THE roll call in the classroom of a morning went along these lines.
Condon, Daly, Egan, Horgan, Hennessy, Mahony, O’Donnell, O’Sullivan, O’Driscoll, Sheehy, Shields.
I mean it was a long time ago but that’s at least some of what I remember.
This wasn’t Ireland though.
This was the inner city of England’s second biggest city.
This was England in the 1970s and 1980s and this was Ireland abroad.
I’ve tried to explain to people that growing up in England my knowledge of England wasn’t by any means extensive. I didn’t really know any English people growing up.
Our first next door neighbours were an Asian family and everyone else I knew was Irish.
Everyone who came to the house, bar those neighbours, was Irish.
Every kid at school came from an Irish family. The teachers were nuns or Irish or a few English Catholics who I never understood — and to this day English Catholicism remains something of a mystery to me.
When I finally went away, at the late age of twenty, to do a degree in a northern English town I really didn’t know where it was and anyone I asked didn’t know either.
This was pre the internet, you see, and the Irish people I lived amongst only really knew an English place if they’d had to go there.
Outside of the tight streets of the city I grew up in I knew nothing of England.
I never went to the English countryside. I was utterly flummoxed by cricket and my father used to say of it that it seems to go on all day and nothing seems to happen.
I would definitely have failed Tebbit’s cricket test on every level and, indeed, in ways he wouldn’t have dreamed of.
I knew my own city well and identified with it and spoke like it and was passionate about my local football team but England itself was as good as a foreign country to me.
That did, of course, change, I went away to study, sort of anyway, and in the next decade I studied and worked in any number of big English cities.
I got to know them all very, very well, and knew them easily. Birmingham, Preston, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, London, how are ya?
Many aspects of English life remained foreign to me but I got to know the country well and the people of different cities and married into an English family and realised that for everything that divides us there is always far more that unites us.
We are very different and we are much the same too. And that’s not just okay, that’s a good thing.
The point is that being Irish for people like me was just a matter of fact. It wasn’t a wishful thing.
It wasn’t an aspiration. It wasn’t something negligible that was suddenly useful decades later when we wanted an Irish passport in order to beat Brexit rules.
It was simply a factual recounting of who we were. I’m fairly sure, for instance, that if by some chance my parents had found some corner of England where we were the only Irish family that would have been completely different.
Our house would have still been Irish but we would have had no choice but to be English outside because there would be nothing but England outside.
It wasn’t like that though. The Irish emigrated to the big cities because they simply went where there was most work. Thousands and thousands of them.
The UK economy has relied on immigration and the labour of immigrants for decade after decade.
They might resent that now but that doesn’t make it any less true. We built their cities. And we made them sing and dance and echo with our lives.
I haven’t lived in England since 1999 and each time I go back the strangest feeling I have is of how foreign it all is. Some of that is merely the passing of time. Some of it is the nature of the immigrant existence in that it contains a certain transitory element.
Where I grew up has completely changed. One wave of immigrants is replaced by another. And so it goes. Still, I can’t help but notice, that the country I was born in was once like a foreign country to me, became a country whose cities I knew well and closely, and is now a foreign country to me all over again.
When our parents made the decision to get on that boat who’d have thought how far the ripples would travel.
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