On August 22nd, 100 years after the death of Michael Collins, a neighbour here in Canada asked me what difference it would have made had he lived. I told him I actually wondered what difference it would have made had Collins lived his period of emigration differently.
When he was 16, Collins emigrated to London to work for the Post Office Savings Bank. He lived there with his sister Joanna, and socialised mostly with other Irish people. In a letter home, Collins wrote of the English: “For the most part we lived lives apart. We chose to consider ourselves ‘outposts of our nation’.” “Outpost” is a military term that suggests living under threat in hostile territory. Collins’s choice of words suggested to me that his experience of emigration was unlikely to move to the integration stage.
Most Irish emigrants — there are exceptions, of course — tend to live as if they are an outpost of the nation. Even children of Irish immigrants born in an “outpost” may remain as Irish as their parents. The novelist Catherine O’Flynn told The Irish Times about growing up Irish in her native Birmingham. “My parents were Irish, in the primary school I went to, St Joseph’s, all the teachers were Irish, 90 per cent of my classmates were Irish, the priest was Irish and the parish was very Irish too,” she said.
For me, Montreal, where I live, was never an “outpost of the nation”, if for no other reason than few Irish people settle here. Montreal is not exactly Catherine O’Flynn’s Birmingham or “County Bondi”.
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I arrived in the city in the summer of 1978, after three years elsewhere in Canada. Quebec was in political turmoil. A newly elected “nation once again” separatist government had enacted the Charter of the French language and was organising a “Quebexit” referendum that could break up Canada.
Bizarrely, instead of scaring me, this environment took the edge off the adrenaline-withdrawal symptoms that had kicked in when I left my very intense life in Belfast. After that, Quebec’s political turbulence was water off this duck’s back.
I had the queasy feeling that the forever factor was creeping up on me and that I might never return home
To keep my job I had to learn French, and despite having been highly allergic to it in school, I jumped right in. I consumed TV, radio, novels, songs and movies in French. A year after that my little bit of lingo got me a date with a neighbour. When we hit it off. My French — and my life — took off.
Although Montreal was love at first sight, it wasn’t easy. True love never runs smooth, does it? There were some headwinds: the climate, competing in the job market as an “Anglo”, and Canada’s highest income tax. I also had the queasy feeling that the forever factor was creeping up on me and that I might never return home.
When I was in my early 40s, a vicious recession here took away my job in manufacturing, and I had to recycle myself into consulting and then into web technologies. That involved 20 years of nonstop head-exploding learning.
Despite the increasingly rocky road of my career, I still managed to socialise, carouse (a little), teach myself to ski, skate and snowshoe, and to learn t’ai chi and yoga.
I improved my French, got a master’s in education from the Université de Montréal, took up German at the Goethe-Institut and fell in and out of love. Then I met my special someone. That was the end of my dating days.
So there you have the — very — abridged version of my own emigration project, which I lived outside the outpost.
Admittedly, as a single man I had to step out of the outpost if I was to meet someone. If I had been a parent, I’m sure I’d have wanted the little ones to know where they came from, which would, of course, have changed things.
Suddenly, I was free, not from my past but from the emotions that tied me to it
Even as a free agent, breaking free from Ireland wasn’t easy. I had fond memories of carousing in Dublin and in Belfast, even fonder memories of Ireland’s land, sea and skyscapes, and many not so fond memories of the years from 1969 to 1975.
While I worked at processing my past, I was stuck in an emotional outpost that Deirdre Madden described in Looking for Home: Time, Place, Memory: “...no matter where I am I am always thinking of Ireland and about home.” That summed me up, perfectly.
Eventually, one sunny mid-April afternoon, by a lakeside, the processing was over and so was my homesickness. Suddenly, I was free, not from my past but from the emotions that tied me to it.
I wonder if Michael Collins would have experienced emigration differently if he’d stepped out of the outpost into London life. Might he have discovered that the English weren’t such a bad lot and that “cruel England” wasn’t so cruel after all?
As I told my neighbour when he asked last month what difference it would have made had Collins lived, I wish I knew.
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