The story of my extended family is probably an average story of their generation, born in the same decade as the Irish state. My father was born into a family of seven in Wexford town, my mother into a family of 11 on a farm in Annyalla near Castleblaney, Co Monaghan, writes Dermot Bolger.
With the exception of one sibling who died tragically in each family and another who inherited the house, all the other brothers and sisters had to emigrate - though one uncle managed to keep his family in Ireland while frequently working abroad, mainly in English car plants.
I possess only a few Irish-born cousins and far more with Coventry, Leicester, Wolverhampton and London accents. Indeed, the sole reason for my Dublin accent is that my father - thankfully still alive and enjoying his 87th year - was a sailor who emigrated twice a week for 44 years, including sailing through the war on those vital small Irish ships that were sometimes bombed, with equal neutrality, by German and British planes.
My extended family was not exceptional. Eighty per cent of children born in this State between 1931 and 1941 had to emigrate. From any group of 40 pupils in a village classroom in 1950, only eight could expect to live as adults in Ireland. The others left because, quite simply, there was nothing for them here. They left to the unspoken relief of government ministers who knew that emigration was a safety valve on social unrest, sluicing away the disaffected and allowing the government not to tackle fundamental problems. They left to the gain of successive ministers for finance, who were able to factor emigrants' remittances as an invisible export into their budgets. All those ten-shilling notes sent home from Birmingham and Manchester counted for more than loose change. At a time of low economic output, emigrants were subsidising the Irish economy up to the equivalent of over €950 million Euro every year in today's money.
Yet, despite providing this huge subsidy, they also left with their Taoiseach's disdain ringing in their ears. Annoyed at their greedy abandonment of his self-proclaimed paradise of "frugal comfort", Eamon de Valera declared: "Work is available at home, and in conditions infinitely better from the point of both health and morals. . .There is no doubt that many of those who emigrate could find employment at home at as good, or better, wages - and with living conditions far better - than they find in Britain."
De Valera could tell better fairy tales than his wife, who published several books of them. But surely even he blushed at spouting such rubbish when agricultural workers in the West worked from 6am until 6pm and often slept in outhouses that would look uncannily familiar to migrant workers arriving here from Moldova today. Apprentices within CIÉ and elsewhere were automatically let go on the day they qualified and would have to be paid a proper wage. Like thousands of others they took the boat and were written from history.
As Joseph O'Connor has noted, "At the heart of the Irish emigrant experience there is a caution, a refusal to speak, a fear of the world." This caution meant that the emigrant experience was represented only in a few works such as Donal Mac Amhlaigh's superb Dialann Deoraí (Confessions of an Irish Navvy) and Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, which was vehemently rejected by the Abbey Theatre's Earnest Blythe, who refused to accept that such people existed.
Novelists such as James Ryan (Coming Home) and Philip Casey (The Water Star) and a welcome late harvest of memoirs ended that silence. Perhaps the most superb book, for bringing together the interviewed voices of a generation of Irish people growing old in London, is Catherine Dunne's An Unconsidered People.
Dunne is among the wide range of participants in a major conference next Tuesday and Wednesday dealing with the Irish emigrant experience. It is hosted by the umbrella group Éan - the Emigrant Advice Network - at All Hallows College in Drumcondra, Dublin. Irish pensioners from London will argue their case for free travel and other topics discussed will include assisted holidays, US immigration developments, sexual abuse and the Institutional Redress Board, Travellers in Britain and working with imprisoned emigrants. President McAleese, will give the closing address.
Éan, which has been strongly active since 1996, is are keen to invite returned emigrants, academics and politicians interested in the area, people working with youth groups (thousands of young Irish still leave utterly unprepared) and housing associations which might be willing to help rehouse returning emigrants. Spaces are free, but they are limited and must be booked in advance from Éan at 01-8574108/8574106 or info@emigrantsnetwork.ie.
This conference will reflect the hidden history of thousands of Irish families and the fact that our shiny new Ireland was nursed to its present prosperity on the back of ten-shilling notes sent home by a generation now growing old in a limbo of flats and nursing homes across England, unable to relate to the Ireland that shipped them away and shows little appetite for their return.