ONE of the most characteristic aspects of growing up Irish in England was that it was primarily happening in big English cities with parents who were from the countryside. That is that we were city kids, often inner-city kids, and our parents were invariably rural people. My father was born on a farm and grew up in a small village. My mother grew up on the edge of a city in a family of farm workers. I was born and grew up right in the heart of a big, industrial city.
This meant too that when we went back to Ireland the contrast was huge. We came from concrete and streets to grass and lanes. It is hardly surprising then that Ireland imprinted itself upon us. If Ireland is still a rural place now it really was rural then. It looked different and it smelled different and it sounded different. Of course it stayed with us. How could it not?
It is hard at this distance, after all these years, to figure out what impacted us most. Was it the Irishness in England we were reared in? Or was it the island itself? The physical island of Ireland as the boat sailed in or as the boat sailed out.
I’d say our Irish upbringing was the fundamental aspect of our Irishness, and indeed this often seemed to exist independently of Ireland itself, maybe even despite Ireland itself.
Yet, unlike a lot of other immigrant groups, unlike for instance our cousins in America, Ireland, ‘home’, was just over the Irish Sea.
Going back was more than possible, even for working class families without loads of money. So in the formative years of our lives we piled out of harsh, industrial, English cities and we went to visit farms and lanes and star-speckled skies. And we were told that the place we were going to was ‘home’. Yes, it really did have an impact.
So this island, this small country, has loomed so large for so many of us. I’ve lived back here now in Ireland for twenty-six years, my children were all born and reared here, my father lies in a grave just down the road, and my everyday life is just that. It is an everyday life full of everyday things.
Yet, still the huge significance of being here, the special something about this being Ireland, being that place, still strikes me. We recently had a visitor and though she’s been here before she stopped and said this place is so. . . and then she hesitated for a while and said it’s just so beautiful. Yes, there is the old truth, the old saying, that you can't eat scenery and the deprivation our parents left was very real and really wasn’t very beautiful.
But Ireland is beautiful and while there are many things wrong with it, it has a society that works. Where people, by and large, treat each other well.
When you get to a certain age you realise that a lot of what you grew up with, and very sadly a lot of who you grew up with, is gone. It is gone and it is not coming back.
The Ireland in England I grew up with has changed hugely. Time caught up with Birmingham and changed it in a way that I never imagined would happen.
Well, I knew it would but I just never wanted to think it and in those days when there were so many of us and we were so vibrant it was easy to do that sidestep. Being back here in Ireland I have thought often of the Ireland overseas I was reared in and felt a sadness about the changes time had wrought on it. I thought too, correctly, of how much that vanished place, defined me. I was forgetting something though. I was forgetting this place. I was seeing it every day and I was forgetting it. Ireland too, Ireland itself, where they all came from, that they all talked about and all sang about.
That’s still here, changed and altered and still the same too, still here. I must remember that. Take a look around. It was only ever just over the sea. Ireland itself.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Birmingham, Immigration, Rural Ireland
