I’ve been farther away, but in London I’ve truly travelled

In a new series for Generation Emigration online, people involved with Irish communities worldwide share their own migration story and give an insight into the work they do. First up is Conn MacGabhann of the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain

I came to London in 2009, and I’ll never regret doing so. I had been a teacher in Derry, which I enjoyed, but in my late 20s I wanted to see something else while I still could.

In the first year I did bits and pieces of work, including cleaning and security in a museum, teaching in a school, and an admin job. It was enough to keep the iron bars on the window of my luxury basement bedsit off Old Kent Road.

In 2010 I heard of a job going as a researcher with the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain, one of the oldest Irish charities in the UK. The job, conducting a research project on the experiences of Irish Travellers in prison in the UK, has changed how I view everything.

It was fascinating to visit places redolent of Irish history: the Pentonville of Roger Casement, the Brixton of Terence MacSwiney and the Long Lartin of Frank Stagg. But going to prisons has changed me: the Victorian ones, the US-style 1980s-era kind, and now the Tesco-type private versions. Above all else it has been the people who have had the most profound impact.

I came to London wanting to get away from the negativity of the politics of Northern Ireland, to mix with different people with different ideas and views. But unemployment changes these grand notions, and I took the job.

It’s five years later and I still work with the Irish Chaplaincy, running a small project organising support for Irish Travellers, Romanies and English Gypsies, notionally, throughout the 120 or so prisons. Today I was in Brixton Prison; yesterday it was Liverpool.

Oddly, though, although I came to London to experience something different, perhaps something not connected to Ireland, it was at the Irish Chaplaincy that I saw more of the world, understood how life works a little better and became political again.

All liberals think prisons should be places of rehabilitation. We believe prisoners to be marginalised and from areas of socioeconomic deprivation. The truth is more shocking: prisoners are there because they got unlucky. Of course they are responsible for their actions, and often they should be in jail, but if you and I were born into their lives we would be where they are now.

If you don’t believe me, take the 30-second fantasy prison challenge: take away your schooling and your stable childhood home, add alcohol or drugs, and violence, maybe take away a loving hand or a kind word when things go wrong or right, and then ask how much of your “decent” self would be left and how far would you be from jail.

I am haunted by some of my visits to prison. Strolling off the Tube into a sunny Camden Town this afternoon, we are all thinking of our own lives. I'm wondering what's for dinner. Will I go for a run? Meet the girlfriend? Where will I watch the football on Sunday? And then images from prison hit me. Like the young fella who looks about 15, sitting there, seeming small in an oversized parka straight out of the TV series Porridge. But he is real, and he's gentle and polite, and his parents are real and are both in real prisons. He is in prison for driving offences.

You thank God you’re not him; you thank God you weren’t born him. Because he was born in the wrong place, and now he’s in a prison, serving jam sandwiches for dinner and sitting in a locked-up cell for most of the day.

I’ve been farther, but in London I feel that I’ve truly travelled.

Conn Mac Gabhann is editor of Dissonant Voices: Faith and the Irish Diaspora; you can read more about the chaplaincy at irishchaplaincy.org.uk