Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
IT was noticeable there for a while that a British city should loom large
in the episode that nearly bought down the Irish Government. Bertie Ahern
had to explain how it came about that while Irish Minister for Finance
he took £8,000 from a group of Manchester businessmen at a dinner
in that city.
Ahern explained that he had very close links with the city, talked of
his visits to watch Manchester United just like any other regular fellow
— though he avoided mentioning that this was often in a friend’s
private jet — and of how he had given a number of talks there on
the Irish economy. Among the long drawn-out political soap opera that
was dubbed Bertiegate by the press here it just seemed remarkable that
it was an English city and the Irish abroad there that figured so prominently
in the crisis.
One of these businessmen appeared on RTÉ to speak of being at
the dinner and of how the money was raised for Bertie in an impromptu
whip round. He neither corroborated nor refuted anybody’s story
and merely gave his account of events from the position of someone who
had been there.
He was clearly the kind of successful, wealthy Irish exile that Bertie
had come to know over the years. In other words he wouldn’t have
been particularly typical of a lot of the Irish people I knew back in
Britain. It reminded me of something that in many ways, we the Irish from
Britain never talk about. We never really acknowledge the fact that for
many Irish people the experience of living in Britain was one that was
marked by their treatment at the hands of other Irish people.
I remember sometime in the mid-1980s visiting an aunt of mine who was
at the time living in Kilburn in London. We had a drink in The Crown in
Cricklewood and a few more beers back in her rooms. Mostly though I remember
two things from that visit. There was one early morning café that
slowly filled up with young Irishmen coming in for their breakfast. It
left me thinking of cold bedsits with none of the facilities of home.
The other thing I remember is the line of men waiting on Kilburn High
Street for Transit vans to pick them up and take them off to a day’s
work. It left me thinking of hard graft and hard living.
The dark side of the Irish experience in Britain is one of men, now older
and physically spent, who worked in tough, demanding, labouring jobs.
They got no pension and nothing was put aside for their future. They were
often paid in the pub so that men away from home, in accommodation with
no comfort, were unlikely to look much further for that very comfort.
Sure, there was the craic and companionship and good times. But there
was abject loneliness too, depression and alcoholism. And the truth behind
all of this was a great many of these men worked for other Irishmen.
The truth is that some Irishmen got very rich indeed on the hard labour
and sweat of their fellow Irishmen who found themselves years later without
even the safety net of a pension to see them through.
I remembered when thinking about this something that I’d heard quite
a few times growing up in England. Never work for the Irish. I remember
too that the people saying it were other Irish people. They knew too well
how their countrymen would treat them.
There is an old letter in my family sent some time in the 1950s. It is
from my father’s brother talking of how he was faring in New York.
In it he writes: “If the Irish here in America would only work together.
The Italians make money here because they all stick together.” Was
there something about the Irish in exile?
Of course that’s not the whole story. But it is a definite part
of the story and one that sometimes we seem happy to smooth over. A lot
of young Irish had great adventures in Britain, great life-forming experiences.
But a lot of Irish too were treated poorly and harshly by other Irish
people they worked for and some of those Irish suffer those consequences
to this day.
Whenever the success of the few and their great wealth is celebrated
this should be remembered. And sometime if we are really interested in
the truth of the Irish immigrant experience we might need to explore the
nature of those relationships and discover just how the wealthy ones got
so wealthy and just how the other, defeated Irish got so lost.
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