, has something to do with it.

In the end maybe what Helen O’Rahilly says is true.

Love brings us home.