We don’t have to search for too long, either on the internet or in our local book shops, to find biographies and autobiographies of famous Irish people and those of Irish heritage who have made their fame and fortune largely outside of Ireland. Terry Wogan, George Best, Louis Walsh, Dave Allen, Graham Norton, Daniel Day-Lewis – actually the list runs into hundreds and covers professional backgrounds from sport to comedy, and from music to literature.
But the stories of ordinary individuals or
those whose contributions have been in areas like community, business, health,
teaching and politics tend to be far less frequently told. A book by Anne
Holohan, Working Lives - The Irish In
Britain published in 1995 set out to fill this gap, with 39 interviews with
Irish people who had emigrated to Britain largely from the 1950s onwards and
worked here most of their lives.
A common experience of Holohan’s interviewees,
especially the older generation, was that of the emigrant arriving in Britain with
a few bob in their pocket then working hard to raise families, build
communities and carve out careers. The wide range of voices in her book include
vagrant, politician, labourer, prisoner, footballer, community worker,
academic, bra consultant, AIDS counsellor, snooker player, traveller,
journalist, executive and nurse. An illuminating, insightful and sensitive
portrait of the Irish diaspora in Britain.
The book has a strong London bias but of
local interest to the West Midlands Working
Lives has interviews with Clare Short, at that time Labour MP for Ladywood
and with the late Father Joe Taffe, priest and community activist in Birmingham.
Both inspirational individuals who demonstrated in their different ways a
characteristically Irish commitment to social justice and community service.
A more obscure publication was People Like Us – The Irish Community In
Birmingham written by George Makin, with photographs by Phil Lea, published
by Birmingham City Council in 1997. This is a booklet which was distributed
alongside an exhibition of photographs housed on Floor Six of Birmingham
Central Library as part of a record of contemporary Birmingham.
In his introduction George Makin recalls his
own childhood in Birmingham and his sense of Irish identity being formed partly
by family holidays to his mother’s farm in Roscommon:
“The Ireland I first saw as a child was
almost in a museum as I got back on the boat to Holyhead and on to Birmingham.”
He also recalls the “shattering effect” of
the 1974 pub bombings on the whole of Birmingham and “no more so than on the
Irish community”:
“It is sometimes forgotten that young people
from Irish families also died and suffered injuries that night. On top of this
loss the Irish community, who came to see Birmingham as their home, found
themselves excluded and under suspicion. The community withdrew on itself and
for many years adopted a low profile. Now that is changing as a new second
generation emerges who didn’t experience the bombings or the fear that came
with the suspicion that followed it”.
The interviews in People Like Us reflect the sense that the Irish community in
Birmingham in all of its diverse forms, were finally feeling more confident to
speak openly about their identity as both Irish people and as Brummies, two and
a half decades after the horrific events of 21 November 1974.
Incidentally, between the publication of Working Lives in 1995 and People Like Us in 1997, Birmingham’s St
Patrick’s Day Parade which had not taken place since 1974 had been re-instated
in 1996. We might also note here that a driving force behind the campaign to
re-instate the parade and subsequent festival was the aforementioned Father
Taffe. In any case, the re-instatement of the parade was also perhaps symbolic
of the new era, which also coincided with the peace process in the north of
Ireland and Good Friday agreement of 1998.
Having said all this, People Like Us was a fascinating, if limited snapshot of the Irish
community in Birmingham in the late 1990s, including interviews with Paul
Murphy, Gearoid Mac An Mhaoir and Denise Ni Loinsigh, Brenda Fleming, Caroline
Kerlin, Desmond Bromley, Maggie Roche, Rory Murray, Dennis Hennessy, Deirdre
Dunne and Tony Gorman.
There have been other significant works of
local and oral history since, including Carl Chinn’s Making Our Mark and Gudrun Limbrick’s A Great Day: Celebrating St.
Patrick's Day in Birmingham.
But my suspicion is, there
are many more unheard tales still to be told.
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photos to Pete Millington at recollections.contact@yahoo.co.uk
