Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
I HAVE to admit to not really having a great deal of awareness or knowledge
of the so-called Ryanair generation. These were apparently, the people
who left Ireland in the late 80s and into the 90s with qualifications
instead of just an old suitcase and who took up good jobs in places like
London instead of jobs in a wet trench laying building foundations.
In England in the eighties I never came across any of these people but
then they were very unlikely to have been frequenting the kind of Irish
places I was wandering in and out of. By all accounts they avoided the
settled Irish communities like the plague.
What’s a university graduate with professional ambitions going
to say to some 50s emigrant working on the tail end of industrial Britain?
They represented, they articulated, two very different Irelands. In some
ways it goes a way to explaining how my own view of Ireland is distilled.
Like a lot of my second-generation contemporaries I often see Ireland
through a time warp that jumps from somewhere in the 1950s to the present
day. It is lit by memories of all those visits back and the years of growing
up but in reality I miss out the1980s and 1990s Ireland as experienced
by those Ryanair emigrants and just land here looking for my mother and
father’s vanished home.
I have met some of those people since coming here and to be honest with
you I’d still have to say I have no great knowledge of them. Some
of them are lovely people but it is always clear that when we talk about
Ireland and when we talk about Britain that we are talking about four
different places.
We are divided, if you like, by our common experience. I always have
a sneaking suspicion that they are the ones who have inherited this new
Ireland and that perhaps, even more than any other Irish here in Ireland,
that those fifties emigrants are something of an embarrassment to them.
You see, they came perilously close to them, perhaps even passed them
in the car or on the tube, saw their old pubs as they put down their suitcases
and sipped their coffee. With their social clubs and their sentimental
music and their sometimes gaudy expressions of Irishness, well, what Trinity
or UCD graduate wouldn’t have blushed. But, like I say I’m
damned really by ignorance and there is nothing like that to jaundice
your opinion.
So I have no real understanding or knowledge of those in the USA that are
referred to as the illegal Irish. Apparently they are the ones who went
out there in the 80s but who, for one reason or another, never attained
the proper documentation even as they were building jobs, relationships
and lives. In the current climate in America they are said to be more
fearful of deportation than ever and it is not hard to understand the
strain that must be.
At the time in the 1980s that they went to the USA without, say, the
proper visas and leaving a virtually bankrupt Ireland behind them they
got jobs and settled down and had kids. In Ireland they would have had
the dole but in the USA they got a future. They were, in today’s
parlance, economic refugees. I can understand that. The only problem is
that they remain illegal in the US, cannot leave without facing the threat
of not being allowed back in and face deportation if ever caught.
There are stories of people not even being able to come home to bury
a parent because it would mean abandoning a whole life. So this St.Patrick’s
Day Bertie Ahern is said to have broached the subject with the US administration
in the hope of legalising these people’s lives. Even in my ignorance
I’d support the humanity behind that.
But just one, just one glaringly obvious thing, bothers me. How can this administration
go to America and argue that these illegal immigrants, these economic
refugees, should be granted amnesties whilst continuing to arrest and
aggressively enforce the deportation of the ‘mere’ economic
refugees who come here?
How can this Irish government openly deride the reasons people have
used to come here, the “sob stories” as they labelled them,
and yet plead for clemency for people doing the very same thing in America?
Are some illegal immigrants deserving of justice just because they are
Irish? Shouldn’t our humanity be a little less chauvinistic than
that?
By all means give those Irish in the US a legalised, free life but without
the subtle, racist hypocrisy. Give our own refugees a bit of humanity
too.
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