Counselling Irish emigrants in Britain

This morning, on my way to work, my MP3 player flipped to the theme tune of The Gay Byrne Hour. Suddenly I was transported back to 1976, sitting in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, watching my mother prepare the turkey and listening to Gaybo broadcasting from Grafton Street. Then it's 2000, and she's in hospital, dying, but chiding us gently to buy the all-important bird for Christmas dinner. Memories, as Haruki Murakami writes, warm you up from the inside. But they can also tear you apart.

At work we deal in memories. I work for Icap – Immigrant Counselling and Psychotherapy – a charity with a focus on Irish migrants. We have therapy centres in London and Birmingham, as well as a network of therapists across Britain. Many of the people we support arrived in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Many were runaways, fleeing childhood trauma. A third of our clients spent time in industrial schools, Magdalene laundries or both. One woman brought her therapist a packet of a well-known brand of Irish biscuits, saying she called them "Christmas biscuits", as she remembered receiving them as her Christmas gift in childhood. Three of them.

Other people were grow-aways, leaving in search of a better life in London or England’s industrial heartland. So many thought the move might be temporary, always planning to go back. Many are older now and often socially isolated. If there was an Irish pub there’s a good chance it’s now a restaurant or a block of flats.

And then there were the throwaways – those who felt unwelcome or unwanted in their homeland and who, if they were lucky, found acceptance and anonymity in Britain’s cities. Men like the 56-year-old who discovered he preferred musicals to hurling but could never discuss his sexuality with family and feels as though he’s living a lie. We see lots of people born in Britain to Irish parents, too, such as the woman who remembers summer Sundays spent high up at Alexandra Palace, overlooking London, while her father listened to RTÉ’s radio coverage of GAA games. In recent years we’ve started to see the Skype generation, well educated and connected but struggling to come to terms with life in a new country

Place of welcome

For all of these groups Icap aims, first, to provide a place of welcome and acceptance. The building of this trusting relationship between therapist and client is the bedrock of our endeavour. Our therapists work with people to help them understand and come to terms with painful memories and experiences, especially where these are intruding in the present. It helps that many of our therapists are Irish and share a cultural understanding and an experience of migration with clients. Our clients appreciate speaking to someone who knows the Falls Road or Tralee, someone who remembers, well, Gay Byrne on the radio, and that long-gone Ireland that exists now only in memory.

It’s challenging, highly skilled and important work. We feel privileged that people share with us their memories, their hurt and their hopes and dreams. Often memories can be redrawn, becoming the framework for future growth. Above all our work enables us to see at close quarters the capacity for survival and hope.

[ icap.org.uk ]