The Irish Writers in London Summer School: fiction, friction and elastic Paddies

I am one of thousands of Irish Londoners who have benefited from Tony Murray’s work at the London Metropolitan University, previously the University of North London. He is a lecturer in Irish studies and English literature, and among his other achievements are the Irish Studies Centre, the annual public lectures and the Irish in Britain seminar series.

Tony established the annual Irish Writers in London Summer School in 1996, and I have attended the course most years since then.

As part of this course Tony looks back at great Irish writers of the past who have lived in Britain and examines how living here influenced their work. For example WB Yeats was walking along London’s Fleet Street in 1888 and heard a water fountain in the front of the grand offices of one of the national newspapers. He wrote the Lake Isle of Innisfree inspired not just by the memory of the lake water lapping but also by the pavements gray of London.

The unique heart of the course is that the other writers we study actually attend in person to be discussed and even criticised. The course runs on seven evenings in June and July. On Tuesday we discuss a work by a particular novelist, poet or playwright and on the Thursday the writers themselves come to read some of their work and take part in the always fascinating discussion, which of course continues late in the night in the pub opposite. In 18 years more than 90 writers have attended this course. Many of the writers have said that the experience gave them a fresh insight into how the combination of their Irish background and their lives abroad have influenced their writing.

On many university courses the students change each year but the lecture stays the same. In Tony Murray’s course, because each year we have different visiting writers, the lecture and the experience is always changing and evolving. Uniquely the same students do return year after year together with new students who come for a year and often stay to be become part of Tony’s ever-expanding family of students.

It is the balance of the students that makes the course always interesting; all ages, all backgrounds – some who came over in the 1950s and 1980s and built a home and a family here but retain a longing to someday, somehow return to Ireland. Or now the post Celtic-Tiger workers who think of themselves as commuters not emigrants. The generation that #camehometovote in the recent referendum.

As well as finding out about the writers we also discover things about each other: the old Irish; the young Irish; and people like myself, the second-generation Irish with our own homeless Irish heart. We were reared by our parents as Irish in a home full of songs and stories – the FBI: the Foreign Born Irish with an English accent.

The names on my birth certificate are Michael John but my parents have always called me Seán. I asked my mother why Seán and she replied, “I knew you wouldn’t sound Irish, but tell people your name and you will sound Irish.”

Of course the evolution of the summer school has been influenced by the continuing and changing relationship between Ireland and England. When the course started in 1996 London still wasn’t necessarily a friendly place to proclaim your Irishness in London. Canary Wharf was bombed that year and peace was still far off.

The conflicts that writers express about being Irish in Britain, in England, in London, are mirrored by the conflicts that the students feel. From London-Irish friction emerged the London-Irish fiction we study each year.

The second-generation Irish often reflect on how our lives and our writing were transformed because our parents met in London and not Ireland. If we were born in Ireland and not here we would be physically the same but very different. We grew up in Holloway, not Galway; played on the fields of Peckham Rye, not the fields of Athenry. The education, the environment, the TV and radio we experienced were all different.

The experience of Afro-Caribbean young people born in Britain is that over the years they have had to struggle to be recognised as British. In contrast the Irish who are born in British have a fierce battle not to be called British. However, is it now possible to remain very proud of being Irish but also begin to acknowledge that growing up in England may possibly have had a positive influence on our lives? I am still struggling with this concept !

In Tony Murray’s book London Irish Fiction – Narrative, Diaspora and Identity, one of the chapters is titled Elastic Paddies. This is a term coined by Fintan O’Toole in an Irish Times article from September 6th, 2009 about the second-generation Irish poet Michael Donaghy.

Fintan O’Toole wrote, “Irish culture is nothing if not persistent. It can sometimes seem so elastic, so open to infinite variation and appropriation, as to be virtually meaningless. Yet this elasticity also makes it stretch, not just through space (the many Irelands of the diaspora) but also through time……it is often the very quality of adaptability that makes it linger.”

Please call me an Elastic Paddy not a Plastic one!

I remember one summer school back in 2006 when a writer spoke very movingly about his Irish mother. When we adjourned to the pub after the course we quickly realised that the writer did not just have pride in Ireland. He was also very emotionally attached to the English football team who were playing Portugal in the World Cup. It was going badly and he was not happy.

Playing his part in the peace process and the improvement in Irish-English relations and also as a good host, Tony Murray got everyone in that Irish bar in the heart of Holloway to cheer England on for perhaps the first time. (They did, of course, still lose on penalties).

The London Irish fiction we study on the course also reflects the positive aspects of living here and well as the real problems which exist in our Irish community. We can suffer isolation, poverty, health problems including mental health difficulties and the distressing number of suicides. It is both older and younger people who are affected.

President Michael D Higgins spoke of his concern for, as well as his pride in, the large Irish community that is represented in every walk of life in the UK. He described us as the living heart in the evolving British-Irish relationship.

I feel that Tony Murray’s Irish Writers Summer School, his teaching, his archiving of Irish life, his book London Irish Fictions, together with the way he reaches out beyond the academic life, ensures that the Irish in London, the living heart of our nation in the scattering, is finally given the respect it has always deserved.

I would urge anyone Irish, or even with just an interest in Ireland, to sign up for this year’s Irish Writers in London Summer School. You will learn a lot about Irish writers and even more about yourself.

The 20th Anniversary Irish Writers in London Summer School runs from June 11th-July 17th, 6pm-8.30pm Tuesday and Thursday evenings plus final session on Friday, July 17th. Fees: £165 (£129 concessions). This year's guest writers are:

Maurice Leitch, who will be reading and discussing his recent novel A Far Cry about the way one man’s past in Northern Ireland continues to haunt him years later after leaving to live in England.

Martina Evans, who will read and talk about her latest poetry collection, Burnfort, Las Vegas, which was short-listed for this year‘s Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

Roy Foster, who will be sharing his thoughts on the writing of history and his critically acclaimed new book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923.

Sarah Strong, who will be discussing her evocative and moving film I Hear Fish Drowning and talking about her mother, the acclaimed Irish poet Eithne Strong.

Lane Ashfeldt, who will be reading a selection of her short stories and discussing the pros and cons of raiding history books and family stories to create fiction.