Nora Higgins: A lifetime helping Irish emigrants in Britain

Nora Higgins is never one to miss the chance to raise funds for good causes. Last year, she abseiled down the side of a hospital building in London. Nothing unusual in that, perhaps, bar the fact that she was eighty years old.

"You have to keep trying. If they don't have the money they can't do the work," says Higgins, who today will be honoured by President Michael D Higgins for a lifetime's work helping the Irish in Britain.

Spirited, energetic, Ms Higgins is the chair of the Southwark Irish Pensioners’ Project, which provides services in South London to 300 Irish, many of them emigrants from the 1950s.

Today, a lifetime’s work will be awarded with a Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad by her president namesake, but no relation in Áras an Uachtaráin.

The awards are given annually to recognise those who have delivered decades of unpaid, often little-noticed service to emigrants.

She joined the Southwark Irish Pensioners’ Project in 1997 a month after she had retired, and has remained there ever since.

Southwark was once a thriving hub for Irish emigrants. The men came to work on the building sites of Elephant and Castle in the 1950s and 1960s, the women to work in nearby factories.

Today, the area has changed beyond recognition having become the homes for new generations of emigrants, but the elderly Irish, though dwindling, remain.

The Southwark Centre costs between £220,000 (€258,000) and £250,000 (€293,000) a year to run. Half of the money comes from the Irish Government. The rest has to be raised.

Burden

Much of the burden falls on the mother-of-three’s shoulders: “We need more funding definitely [for the centre]. We had a wealthy Irish man give us £25,000 for the last three years. Now that is the end of that. That is a lot of money - that is one and a half people’s jobs that you have to find money for.”

Ms Higgins, originally from Milltown, Co Galway, first moved to Scotland in 1955 where she trained as a nurse before moving to London in 1960. Signs saying "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish" were frequently seen on houses where rooms were for rent, a marked difference from Scotland where more tolerant attitudes prevailed.

"The Irish kept together. We used to go to The Forum and The Buffalo in Camden Town and The Graham up at Holloway. You went to the Irish dance halls so everyone you were mixing with was Irish except in work."

She later became a school secretary and worked with a charity for disabled children before retiring and starting with the Southwark Irish Pensioners’ Project. Many of the same generation of Irish people who travelled to London in the 1950s and 1960s now attend the centre to socialise or play cards, as well as avail of the outreach help, which can be as simple as helping to fill out forms to receive benefits.

Her contribution to the centre, and the elderly Irish community in South London, is enormous, according to Rita Andrews, the manager.

“You need a person who will do the dirty work and who is knocking on the doors and asking people for money because that is not an easy thing to do,” said Ms Andrews.

“We wouldn’t have achieved half as much as an organisation without Nora because she is the one that has been pushing and irritating and not letting go.”

Painted on a wall in Southwark’s Central Market where the centre is located is a recipe for potato bread, detailing how much flour and baking powder is needed for the traditional loaf - a piece of public art which reflects the Irish community’s history in the area. A younger generation now work as volunteers and “befrienders” who help with the centre’s work.

Ms Higgins will attend today’s the event in Áras an Uachtaráin with her husband Tommy, two sisters and her brother. But will she take the opportunity to try and raise money, given that she is always on the job? “I cannot really but if I get any opening. . .”