THOSE who left Ireland over the years, who disappeared into Birmingham and Manchester and London, who went away in their thousands, were often said to have gone off into silence.
It was said that for years there was silence about their leaving and that it wasn’t until the 1980s that this silence was broken. That it took that long before music and songs and books were written about them.
I’m not sure how true that is, but the outpouring of music and books around that time is true. We made ourselves known. We made sure we were heard.
Did Ireland stay silent about the thousands and thousands shipped off the way it stayed silent about the Laundries and the Industrial Schools? I can only say that when I first came here to live, the ignorance in Ireland about Ireland abroad astonished me. Perhaps that was the silence. Perhaps they’d never heard of us.
And yet nearly everyone had an auntie or an uncle over there, often in a place they couldn’t remember the name of, someone who wasn’t so much a ghost as a distant echo. It wasn’t as if they’d forgotten us; it was as if they didn’t know we existed. Even though they did. It was as if Ireland had made some kind of compromise with the truth whereby it knew the truth but had to pretend it didn’t.
This used to annoy me. A lot. It used to enrage me that the country we’d always come ‘home’ to treated us as if we were strangers it had never heard of. It confused me and angered me. And now, twenty-seven years later, I think I understand it.
When we watch our loved ones leave now, it hurts. The footage at the airports each Christmas, of those being greeted as they come home, is an annual fixture of Irish broadcasting. There are tears of joy and cheers of happiness. There’s not the same footage after Christmas when they leave again because that would just be watching sadness.
It’s hard to have children living in another country and it’s not any easier because it has always been a part of Irish life. That’s not any consolation for the absence that is lives being led elsewhere.
Now, though, at least they are only a plane journey away. They are no longer a lifetime away. We say goodbye now for months and dream of the day they’ll come home for good. Even still, saying goodbye for months is tough.
We used to, though, say goodbye forever. Or what might as well have been.
One of my uncles in America came home a lot in later life but hardly at all when his family were young. The price of a family fare from New York wasn’t on a working man’s shopping list back then. Another of my uncles in England didn’t come home for over twenty years even though he only lived a few streets from us and we came home every summer. For some, the psychological fare was always too expensive.
Irish society did know about us and it did know who we were. But it seems to me now that it had to send us off into silence in order to survive. The ignorance, the knowing and not knowing at the same time, was the only way for Irish society to survive.
We all still do it now. We know our loved ones are over the ocean and, for all of the modern technology, we know they are not just around the corner, so we conduct ourselves as if they haven’t left at all. We are silent to ourselves about where they really are. We carry on as if they’ve just popped out because if we sat and thought about it every time we waved them off, we’d never stop thinking about it.
When there were endless boatloads leaving, is that what Irish society did? Did it know and not know at the same time? Did it think about it and not dare to think about it at the same time? Is that how it had to function?
There’s something so Irish about young people leaving that as they are growing up we forget that it happens. We don’t think about it.
During the boom our neighbour’s son, who’d left for America, built a house. I pass it nearly every day. The boom ended and the house is still empty and has never been lived in. He never came home.
We just don’t want to think about that.
Everything from irishpost.com and the print edition is available on the Irish Post App — plus more! Download it for Android or Apple IOS devices today.
See More: Emigration, Ireland, UK
