Life history and the Irish migrant experience in post-war England

Myth, memory and emotional adaption

Barry Hazley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526128027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica moderna

This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants, as well as the personal dynamics of subjective change, Life history illuminates how migrants' 'recompose' the self in response to the transition between cultures and places. This book will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geography

1

Narratives of exit: the public meanings of emigration and the shaping of emigrant selves in post-war Ireland, 1945–1969

Emigration has been for years and years a severed artery from which this nation is slowly but surely bleeding to death.¹

Mythologies of exit in modern Ireland

National imaginaries are not only constructed in relation to external rivals and incoming aliens; they are also fashioned through the ‘politics of exit’, in relation to the outgoing departee.² Nowhere was this more apparent than in nineteenth-century Ireland, where, against a backdrop of mass departure unparalleled in modern Europe, the emigrant was mobilised as a metaphor for national dispossession amidst the country’s developing politics of independence.³ Where leave-taking was associated with ambition and aspiration in other European sending societies, observes Kerby Miller, in Ireland the departee was an ‘exile’; a displaced refugee, forced from ‘his’ homeland due to the deleterious effects of British ‘misrule’.⁴ Consequently, within emergent myths of the nation, and at the inception of the modern Irish state, emigration was coded as an injustice and a pathology, the invidious causes of which would disappear following the acquisition of sovereignty. A ‘free Ireland’, maintained Patrick Pearse, leader of the Easter Rising, would not have ‘hunger in her fertile vales’ nor ‘squalor in her cities’, and no Irish-born man or woman would be forced from their homeland once imperial rule was overthrown.⁵

In the event, emigration did not cease following the achievement of Irish independence in 1921. On the contrary, since the policies pursued by successive Irish governments tended to consolidate the post-famine rural order of which emigration was a structural feature, so high rates of emigration persisted as a controversial aspect of Irish society, resulting in the departure of well over a million men and women between 1921 and 1971.⁶ In this context, where the revivalist code of national identity promoted by elites was antipathetic to both the persistence of emigration and the forms of industrial modernisation necessary for its reduction, the fatalistic rhetoric of ‘exile’ was now redirected against internal aspects of Irish life. Where previously the ‘exile’ signified the injustice of external misrule, mass emigration to the ‘auld enemy’ after 1945 provoked agonised self-inspection, engendering a public discourse of emasculation and loss. This was underpinned, not only by concerns over the economic failure of the new state, but by racial fears that emigration was ‘draining’ the nation of its ‘life blood’, ‘bleeding’ the country of ‘the very best and ablest’ sections of the population.⁷ ‘Everybody knows’, argued Labour TD William Norton, speaking in the Dáil after the war, that

emigration is probably the most dangerous social evil, the most dangerous cancer, of our national life from which it is possible for a nation to suffer. It has been heart-breaking for the last six years to see the finest of our young men and young women pleading and begging at the labour exchanges throughout the country to get a permit to go to work in Britain … because they could not get here the employment which ought to be available for them. Of course it must be tackled if there is to be any Irish nation left. Of course it must be tackled if there is to be any virility left in the nation. Of course it must be tackled unless we are to see the end of the Celt and the entire extinction of the Irish people as a race.⁸

This chapter addresses two interrelated questions provoked by this cultural politics of exit, namely: how did migrants who left for England during this period interpret the meaning of their own departure? And to what extent and in what ways were these personal understandings of leaving affected by the wider discourse of national crisis generated around emigration during the period? According to perhaps the dominant view at the time, post-1945 emigrants experienced their departure in the same way as previous generations: as reluctant ‘exiles’, ‘forced’ from their homeland with ‘black despair in their hearts and tears in their eyes’.⁹ However, while Ireland’s economic stagnation certainly formed an essential condition of mass emigration after 1945, it did not automatically follow that migrants themselves interpreted their departure through the rhetoric of exile. Popular representations, then and since, which depict migrants’ actions as an effect of ‘economic necessity’ here tend to screen out the diverse mechanisms by which migrants made sense of the social worlds they inhabited. These included the affective relationships and informal personal networks in which intending migrants were enmeshed, but they also included the ‘cultural circuit’ by which personal understandings of self were fashioned through articulation with wider constructions of emigrant identity circulating within post-war Irish culture.

It is here important to recognise that, although the post-war crisis replenished conventional narratives of exile, it also fuelled a wide-ranging debate over the causes, consequences and remedies of emigration, contributing to a wider contestation of the Catholic-nationalist settlement which had come into being during the first 30 years of independence. Between 1945 and 1965, the ‘emigration problem’ formed the object of a vast and variegated discourse, articulated through priestly sermons and Lenten pastorals, journalist exposés and editorial letters, government reports and Dáil debates, local theatre productions and National School essay-writing competitions. Across these various forms, the desires of the emigrant functioned as a heated site of ideological struggle, as different commentators sought to enlist the ‘plight of the emigrant’ in support of their own interpretation of the failures of post-independent Irish society.

While some observers here presented the emigrant as a victim of incompetent governance, others framed the post-war ‘crisis’ as the crystallisation of a ‘modern sensibility’ among Ireland’s increasingly restless ‘youth’. This sensibility was apparent in young people’s expanding consumption of modern commercial leisure, but it was most pronounced in relation to emigration itself, which performed the double function of an escape route for those desiring ‘adventure or change’, and a feedback loop by which the ‘enjoyments of modern city life’ were recirculated back into rural parishes, enticing others to the city.¹⁰ For cultural nationalists and large sections of the clergy, these processes of cultural transfer were instinctively perceived as a threat to the racial and religious purity of the Gael. Where Irish people had been content to ‘work for a living’ in the past, claimed Captain Patrick Giles, mass emigration was motivated by an unsavoury desire to ‘get things more easily’, showing that ‘our people have become more or less soft and sloppy’.¹¹ Emigration was a barometer, not of economic inadequacy, but of cultural degeneration, conferring upon the intending emigrant a moral and patriotic duty to resist the materialistic allure of the city:

Tell the youth that for seven centuries brave men of every generation fought and died to uphold our God-given right to be masters of our own destiny … Tell them that the land of Ireland is their sacred trust, and if they want to show their love for their country, if they want to show their appreciation for the sacrifices which former generations have made for the sake of freedom, let them do so by living and working in Ireland.¹²

For other commentators, however, ‘the right of citizens’ to ‘fare forth into the new world’ in order to ‘better themselves’ was itself a necessary condition of ‘freedom’.¹³ And to the extent the emigrant’s decision to exercise this right signalled a new collective desire to ‘chose one’s own way of life’, so mass emigration pointed the way forward, not to racial extinction, but to Ireland’s participation in the epochal transformations of the wider post-war world.¹⁴ For the writer and novelist Sean O’Faolain in particular, post-war Ireland was scene to the birth of an ambitious and increasingly self-confident generation no longer prepared to submit to the oppressions foisted upon their parents by a restrictive cultural conservatism:

We are rearing generations in Ireland that have ten times more pride and ambition than their parents ever had, and good luck to them for it. As one young woman put it to me in two sentences: ‘I saw what my mother went through. Not for me, thank you!’¹⁵

This chapter applies Nancy Green’s insight that the ‘attitudes and constraints surrounding departure’ constitute an ‘important framework’ within which migrants construct the personal meanings of emigration.¹⁶ Mass departure for England fundamentally undermined Catholic-nationalist cultural hegemony in post-war Ireland, in that public discourse on the emigrant formed a dynamic space where competing understandings of Irish selfhood could be ventilated and defined during the period. But these representations also fed back into the practice and experience of emigration, in that these public narratives informed and complicated individual interpretations of personal agency. Precisely because of the tensions between these representations and the emotional demands of the personal relationships implicated in departure, migrant motivations were rarely coherent or straightforward, but characterised by division and ambivalence. Personal stories of leaving thus present more than mere evidence of migrant intentionality; they are also a record of the enduring emotional impact of departure and its ongoing negotiation through remembering.

National ideals and quotidian realities: narratives of obligation and self-determination

Aboard a steamer from Liverpool to Dublin in the mid-1950s, the German writer Heinrich Böll found himself listening to a fraught exchange between a young Irish woman and a priest as he settled down to sleep on the ship’s deck just after midnight:

‘No, Father, no, no … it hurts too much to think of Ireland. Once a year I have to go there to visit my parents and my grandmother is still alive. Do you know County Galway?’

‘No,’ murmured the priest.

‘Connemara?’

‘No.’

‘You should go there, and don’t forget on your way back in the port of Dublin to notice what’s exported from Ireland: children and priests, nuns and biscuits, whiskey and horses, beer and dogs …’

‘My child,’ said the priest gently, ‘you should not mention these things in the same breath.’

A match flared under the green-gray blanket, a sharp profile was visible for a second or two.

‘I don’t believe in God,’ said the light clear voice, ‘no, I don’t believe in God – so why shouldn’t I mention priests and whiskey, nuns and biscuits, in the same breath? I don’t believe in Kathleen ni Houlihan either, that fairy-tale Ireland … I was a waitress in London for two years: I’ve seen how many loose women …’

‘My child,’ said the priest in a low voice.

‘… how many loose women Kathleen ni Houlihan has sent to London, the isle of the saints.’

‘My child!’

‘That’s what the priest back home used to call me too: my child … but even he co...