Many of the working class Irish who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s have become the forgotten generation writes Roisin Ingle. They live in poverty and lonliness, unable to return to the new Ireland which moved on without them.
On the 15th floor of a tower block in north London, an elderly Limerick woman tries to manoeuvre herself onto a chair using a walking stick and a Zimmer frame. Kathleen O'Connell (79) wants me to write a letter to a Co Wicklow priest requesting a small prayer booklet entitled A Shower Of Blessings. She tells me where to find notepaper and an envelope and a first class stamp in her Abbey Road flat. The booklet only costs €1 but she wants to enclose £30 along with the letter. "I'm not greedy," she replies when I tell her what she already knows, that £30 is far too much.
She is, she says, like a monkey up a tree. "I have high hopes," she guffaws, laughter whooping out of her, hard and long and sad. There are the hopes that God will give her back the use of her legs so she will no longer be virtually housebound, relying on snatched conversations with a neighbour who brings shopping once a week. There are the hopes that someone will come and show an interest in her, someone kind to listen and laugh at her vast repertoire of jokes. There are the hopes that her remaining relatives in Ireland will visit more often. "Who would bother with this life?" she sighs, buttering a slice of toast.
Kathleen is just one of hundreds of thousands of Irish people who were forced for economic reasons to emigrate in the 1950s and 1960s, the men destined for lives of hard labour and loneliness on building sites, on bridges, on tunnels, the women making money in factories and hotels. In 1961 alone the equivalent of €13.5m was sent back home in remittances.
For most of them there was no going back. Kathleen left Limerick in her early 20s to live with an aunt in London and worked in factories and hotels and "didn't do too badly until now". The man she married in England died when he was only 48 - they had no children - and she has lived in this flat alone for more than 20 years. The walls and most surfaces in her home are crowded with holy pictures. "I've never seen such a religious flat before," I say. "Thank you," she replies.
On the table is a box of Christmas cards she is planning to send. Would she go back to Ireland for Christmas if she could? "No, I wouldn't want to see it at all, I don't want any part of it," she says. "There is no one there for me any more. I just want someone to keep me company here. I just don't want to be forgotten." Of those living in post-boom Ireland she remarks: "I don't think they know Irish people like me even exist. But here I am."
We have all heard about the homeless Irish on the streets of London, the ones that reek of desperation and super-strength beer. We know about the ones queuing up at the soup kitchens, the ones that make it onto the lists of the wide variety of vital emigrant care organisations. We've heard stories about the Irish people who die on the streets and end up in the paupers' plots in Finchley, where coffins are made of cardboard and they dig deep so they can bury them twelve to a grave. Surveys carried out by the health service here show that Irish immigrants to England die younger and are at more risk of cancer, heart disease and mental illness than any other minority.
The recently announced 60 per cent increase in funding for the Unit for the Irish Abroad, part of the Department of Foreign Affairs, will go some way to help the visibly needy Irish in London, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to touch the lives of the invisible Irish, according to London Irish Centre Outreach worker Brian Boylan. "The homeless Irish drunk on the street is a terrible reality but it's also a distraction from another less obvious problem," he points out. It is certainly harder to help women like Kathleen O'Connell or Moira (not her real name) from Co Waterford who sits in a tidy apartment in Kilburn every day with the radio on constantly, even as she sleeps. "I'm not interested in the programmes - I just need to hear someone speaking to me," she explains. "Especially when I wake up. I don't know why but I do."
Moira only came to the attention of Boylan when she went to ask advice about planning her funeral. "She didn't want to cause anybody any fuss when she died," he says.
The bell on Moira's flat is broken but that's grand, she says, because there aren't that many people who come to call. She arrived here from Waterford in 1942 as a 14-year-old, leaving the bed she shared with two sisters for a single bed in war-torn London. "I wasn't forced to come but I don't remember anybody saying I shouldn't," she says. She took a job in a make-up factory, sending most of her money home to Ireland every week and spending the rest on the cinema and sweets. She married at 16 to a man who drank and abused her for most of their marriage. "I met him in the State cinema and I was in a state the rest of my life," she says, managing a smile.
A girl, a boy and a set of twins she gave birth to all died as babies, and while she sees her two surviving children as often as she can, she doesn't make demands on their time. "They have their own lives," she says.
She turns 77 on December 20th. "It has been a very lonely life," she says. "I helped my family in Ireland when they needed it, I sent parcels and money when they had nothing, but it isn't remembered now or spoken about. It' s like it never happened." She hasn't been home for Christmas in six years.
If she did go home to Waterford she would have to stay in a B&B despite having family there.
"When I go back I don't feel good enough. When it comes to money and the clothes I wear I am different. The last time I went I got the feeling they didn't want me and I don't think I will be back there again. The Ireland that I knew doesn't exist anymore," she says. "It's great to see all the people spending money and having so much success and prosperity in Ireland. It came too late for me though." Boylan recently arranged for her to be presented with a lifetime achievement award, a Cavan crystal trophy with her name etched on it that has pride of place in her cabinet. "It's a lovely thing to be acknowledged," she says.
After trawling through the electoral register, Boylan has collated a list of around 100 Irish-born people in the Kilburn and Cricklewood area who live in isolation, separated even from the Irish community, afraid to ask for help not only from the system but from their own. When he tried to fill tables for a dinner at the centre he had ten refusals for every acceptance of the free night out.
"We are talking about people who are too ashamed to be seen by the mainstream Irish community. They feel like failures and so just hide away," he says. He goes to visit them but says it is impossible to give them all the attention they deserve. "These on the list are only the ones I know about. There are 30 other boroughs in London filled with them," he says.
"There used to be a saying, 'the craic is good in Cricklewood'. Ireland may be affluent now and the affluent Irish can be seen all over London, but the craic isn't good for many Irish people here and we need to start acknowledging that."
Things have improved for some. After a year in hospital suffering from depression, John Donnelly (54) from Co Meath finally has his own flat. He has been away from Ireland since he was 16. He tried going back once but ended up sleeping in hay sheds and barns, unable to get support from his community, and so left for London again. He spends most of his day in Paddy Power's bookies in Holloway; it's a social outlet but, with a new home to maintain, he is more careful now about keeping money safe for bills. He looks askance at the new Ireland and says going home for Christmas would be "a waste of time. It's full of people trying to keep up with each other by getting further and further into debt," he observes. "If you are struggling they prefer you to go away so they don't have to look at you. I am proud of being Irish but if you are not self-sufficient there you better expect to be punished." He is supportive of schemes which relocate emigrants to Ireland. "I'd take them up on that if I ever got the chance but Inever hear about those things," he says.
Some of the long-term migrants manage to escape isolation despite their negative experiences, but they can never escape their often traumatic past completely. John Quinn (54) from Longford and Frank Costello (50) from Dundalk met in the London Irish Centre after coming over from Ireland as teenagers, and have lived together for 32, mostly wild, years during which gambling and alcohol nearly killed them both. John is Frank's carer - the younger man has suffered with depression - or he was until recently when John fell ill with a suspected heart attack; now both of them are on medication.
Both say the other has kept them alive. They share a cosy, cluttered flat and a dog called Tommy in Holloway. While Frank is out doing volunteer work for the Islington Carers Forum, a group which does crucial work helping local carers, many of whom are Irish, John sips coffee and recalls why he left Ireland in the first place.
The sexual abuse began when he was nine and lasted until he was 14. He says a prominent man in Longford, now dead, would bring him to various houses in the town where he was systematically raped by local men and pictures were taken of him engaged in various sexual acts. "They were naked and I was physically thrown in among them, forced to do things and then beaten. I got 10 shillings at the end of it. I could go to the cinema and I could buy whatever I wanted. He said if I ever told I would be taken to an asylum. When I left Longford I still had a fear that I was going to be taken away," he says. A chronic dyslexic, when he went to England he carried a razor blade in his bag at all times so that if asked to fill out a form he could cut himself easily and use the injury as an excuse for someone to help him. "I did that for a long time," he says.
Years of counselling have helped but haven't healed all the wounds. He says he believed he was doing his family a favour by leaving and thought that by emigrating he wouldn't taint them with his shameful experiences. But while he is close to his mother, when he goes home he says his family make him feel out of place, as though he doesn't belong and his sacrifice was for nothing. "When I visited last year they said, when you come to Ireland we tell you what to do, you don't tell us," he says. He has never spoken to them about the abuse.
Frank, who hasn't touched a drink for 17 years, was also sexually abused as a child in Ireland but says he is happy, for the moment, to stay in England, the place he now calls home. Devoutly religious, he goes to mass every day and says this has helped him to cherish his Irish identity. "When I was a youngster playing in the fields of Dundalk I would hear the bells of the Angelus ringing out on a summer's day and that is Ireland to me. I didn't go to mass for years but now I have my faith back I feel I have my Irishness back too," he says. John and Frank know of many unseen Irish. People like Mr Brennan from Co Kilkenny who sat in the flat upstairs for 20 years without electricity until the men found out and fixed it. He had been cooking on an oil stove with only the light from the street lamp outside his window.
People like Deirdre, a woman raped by her brothers in Ireland as a young girl, who, as an old woman, just wants them to acknowledge what they did, but is continually told when she tries to confront the issue with her family that she is mad. "We have come through the worst of it, these are the people who really need help," says John.
I met the two friends in the Archway Tavern, a landmark Irish watering hole in Holloway, where they introduced me to a man named Leo Cafolla. Fifty-eight-year-old Leo is from East Belfast and came to London in 1972 after his father's fish and chip shop was burnt down. He does the same thing every day. His first pint is drunk at 11 a.m. and he goes home for a nap at 4 p.m. His one daily meal is always the same - sausage, chips and beans in a local cafe. After dinner he goes back to the pub and sits drinking until closing time. He speaks softly but with urgency in a diluted Northern lilt, spilling out random facts about jobs he has had, people he has known, places he has seen. It's as though he might not get the chance to say these things to anyone again and he must make sure somebody knows. "Thank you very much for the chat," he says when we head off. "Thank you very much," he calls.
In a 15th-floor flat in north London, the day before I meet Leo, Kathleen O'Connell from Limerick realises that the person doing dishes in her home is a journalist and not, as she had thought, a home help "sent from God to keep me company". "Will you be back again?" she asks, putting her hand to her head in anguish when I tell her that I don't know. I hug her and lock the door as I leave, pushing the key back through the letter-box.
The upcoming Streets of London concert in Dublin on Tuesday night will raise money for the valuable Aisling Return to Ireland Project, but it's obvious that any increased funding won't mean a thing if it doesn't raise awareness of people like Kathleen. Volunteers to visit people like her in their loneliest days are desperately needed, and imaginative moves must be urgently made to lessen their sense of separation from the country they still call home. Near the Abbey Road zebra crossing made famous by The Beatles, I post an envelope containing a letter and three crisp ten pound notes to a priest somewhere in Co Wicklow. A Shower of Blessings. It's the least Kathleen O'Connell and the rest of the invisible Irish in Britain deserve.
• The Streets of London concert takes place on Tuesday night at 8p.m. in Vicar Street, Dublin, and features Lunasa, Altan and guests. Tickets from Ticketmaster cost €20.