| Joe Horgan Comment
By Joe Horgan
IN THE evenings in town there is still the old smell of peat and turf
and coal burning. In a sudden snap of cold that only really reminds us
how mild it is the rest of the time, there is a comfort in the smoky streets
and the smell from the chimneys.
The coal is all Polish now, coming to us from dark industrial places
where men mine the long sunken forests where they emerge far away from
Ireland blinking in the daylight. But their countrymen and women are here
in Ireland now too and the town now has call centres, where cold fluorescent
lights reveal people making far away calls to far away places in Europe
and Africa and Asia – far away places that those on the phone are
calling home.
They sit on hard plastic chairs and for a few moments they are back home
in their heads, hearing their own accents and seeing from behind closed
eyes the towns or fields they grew up with.
There are some east European faces in the pubs now and some of the young
men and women of Latvia or Lithuania or the Czech republic are enjoying
having a few bob and the freedom some spending money brings them. They
can come to Ireland and earn far more for doing the same job or a lesser
one and some stories talk of depopulated stretches of east European countryside
in a way that was once only too familiar in Ireland. Recently there was
a terrible accident when five Latvians were killed as a car crashed into
them in a remote corner of Donegal.
The driver of the car that smashed into them turned out to be from the
same area of Latvia as some of the others. The bodies left the affluent
fields of Ireland and went back to a countryside decimated by emigration
and tears. Some persistent reports suggest Irish workers are being displaced
from jobs because opportunistic, greedy, craven employers can pay these
people far, far less.
The black faces in the pub though are few and far between because, unlike
the European immigrants, the people from Africa have no employment rights
and are kept in hostels and not allowed to work. They cannot be force
fed into the greedy maw of the Irish economy. But they cannot take a drink
either or socialise or show their faces because they truly are the non-nationals.
The church has done away with limbo but it has been retained for these
souls whilst the kind heart of the Irish state decides whether they have
come all this way to cheat us or have been fleeing genuine persecution.
If it is the case that they were just poor they will be rounded up and
flown out in the middle of the night, sometimes without their children
if the children escape the authorities.
Whilst fleeing poverty was once reason enough for countless souls to
leave Ireland it is not deemed fit reason to come here. Ireland didn’t
mind pushing out economic migrants not so long ago but it won’t
let any come in now. Somehow poverty is not seen as persecution. It is
not seen as political.
Some of the faces passing by are those old Irish faces you’d recognise
anywhere, like when you walked the streets of a British town and just
knew if someone was Irish by their face, their clothes, their look or
something. Some of these older faces look bewildered as their town fills
up with cars and buildings and faces from all over the world. All kinds
of accents are overheard now as you walk the street.
Sometimes they look as if they have been left behind, as if they still
live in a different Ireland, one before all this. They look around and
just don’t quite get it. What is this place? What is this country
they used to know?
People stand outside the pubs now even as the cold bites and we get
northern winds that the woman on the radio says have come all the way
from the arctic. They smoke into the night and the lights of the Irish
pub no longer have the fug we all grew up with. Some kill the cold by
talking into mobile phones as they smoke. Some nod and say hello.
The town is ringed by people walking, wrapped in coats and hats. The
women power walk and it is a merry-go-round of keep fit now that the car
means this is the only way people walk any more. Some people still hitch
but they are invariably visitors and when you stop they are grateful and
talk a little and want to know where you’re from. The car lights
catch a crossing fox and you change gears and chat into the dark.
|
