"It has been a very lonely life. 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."
These words spoken in London this week by a 77-year-old woman, who left Waterford aged 14, eloquently describe the experience of many other Irish people in Britain with their native country and its attitudes towards them. As another Irish emigrant puts in the WeekendReview section today: "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."
Such bitter truths are uncomfortable and commonly avoided or denied by a far more prosperous Ireland than the one they left in the 1940s and 1950s to work in factories and on building sites in Britain. The combined remittances they sent home are estimated to have been £3.5 billion, a sum equivalent to the structural funds received from Europe in the following generation. In all the achievements of the Irish abroad and the great benefits they have brought to what has now become one of the world's most globalised societies, the condition of the many disadvantaged and ageing Irish born people in Britain has been shamefully neglected officially and personally. Their plight has been brought home by reportage, social surveys and commissions of inquiry over recent years and highlighted by dedicated voluntary and church campaigns to provide aid and welfare facilities for them in their old age, including visits home. The State has been too slow to act on their behalf, but there is now a dedicated unit for the Irish abroad in the Department of Foreign Affairs. While its budget has been steadily increased it still falls well short of the amounts required to bring genuine help to many of the people portrayed in this newspaper today, while they can still avail of it. Loneliness is a major problem for them, as well as poorer health than the host society. These problems are made worse by their relative invisibility in that society and by prejudice against them there - and in Ireland.
Emigration was for years and years a standing feature of Irish society, whose consequences and social costs were denied and repressed from official consciousness. Millions of Irish families have experienced its effects, both negative and positive. For a long time serious consideration of how to respond to the humanitarian needs of disadvantaged emigrants in Britain was caught up in a fruitless and sterile debate on whether they should be entitled to vote. There is still a very good case for that, but this no excuse to avoid responding to immediate social needs.
Ireland has many reserves of generosity, volunteering and community involvement, as has been seen over the last year in many walks of life. The efforts to extend that involvement to the older emigrants now suffering from poverty and loneliness are well worthy of support.