Lost in emigration

Connect: Earlier this week RTÉ re-screened a documentary titled Ireland's Lost Generation

Connect: Earlier this week RTÉ re-screened a documentary titled Ireland's Lost Generation. It focused on Irish emigrants to Britain during the 1950s and 1960s who have not prospered and are now living lives of desolation and destitution. It was grim viewing.

Poverty, alcoholism, loneliness, shame and desperation characterised most of the men in this film. The squalor of their living conditions was dreadful. The luckiest were in a Camden Town hostel - itself a grim institution - but better than the alternatives of filthy, rat-ridden, private sector bedsits or homelessness on park benches. It reminded you that even 20th century Irish emigration to Britain often remained every bit as forbidding as 19th-century emigration to America had been.

During and after the Famine of 1845-50, hundreds of thousands of Irish people fled to Britain. Before then, the Industrial Revolution had attracted Irish workers to Scotland, Lancashire and London. But between 1841 and 1861, the number of Irish in Britain doubled to more than 800,000 before North America became a more attractive option in the later 19th century. Thereafter, Irish emigration to Britain declined. By 1901, there were 630,000 Irish-born there and 30 years later just a little more than half a million.

The aftermath of the second World War reversed the decline as mid-20th-century Britain (England mostly) sought labour for redevelopment. Motorways, factories and hospitals recruited Irish labour as railways, canals and mines had formerly done.

READ MORE

By 1971, there were almost one million Irish-born in Britain. In the 1950s alone, an estimated 400,000 left the Republic to find work in England. These were predominantly rural people, prepared to do physical work that a growing proportion of the British wanted to avoid. Thus the roughest end of building work - manual labouring - became the preserve of Irish men.

The men shown on Ireland's Lost Generation had worked as builders' labourers. They spoke the argot of mid-20th-century Irish "navvying" in England: "the start", "the work", "the building", "the crack" and so forth. The preponderance of the definite article in such talk perhaps reflects an Irish language underlay but it also stresses a distancing (alienation) of a man from what he's doing.

There was invariably a barrier between Irish navvies in Britain and the wider society in which they worked. It was, in large measure, imposed by the larger society but it was also maintained by the Irishmen. History in the form of colonised and coloniser, vanquished and victor, rural and urban; and religion - Catholic and Protestant - cut too deep for easy eradication. There were, of course, cordial relations between natives and emigrants too. Many 1950s and 1960s emigrants have reported that they preferred to work for English firms and gangermen because they believed they were less likely to be exploited and ripped-off than when working for Irish outfits. It's believable: the Chinese cockle-pickers at Morecambe worked for other Chinese.

Yet maintaining the division, especially when with a personally detrimental rigour, was a form of dignity. It stressed identity. One man on the programme spoke eloquently about all he had lost through emigration to Britain. He had lost country, community, a sense of belonging, hope, identity. He had, he concluded, before a belated and painful recovery, lost "self".

In fashionable 21st-century Ireland, unburdened (increasingly to vacuousness) by peasant pieties about nationality and religion, destitute emigrants to Britain can appear gauche and blameworthy. Did they not drink themselves into this condition? Their kitschy religious paraphernalia and sentimental attachments (including even talk of the TV programme Daithi Lacha!) can seem risible.

Yet, if you can discern the alienation - the refusal to accept that they should be a slave class for anyone, anywhere, anytime - you can, even amid the squalor, hear the human propensity to cede almost everything sooner than cede identity. Sure, the props to that identity are now and have been for years, embarrassments in trendy Ireland. Thus such emigrants are further isolated.

The response of this Government to poorly schooled, marooned men, failed by this State in having to emigrate is, like its response to relatives of the Dublin and Monaghan bomb victims, truly disgraceful. It's unfortunate that journalism exaggerates so often that "disgraceful" now sounds anaemic. But this Government's response is vile and mean. Emigrants, of course, don't vote.

Showing the programme a day after the start of the smoking ban potentated it. (That ban is right but evidence too of a creeping preciousness and certainly not, as widely spun, a case of "leadership". Surveys showed the public favoured it, so it could be read as being as much a cave-in as "leadership". Then again, people in favour of it are likely to dismiss such an argument.) Anyway, the preciousness of the ban contrasted with the disregard for their health of the emigrant men. Yet Ahern, Harney, Cowen and the rest could never have formed the Government of this State - there simply would have been no such State - without the indomitable sense of Irish identity preserved, albeit crudely and partially, in the men of the documentary. "Lost generation" indeed.