The Irish in Britain, including those of Irish descent, make up a significant part of the UK population. Here, you will find news, entertainment, events, sports and features from the local Irish Post newspaper.

By Joe Horgan

I’VE always loved Ireland. I remember as a kid just how much eager anticipation I felt as we waited for the coach outside the Irish Centre.

The school holidays would have just begun and we would be heading to Ireland for the summer.

We’d sit on our suitcases on an English street and wait for the journey to begin. In a way though it had already begun because we would have said goodbye to our house and wandered off down the street, wandered off into the strange dislocation of going to the other country the one our parents called home.

One of the most defining aspects of going to Ireland then was the contrast between our big city lives and the rural country we found our parents’ land to be.

My mother was actually from the city but the edge of the city where they lived what would now be the suburbs was merely the country nearer in.

My auntie, who I often stayed with, would now live in what is virtually the inner city but back then I could still see fields from her street and when we played on the GAA pitch round the corner we’d sometimes stop and listen to the sound of the farm animals entering the nearby slaughterhouse.

There is a place where we used to walk that I try to trace now whenever I go up to the city.

It is difficult to see it now as dual carriageways and flyovers and roundabouts block the way and there are estates of houses and a long manicured golf course where I think the land might have been.

We used to set off for there and once past a few houses we soon hit fields.

The corporation dump was there then, as now, though nowhere near the same size and I remember the flocks of seagulls and crows that used to swirl endlessly around it.

We would walk past there and there was usually a line of Travellers’ caravans and dogs running loose and clothes drying in the sun.

Just beyond there was the boarded-up shell of some kind of substantial old house. I remember all this now from the eyes of childhood but I can see it still so clearly.

After crossing a few paths and maybe we were trespassing I don’t know but I think things were a bit more relaxed back then with regards to such things we came to the wooded land and the black pools.

For a child especially a child growing up in a big city in a different country this bit of old Irish wilderness was like something from a fairytale.

The water in the numerous large ponds and pools was as black as could be.

Alongside one of them was some kind of small shed or lean to. My cousins swore a hermit lived there a wild man who swam naked in the black pools.

We never saw him but he was all the more mysterious for that.

It being Ireland the weather could change in an instant and we would find ourselves running for shelter from a once sunny day as the black water came alive with ripples.

Like a lot of childhood I can’t really remember what we did there for all those endless days but back then it would be dark before we ever got home.

At other times we would all stay much further out in the country and the sea and the fields and the rocks were our wandering grounds.

We even used to, I kid you not, play around a deserted castle climbing in and out of its tunnels and rooms, up broken stairways to higher floors somehow even getting on the roof. Kings of all we surveyed.

That old building has now been renovated and is out of bounds. No Trespassing signs litter it and the surrounding grounds and an old coach house is renovated too. Many surrounding paths used by everyone around the place have been blocked off by the new owners so that the amount of common ground gets less and less and childhood now might not be so free or so expansive whether in Ireland or anywhere else.

Of course remembering like this is an act of nostalgia. How could recalling your childhood be any other way?

And how lucky we inner city kids from England were that our immigrant parents were Irish and took us with them when they made their annual trip home and showed us the place they loved and the place they sang about and talked about and drank about and dreamed about.

So I always remember and I’m always grateful.

And I always love Ireland.

We’d sit on our suitcases on an English street and wait for the journey to begin. In a way though it had already begun because we would have said goodbye to our house and wandered off down the street, wandered off into the strange dislocation of going to the other country — the one our parents called home.