Don’t look to the media for a fresh take on the Irish in Britain

I’ve worked as a journalist for an Irish community newspaper in London for the seven years. It has been my job to talk to Irish people, in pubs, cafes, at GAA matches, in the city and out in the suburbs. They include old people and young people, those who’ve done well and those who haven’t.

At this point I reckon I’ve a decent feel for the Irish experience in Britain, but in my opinion it hasn’t been remotely well covered by the media in Ireland.

Stereotype one: homesick and drinking bad Guinness while listening to bad ballads in north London.

Stereotype two: too successful to be homesick while making megabucks in the City, and reporting the good wealth home via Skype.

I never thought I’d end up somewhere way beyond those extreme portrayals: sharing a house with a group of Bulgarians, a Scotsman and my girlfriend, well into my 30s; sober, in the main, despite the Guinness being pretty good; and working long hours (like everyone) for less money than I’d like. But I’m well disposed to the place, all told.

Mine is just one Irish experience in Britain, one of about 530,000. Their lives are too diverse, too complex, too individual to ever influence the Irish-in-Britain narrative.

Skewed portrayals of the Irish here are nothing new. When I was growing up, in the 1980s, RTÉ reports from Britain seemed to be filmed only outside Westminster. If there were other beautiful buildings, other towns, and cities north of Watford, then I don’t remember seeing or hearing about them.

Back then the breadth and depth of the Irish experience were drowned out by the Troubles. When other stories did arrive they always seemed to be dressed in a pair of heavy boots or an NHS uniform.

There just had to be other sides to Irish life in Britain than building and bathing and homelessness.

Fit the image

When I arrived in Britain I myself ticked a few of the old boxes: I was clad in a dodgy brown suit, and the only bed I could find was in a youth hostel near Ravenscourt Park, in west London.

When I first went looking for stories of the Irish in London I too was steered by both trowel and stethoscope. Irish people popped up in increasing numbers at Olympic Park; more and more Irish nurses arrived in Whipps Cross University Hospital, in east London, and at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, in Reading.

That changed when I began to write the story of the GAA in London through 12 very different voices. They were people removed from the stereotype: they were successful in a way that I’d never imagined.

Among those I met were a Catholic from Ardoyne establishing a GAA team in the Metropolitan Police; a lecturer at a London fashion school who had run a GAA team here for decades; a former Galway hurler who sold bootlegged Irish sports videos to Irish pubs in the 1980s; an English girl with no Irish background who won an All Ireland with the London Ladies in 2008.

These were rich undocumented lives way beyond the stereotype, untapped. But it wasn’t long before these stories became contaminated by the old stereotypes.

Last year, when London won their first Connacht Championship game since 1977, offered a perfect opportunity to fuse an old image with new technology.

An RTÉ interview was conducted via Skype (what else?), and the tone was toxic with the kind of Paddywhackery that can reinforce the caricature of a team surely working on the buildings, drinking pints, having the craic. That identity was at odds with the reality of those players’ lives.

To its credit, The Irish Times carried a penetrating feature on the team by its London Editor. The vista was more banker than builder and may have changed a few perceptions at home. But such insights are rare from Irish-based media.

I seldom meet journalists who have travelled over from Ireland for anything other than official functions. It’s as though a map is passed around that joins the Irish centres with the Embassy, the Broadway in Cricklewood and the High Road in Kilburn. It’s a map that fails to account for a wider Irish experience.

In 2012 the Federation of Irish Societies (now called Irish in Britain), an umbrella organisation for Irish support groups here, estimated that about 140,000 of the 641,000 Irish recorded in the 2001 census were connected to one of these groups. Based on those figures, nearly 500,000 were not, and many remain removed from any Irish community experience.

In March 2014 I wanted to canvass some opinion on the State visit of President Michael D Higgins, so I made for Maggie’s Cafe, an Irish breakfast pit stop in east London. The older Irish people I spoke to that morning – drivers, DJs, publicans, caterers – were generally nonplussed by the whole thing.

This was no scientific poll, but it rang true with what discussion I’d heard already in pubs, among colleagues and at games in Ruislip: that is, little or no discussion at all.

RTÉ sent over dozens of journalists to report the event from every angle. But, for all the expense, I can’t think of one story that really resonated with my social experience of living here.

There’s the shortage and cost of housing that can send someone home before they ever get started; there’s the constant comparing of the pros and cons of both countries; there’s the tolerant nature of the place; and there’s my own intolerance of an Ireland that feels less agreeable to diversity when I return.

Sure, some of these things have occasionally been touched on, without any great interest.

A lot of Irish people here didn’t embrace the story of the President’s visit. This was slightly unsettling, even for people in my own newsroom.

The Irish Post did carry a feature that gave a voice to the disengaged, eventually, but it took some convincing of the editor. You could say it was a reality that didn't fit the script of celebration.

Sticking to . . .

“Script” feels like an appropriate word when it comes to the Irish story in Britain. If journalists seem to stick too closely to that script, then it’s partly because of the vastness of the story and the dearth of resources to report it more widely.

The Irish Post has done much over 40 years; this paper's Generation Emigration series has played a role in more recent times. But the rich nature of the Irish-in-Britain experience is too great to cover in this or any other single article.

Perhaps the most neglected aspects of the Irish-in-Britain story have been the scene beyond London and the second generation of Irish people. Any second-generation story the Irish Post publishes online is shared widely on Facebook and Twitter.

It makes you wonder how significantly the truth of the story has moved, while the telling of it has stayed the same.

Robert Mulhern has reported from London for the Irish Post since 2008. He recently lectured at the sixth annual Irish in Britain seminar, on how the Irish media have reported emigration