The many destitute and lonely Irish people in London are a legacy of decades of emigration. An event in Co Mayo aims to commemorate and support them, writes Patsy McGarry

A major concert and exhibition about the Irish in London will take place at the Country Life museum in Turlough Park, near Castlebar, Co Mayo, this weekend. Both the concert and the accompanying exhibition are titled Streets of London.

The Streets of London concert is on tomorrow, and aims to raise funds to assist two London-based registered charities which help the destitute and lonely Irish in that city, while the Streets of London exhibition, which opens today, looks at Irish emigration to the UK in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

The Streets of London concert will be in aid of the Aislinn Return to Ireland Project and Cricklewood Homeless Concern.

It will feature such top-line Irish musicians and singers as Sharon Shannon, the Fureys and Davey Arthur, Lúnasa, Dervish, Cora and Breda Smyth, and the Guggenheim Grotto.

It begins at 3pm in Turlough Park, the grounds of the Country Life Museum, part of the National Museum of Ireland. Tickets are €25 (or €60 for a family, including up to three children) and are available at www.ticketmaster.ie or 0818-719300. Tickets are also available at the concert site tomorrow.

The Streets of London exhibition looks at emigration across generations under the themes of music, nightlife, street life, tradition, religion, politics and faces of emigration.

A small collection of a national registration identity card, a travel identity card, suitcases, trunks, an accordion, rosary beads/scapular, a regional newspaper, a record player and traditional music records, an overcoat and hat, a child's toy, bottles of stout, and train and underground timetables reflect the emigrant's journey and experience away from "home".

There is also personal testimony from some emigrants.

The exhibition will be opened officially next month, at a date yet to be set, and will continue until the end of September.

A Streets of London concert held at Vicar Street in Dublin in December 2004 raised €23,000 for the Aislinn Return to Ireland Project. It was inspired by a powerful RTE Prime Time documentary on the destitute Irish in the UK, broadcast a year earlier.

Of the current homeless population in London, it is estimated that 60 per cent are Irish. Among them are people whose combined remittances to Ireland in the decades from the 1940s to the 1960s are estimated at £3.5 billion, a sum equivalent to the structural funds received in Ireland from Europe in the following generation.

For further information see

www.streetsoflondonconcert.com and www.museum.ie/countrylife